History Compass Podcast #3

History Compass’ third PODCAST is now available!

This free podcast offers a discussion between Professor Ron Schechter, retired early modern Europe editor for History Compass, and Dr. Laura Cruz, a History Compass author. Examining Dr Cruz’s published essay, ‘The 80 Years’ Question: The Dutch Revolt in Historical Perspective’, they discuss the field of Dutch history, how it is being affected by new global and transnational histories, the need for further theoretical development in light of the cultural and linguistic turn, and the ways this article could be used in teaching.

Click here to download the podcast: http://www.gabcast.com/casts/1696/episodes/1187707007.mp3 (12.1 MB, 16 minutes 59 seconds).

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‘The 80 Years’ Question: The Dutch Revolt in Historical Perspective’

Abstract

Once heralded as the ‘leading event of modern times’, the Dutch Revolt took place over a period of eighty years (1568–164 and historians have worked to interpret it for even longer. This historiographical article outlines the major points of contention and schools of thought surrounding interpretations of the deeper meaning of the Dutch bid for independence from Spanish rule. While the intellectual milieus of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe certainly left their mark on historical interpretations of this event, this article argues that writings about the Revolt distinctively trace changing perceptions of the role played by small countries in the history of Western Civilization. As is true in most contemporary historical scholarship, there are no more grand narratives for encompassing the Dutch Revolt in its entirety, but the article points to future directions for understanding the Revolt in its wider contexts, whether European or global.

NICE Paintings – the National Inventory of Continental European Paintings

Image details: ‘La Falaise à Fécamp’ by Claude Monet, 1881 © Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum

Guest Post: Andrew Greg, Project Director, National Inventory Research Project, Department of History of Art, Univeristy of Glasgow

‘NICE Paintings’ is a pioneering database aiming to bring together in one searchable catalogue all 22,000 old master paintings in UK museums. The first phase of the project is now on line at http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/collections/NIRP/index.php. It contains detailed records of nearly 8,000 pre-1900 Continental European oil paintings from 200 public collections across the United Kingdom. Over 2,500 are illustrated with digital colour images, and more images are being added regularly.

Although a growing number of, mainly large, museums are producing on line catalogues of their collections, most museums do not have on-line catalogues and there is no union catalogue of any aspect of UK museums’ collections that brings together all their holdings into one searchable database. In addition, it has long been recognised that smaller museums do not have access to the expertise to enable them to research their specialist collections and that this is a barrier to publicising and making full use of these collections. The project’s methodology therefore was to bring together the research skills of academic art historians and the under-researched collections of often hard-pressed museum curators.