Historical Memory

Greg Carleton explains how disastrous defeats for the Soviet Union and the US in 1941 were transformed into positive national narratives by the two emerging superpowers.

It is the responsibility of parents and politicians to define and pass on a nation's values and identity, argues Tim Stanley. Historians and teachers of history should be left alone to get on with their work.

Since the end of the Cold War there has been a marked increase in accounts of the past made by those considered to have been on the ‘losing side’ of history. But, warns Jeremy Black, we should all be wary of the forces such histories can unleash.

Tim Grady on postwar Germany’s attempts to remember the contribution made by its Jewish combatants in the First World War.

Inspired by the discovery of the frozen bodies of three soldiers of the First World War, Peter Englund considers the ways we remember and write about a conflict of which there are now no survivors left.

It is a deeply unfashionable thing to ask, says Tim Stanley, but might a nation's history be affected by the character of its people?

The desire of western governments, most notably those of Britain, to apologise for the actions of their predecessors threatens to simplify the complexities of history, argues Tim Stanley.

The anti-government protests in Egypt earlier this year swept through Cairo and Alexandria before measures could be taken to protect antiquities in museums and archaeological sites in those cities and across the country. Yet, argues Jonathan Downs, the impact on Egyptian heritage and the repatriation debate has been a positive one.

Richard Bosworth looks at the Vittoriano, the Italian capital’s century-old monument to Victor Emmanuel II and Italian unification and still the focus of competing claims over the country’s history and national identity.

Jacqueline Riding examines how a 19th-century painting, created almost 150 years after the Jacobite defeat at Culloden, has come to dominate the iconography of that event.

As China reclaims its central role in the world, Robert Bickers appeals to Britons and others in the West to take account of the legacy left by the country’s difficult 19th century.

Berlusconi is a product of the country's incomplete unification, argues Alexander Lee.

A cremation ghat built in Brighton for Indian soldiers who fought in the First World War has recently been inscribed with their names, writes Rosie Llewellyn-Jones.