NHD Archives

Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany

In the 1960s and 1970s in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), or West Germany, newspaper readers and television viewers were appalled by terrible images of fires burning half a world away. The Vietnam War was a decisive catalyst for the era’s wider protest movements and gave rise to an ardent anti-war discourse. This discourse privileged writing in many forms. Within it, poetry and poetic writing were key; and because coverage of the conflict in Vietnam often focused on spectacular, destructive conflagrations ignited by hi-tech machines of war, their dominant trope was fire. Hundreds of poems and related writings about Vietnam circulated in the FRG, yet they are almost entirely forgotten today.

Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany uncovers and explores some of this rich production in order to present a new history of engaged poetic writing in the FRG in the 1960s and 1970s, and to draw out distinctive characteristics of wider protest culture. In doing so, it makes the case for attending to marginal, non-canonical or neglected literary and cultural forms, and for critical thinking about why they might, over time, have been obscured. This book offers, too, a case study for reflection on the representation of war, on ways in which German oppositional culture could imagine its others, and the ways in which other voices could speak to it in turn, and on the relationship of poetry to the historical world.

Praise for Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany

‘The book’s strength lies in its broad approach that contextualises a historical nexus point and seeks to explain the meaning of ‘Vietnam’ for (West)Germany by exploring anti-war poetic responses by lesser-known German writers.’
Journal of European Studies

Poems of Guido Gezelle

The Bruges-born poet-priest Guido Gezelle (1830–1899) is generally considered one of the masters of 19th-century European lyric poetry. At the end of his life and in the first two decades of the 20th century, Gezelle was hailed by the avant-garde as the founder of modern Flemish poetry. His unique voice was belatedly recognised in the Netherlands and often compared with his English contemporary Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). In this bilingual anthology, award-winning translator Paul Vincent selects a representative picture of Gezelle’s output, from devotional through narrative, to celebratory and expressionistic. Gezelle’s favourite themes are childhood, the Flemish landscape, friendship, nature, religion and the Flemish vernacular, and his apparently simple poems conceal a sophisticated prosody and a dialogue with spiritual and literary tradition. However, an important barrier to wider international recognition of his lyric genius up to now has been the absence of translations that do justice to the vigour and musicality of Gezelle’s West Flemish idiom. Two of the translations included go some way to redressing the balance: ‘The Watter-Scriever’ by Scotland’s national poet Edwin Morgan and ‘A Little Leaf . . .’ by Francis Jones. Both translators make brilliant use of their own vernaculars (Glaswegian and North Yorkshire respectively) to bring Gezelle to life for the non-Dutch-speaking reader.

Parliament Buildings

As political polarisation undermines confidence in the shared values and established constitutional orders of many nations, it is imperative that we explore how parliaments are to stay relevant and accessible to the citizens whom they serve. The rise of modern democracies is thought to have found physical expression in the staged unity of the parliamentary seating plan. However, the built forms alone cannot give sufficient testimony to the exercise of power in political life.

Parliament Buildings brings together architecture, history, art history, history of political thought, sociology, behavioural psychology, anthropology and political science to raise a host of challenging questions. How do parliament buildings give physical form to norms and practices, to behaviours, rituals, identities and imaginaries? How are their spatial forms influenced by the political cultures they accommodate? What kinds of histories, politics and morphologies do the diverse European parliaments share, and how do their political trajectories intersect?

This volume offers an eclectic exploration of the complex nexus between architecture and politics in Europe. Including contributions from architects who have designed or remodelled four parliament buildings in Europe, it provides the first comparative, multi-disciplinary study of parliament buildings across Europe and across history.

Praise for Parliament Buildings

‘In its totality, this is an invaluable book, both as a comprehensive review of the wider implications of architecture and building in culture and society, and as a specific resource in the understanding of one highly specialised, but profoundly significant building type.’
Dean Hawkes, Cardiff University and University of Cambridge

‘Symbols of history and of hope, theatres of struggle, cradles of consensus: parliamentary buildings, as these diverse essays show, both reflect our democracies and can help them function better.’
David Anderson, House of Lords

‘Parliament Buildings is a brilliant interdisciplinary exploration of a fascinating topic. Theoretically sophisticated, empirically rich and historically informed, it demonstrates the multiple ways in which politics and the built environment intersect, and sheds light on the symbolic and material practices central to contemporary representative politics.’
Duncan Bell, University of Cambridge

‘The editors and the 32 individual contributions succeed in drawing a multifaceted panorama of parliament buildings in Europe and – at a high level of reflection and with a strong reference to the first third of the 21st century – in highlighting the interdisciplinary interaction between political science and architecture, which place great emphasis on typology and visualization (for example of floor plans and spatial patterns).’
H-Soz-Kult

‘In its totality this is an invaluable book, both as a comprehensive review of the wider implications of architecture and building in culture and society and as specific resource in the understanding of one highly specialised, but profoundly significant building type. It is well produced and the texts are supported by a generous selection of carefully chosen images…undoubtedly an important work of scholarship that should find a valuable place in the literature across the many disciplines that it embraces.’
International Journal of Parliamentary Studies

Narratives of Low Countries History and Culture

This edited collection explores the ways in which our understanding of the past in Dutch history and culture can be rethought to consider not only how it forms part of the present but how it can relate also to the future.

Divided into three parts – The Uses of Myth and History, The Past as Illumination of Cultural Context, and Historiography in Focus – this book seeks to demonstrate the importance of the past by investigating the transmission of culture and its transformations. It reflects on the history of historiography and looks critically at the products of the historiographic process, such as Dutch and Afrikaans literary history.

The chapters cover a range of disciplines and approaches: some authors offer a broad view of a particular period, such as Jonathan Israel’s contribution on myth and history in the ideological politics of the Dutch Golden Age, while others zoom in on specific genres, texts or historical moments, such as Benjamin Schmidt’s study of the doolhof, a word that today means ‘labyrinth’ but once described a 17th-century educational amusement park. This volume, enlightening and home to multiple paths of enquiry leading in different directions, is an excellent example of what a past-present doolhof might look like.

Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain

Histories of Technology, the Environment, and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a uniquely wide-lens view of how technology and the environment have been intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last 300 years. It combines, for the first time, two perspectives with much to say about Britain since the industrial revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Technologies are modified environments, just as nature is to varying extents engineered. Furthermore, technologies and our living and non-living environment are both predominant material forms of organisation – and self-organisation – that surround and make us. Both have changed over time, in intersecting ways.

Technologies discussed in the collection include bulldozers, submarine cables, automobiles, flood barriers, medical devices, museum displays and biotechnologies. Environments investigated include bogs, cities, farms, places of natural beauty and pollution, land and sea. The book explores this diversity but also offers an integrated framework for understanding these intersections.

From Revolt to Riches

This collection investigates the culture and history of the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from both international and interdisciplinary perspectives. The period was one of extraordinary upheaval and change, as the combined impact of Renaissance, Reformation and Revolt resulted in the radically new conditions – political, economic and intellectual – of the Dutch Republic in its Golden Age. While many aspects of this rich and nuanced era have been studied before, the emphasis of this volume is on a series of interactions and interrelations: between communities and their varying but often cognate languages; between different but overlapping spheres of human activity; between culture and history.

The chapters are written by historians, linguists, bibliographers, art historians and literary scholars based in the Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain and the United States. In continually crossing disciplinary, linguistic and national boundaries, while keeping the culture and history of the Low Countries in the Renaissance and Golden Age in focus, this book opens up new and often surprising perspectives on a region all the more intriguing for the very complexity of its entanglements.

Praise for Revolt to Riches
‘The essays are written by historians, linguists, bibliographers, art historians, and literary scholars and cover a variety of political, economic and cultural aspects of this extraordinary period in the history of the Low Countries. While it is, obviously, not possible to discuss all contributions in this short review, it is remarkable that many share an interest in migration, religion, and the production of pamphlets, several of which have beautiful reproductions in this volume.’
BGMN – Low Countries Historical Review

‘This edited collection, consisting of 23 articles, gives a versatile and detailed overview of the Low Countries in the early modern period. The range of topics is interesting and the articles well argued, which makes this collection not only suitable for those interested in the individual topics, but also a valuable general introduction to the Low Countries in this period…the collection at no point feels tired or dull, but portrays the Low Countries with vivid colours. This is partly assisted by the beautiful illustrations in colour.’
TSEG – The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History

Four Histories about Early Dutch Football, 1910-1920

What is the purpose of history today, and how can sporting research help us understand the world around us? In this stimulating book, Nicholas Piercey constructs four new histories of early Dutch football, exploring urban change, club members, the media, and the diaries of Cornelis Johannes Karel van Aalst, a stadium director, to propose practical examples of how history can become an important democratic tool for the 21st century.

Using early Dutch football as a field for experimental thinking about the past, the four histories offer new insights into the lives, interests and passions of those connected to the sport in the 1910s and the cities they lived in. How did the First World War impact on Dutch football? Were new stadia a form of social control? Is the spread of the beautiful game really a good thing? And why was one of the sport’s most prominent figures more concerned with potatoes? These stories of early Dutch football suggest how vital sport and history can be in shaping our lives, perceptions and actions, and why we need to challenge the influence they have today.

This book also includes a downloadable appendix. Download it here(.xlsx).

Praise for Four Histories about Early Dutch Football, 1910-1920

‘Academic historians of sport will relate to many of the problems Piercey has faced when putting together his histories, and the book is accordingly useful for thinking about what alternative futures of the study and writing of history might be. It also effectively uses sport to provide snapshots of urban Dutch society at a crucial juncture of 20th-century history.’
Reviews in History

‘This book by Piercey is a useful contribution to sports history research in the Netherlands. He is the first historian to look at an original professional approach to football in the 1910-1920, demonstrating that good research is possible with archives from the sports world. The material can also inform other professional historians and non-sports enthusiasts.’
BMGN/ Low Countries Historical Review (translated from Dutch)

‘An enjoyable read because of the new perspectives on Dutch football history it offers, but even more so for showing how self-reflection, if done right, leads to histories that are innovative, challenging and empathic.’
Journal of Sport History

‘A valuable contribution to more traditional approaches to sports history, as it emphasizes the constructed character of history writing and the defining position of the historian as a historical actor. By using Foucauldian theories, Piercey provides useful insights into the way football—and sport—was connected to wider social and educational initiatives’International Journal of the History of Sport

‘Piercey’s work is a brave attempt to write four different histories about early Dutch football in four completely different postmodern ways. He amasses a large amount of relevant data and shows command over the postmodern approach to history-writing throughout this book. In particular, his examination of discourses in writing sports history, his nuanced stance vis-à-vis historical findings and conclusions, and his experiment with using semi-fictional narratives to conduct historic (football) research are admirable.’Soccer & Society

Discord and Consensus in the Low Countries, 1700-2000

All countries, regions and institutions are ultimately built on a degree of consensus, on a collective commitment to a concept, belief or value system. This consensus is continuously rephrased and reinvented through a narrative of cohesion and challenged by expressions of discontent and discord. The history of the Low Countries is characterised by both a striving for consensus and eruptions of discord, both internally and from external challenges. This interdisciplinary volume explores consensus and discord in a Low Countries context along broad cultural, linguistic and historical lines. Disciplines represented include early-modern and contemporary history; art history; film; literature; and translation scholars from both the Low Countries and beyond.

Danish Reactions to German Occupation

For five years during World War II, Denmark was occupied by Germany. While the Danish reaction to this period of its history has been extensively discussed in Danish-language publications, it has not until now received a thorough treatment in English. Set in the context of modern Danish foreign relations, and tracing the country’s responses to successive crises and wars in the region, Danish Reactions to German Occupation brings a full overview of the occupation to an English-speaking audience. Holbraad carefully dissects the motivations and ideologies driving conduct during the occupation, and his authoritative coverage of the preceding century provides a crucial link to understanding the forces behind Danish foreign policy divisions.

Analysing the conduct of a traumatised and strategically exposed small state bordering on an aggressive great power, the book traces a development from reluctant cooperation to active resistance. In doing so, Holbraad surveys and examines the subsequent, and not yet quite finished, debate among Danish historians about this contested period, which takes place between those siding with the resistance and those more inclined to justify limited cooperation with the occupiers – and who sometimes even condone various acts of collaboration.

Praise for Danish Reactions to German Occupation

‘Carsten Holbraad’s scrupulously impartial survey of Denmark’s history in the Second World War and of Danish historiography concerning the period is a great boon to Anglophone readers. Almost all of the hundreds of works he cites are available only in Danish, and most English-language studies of his topic are badly dated.’
Michigan War Studies Review

Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa

Looking at decolonization in the conditional tense, this volume teases out the complex and uncertain ends of British and French empire in Africa during the period of ‘late colonial shift’ after 1945. Rather than view decolonization as an inevitable process, the contributors together explore the crucial historical moments in which change was negotiated, compromises were made, and debates were staged.
Three core themes guide the analysis: development, contingency and entanglement. The chapters consider the ways in which decolonization was governed and moderated by concerns about development and profit. A complementary focus on contingency allows deeper consideration of how colonial powers planned for ‘colonial futures’, and how divergent voices greeted the end of empire. Thinking about entanglements likewise stresses both the connections that existed between the British and French empires in Africa, and those that endured beyond the formal transfer of power.

Praise for Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa

‘…this ambitious volume represents a significant step forward for the field. As is often the case with rich and stimulating work, the volume gestures towards more themes than I have space to properly address in this review. These include shifting terrains of temporality, spatial Scales, and state sovereignty, which together raise important questions about the relationship between decolonization and globalization. By bringing all of these crucial issues into the same frame, Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa is sure to inspire new thought-provoking research.’
H-France

‘On the whole the collection offers some stimulating points, such as Martin Shipway’s final remarks … Marta Musso’s persuasive discussion on the diplomatic struggle for control of hydrocarbon resources during the Algerian War of Independence … and a compelling chapter by Joanna Warson on how the French responded to migratory flows of Francophone Africans to British West Africa.’
Africa: Journal of the International African Institute

‘This is a work on imperial history the way it should be done.’
History: Reviews of New Books

‘the essays that comprise Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa go a long way in adding to the growing literature surrounding the uncertainty and ‘imperfection’’
Journal of African History

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