History Archives - Page 12 of 12

The Fall of Yugoslavia – Misha Glenny

Published on January 4, 2008

Cover of The Fall of Yugoslavia

The Fall of Yugoslavia
Misha Glenny
314 pages, including index
published in 1996

The Fall of Yugoslavia was the first book I read in 2007, I got it as a Christmas present from Sandra. I had put this book on my Amazon UK wishlist quite a while back, after having read Glenny’s The Balkans 1804-1999, which was an impressive overview of the modern history of the Balkans. I thought it would be a good book to start the new year with and was not disappointed.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned the past few years blogging the War on Iraq it’s that you can follow the news on tv, read the newspaper reports and magazine coverage on a subject and think you know what’s going on, when in fact you’ve only gotten part of the facts, often arranged in a preconcieved narrative. Even if the news media are basically honest in their reporting, it is too immediate to see beyond the story being reported, to put them in context and digest them. At the same time, news thrives on new and unusual incidents, which greatly distorts the picture we get: in reality more people may die in single car crashes than multicar pileups, but the latter is the one featured on the evening news. Only the simplest of narratives can survive this process and governments and other propagandists make grateful use of it to push through their reality.

Waar Historie Huis Houdt – Jan Marijnissen

Published on January 2, 2008

Cover of Waar Historie Huis Houdt

Waar Historie Huis Houdt
Jan Marijnissen
95 pages including index
published in 2005

Jan Marijnissen is the political leader of the Dutch Socialist Party, currently the sole properly socialist party in Dutch parliament, as well as the third biggest party in the country. He has been the driving force behind his party’s rise, it owning much of its current succes to the years and decades of hard work Marijnissen and his comrades put into building the party. In recent years this hard work has translated into a certain amount of fame for him as not just a politician but also as what you might call a public intellectual.

It’s in this later capacity that Marijnissen has become involved in the great history debate. Amongst historians there has long been concern for the lack of interest the general public shows in their field as well as the ways in which history is taught in schools. Concerns which are perhaps universal. History is after all not a practical, moneymaking subject, so often seen as expendable in school and not directly applicable to real life later on. While interest in history is certainly present in the general public, there has been somewhat of a lack if official attention to it, something that is now slowly changing. Marijnissen has been one of the people who has argued the loudest for more attention to history as
an important, central field of education needed to provide us Dutch with a sense of who we are and where we came from. It’s this role which led to this book, Waar Historie Huis Houdt, a collection of short essays in which Marijnissen sets ups his personal reasons for finding
history important.

Battle for Empire — Tom Pocock

Published on September 2, 2007Leave a comment

Cover of Battle for Empire

Battle for Empire
Tom Pocock
272 pages including index
published in 1998

It was described by Winston Churchill as the very first world war, with war raging between France and Britain for supremacy not just in Europe, but worldwide. Fighting between the two sides took place in Europe, North America and the Caribbean, India and even the Philippines. It was the Seven Years’ War. And even though it was one of the wars that is at the root of the modern world, according to Tom Pocock, it’s largely a forgotten war, especially those parts of the war that took place outside Europe. To rectify this Pocock wrote this book, Battle for Empire; he may have had somewhat of an ulterior motive, as one of his ancestors, vice-admiral Sir George Pocock, was one of the major participants in these events…

This then is not a history of the Seven Years’ War as a whole, but strictly the story of several of the major campaigns in the war outside Europe: the battles between Britain and France in India, the English invasion of Quebec and New France in America, as well as the expeditions against Spanish held Havanna and Manilla. Together they show how wide the war raged and how bold the British waged it. Little context is given to the wider war in which these campaigns took place, even less of the reasons for the war.