by Anna Lindner. (Excerpt from the Service-Learning at Calvin College blog.) The history department, by virtue of its nature, could and, I believe, should have a close relationship with the Service-Learning Center. History is not merely the study of the past; it is also an investigation of humans, the way they perceive and then try …
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by Jenna Hunt. My Museum Studies masters’ thesis focused on museums of communism, and as part of my research I traveled to Central and Eastern Europe and analyzed several museums as case studies. One of these was the Perm-36 Gulag Museum, located on the western edge of the Ural Mountains. I arrived in the city …
Continue reading The Politics of Memory in Russia
by Jonathan Hielkema. No. When you talk about plants, or an ecological system or forest, things are very easy if you decide that bad people ruined it. But that's not what humans have been doing. It's not bad people who are destroying forests. –Hayao Miyazaki Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke follows a young native Japanese (Emishi) …
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by Spencer Cone. Today, Izmir is the third largest city in Turkey. As a bustling city with a thriving economy and cultural life, it’s become a symbol of the modern, Westernized Turkey. However, the city’s prosperity disguises a tumultuous history. Throughout the course of the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) the city, known then as Smyrna, witnessed …
Continue reading Why the Past Matters: Izmir’s Historical Amnesia
by Coryn Mulder. This entry comes from Coryn Mulder, a senior nursing student in Professor Karin Maag’s spring online History 151 class, responding to a final exam question about the value of taking a core history class. Her response is featured here with her permission. History 151 covers human history from the Paleolithic era up …
Continue reading Student voices: Why take a history survey class?
by Hailey De Jong. Eva Kiss, our Hungarian professor of Communist history, yanked down the screen in front of the classroom and projected old film footage of the violent, anti-Communist revolution in Timișoara, a large city in western Romania. It was an apt conclusion to her lecture series on the 1989 Revolution in Romania, and …
Continue reading The Presence of the Past in Eastern Europe
Historical Horizons 