The pandemic may have consigned historians to their homes, but this did not stop history from taking centre-stage in public debate. From falling statues to culture wars, history in all its forms has continued to be deployed by states, activists, prestigious institutions and grassroots organisations. As has always been the case, those who study history for a living have rarely played a prominent role in these debates. At best, historians have tended to be confined to supporting roles as ‘advisers’, ‘consultants’ or ‘experts’. Still, even for those historians who eschew the rough-and-tumble of political and civic discussion, it is impossible to remain entirely neutral. Governments and politicians can overturn funding priorities; universities can suddenly find themselves targets of hostile political campaigning; and lecture halls can turn into sites of civic struggle. This constant historical instrumentalisation is a dramatic reminder of the power of narratives in constructing realities.

In the slipstream of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, there has been a global mobilisation around monuments and statues of famous figures involved in the slave trade and European colonial conquest. In former colonial states – such as France and Britain – and states shaped by the legacies of slavery – such as the United States – activists have defaced, damaged or torn down monuments associated with these contested pasts. This is hardly a novelty. The destruction of physical symbols is often a response to regime change. But, in this case, the mobilisation has taken a different form. Instead of legitimising a new regime and new elites, the destruction of monuments is part of a demand for justice from historically marginalised groups who are seeking to reclaim their heritage. The deconstruction of these monuments automatically entails the deconstruction of dominant national narratives that have contributed to such marginalisation.

In a brilliant 1972 cartoon, the creator of Snoopy, Charles M. Schulz, depicts the contemplative beagle going through a crisis of rage. Snoopy discovers that a six-storey parking garage has been built on the site of the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, a place in which, we are led to understand, he had spent some of his happiest childhood moments. Snoopy cannot contain himself. ‘You stupid people’, he shouts; ‘You're parking on my memories’.

Academic historians often complain that their work is not appreciated by the public and that the impact of their books is limited to a few other scholars. There are, however, situations where historians face the opposite challenge, namely a great deal of interest from both the public and from politicians who want to exploit or interfere with their work to further their political agendas. This arises most often in countries that are undergoing deep political and social changes. At these times, the legacies of the past that emerge after a fundamental regime transformation, like the collapse of dictatorship, have a profound impact on historical research and discourse.

The Irish ‘Decade of Centenaries’ is, at last, drawing to a close, ending the ‘interminable round of national soul-searching’ which one prominent historian warily anticipated in 2013.1 The final major event to be commemorated is the Civil War of 1922–3, when the Irish republican movement split bitterly and violently over the terms of the treaty granting the southern part of Ireland partial independence from Britain. As it turns out, the government in charge of overseeing that commemoration is a coalition made up of the two principal political parties that emerged from the aftermath of that civil war. Where for a century these parties had formed the binaries of the Irish political division, now their peaceful cooperation in government could be seen as proof of the ‘end of history’, Irish-style. Even erstwhile political enemies – whose ancestors one hundred years ago executed and assassinated each other – could unite in a shared project of ‘inclusive’ and ‘ethical’ commemoration informed by an expert advisory panel made up of prominent academic and public historians. Their unprecedented political cooperation would be encapsulated by the peaceful swapping of the position of Taoiseach (Prime Minister) half-way through the government's term. The third great strand of the Irish Revolution, the labour movement, was fortuitously represented by the election to the Irish Presidency in 2007 of Michael D. Higgins, an academic sociologist and former Labour Party TD (member of parliament). Casann an roth, as Higgins declared in one of his many addresses during the ‘Decade’, as it is colloquially known in Irish history parlance.2 The wheel turns, and this time had come full circle, repairing the fractures in the national movement and restoring national political unity.

On 8 February 2022, an expert in Middle Eastern legal history – Florida State University associate professor Will Hanley – testified in front of Florida's House Education and Employment Committee. As a volunteer commentator rather than an invited speaker, Hanley was allotted just sixty seconds. But in his brief time, he did everything he could to argue against the adoption of the HB 7 ‘stop WOKE act’, which called for new educational protocols, especially regarding how race be taught in US classrooms.1 Hanley is not an Americanist; he does not teach on the subjects the HB 7 law affects, such as the Declaration of Independence, the US constitution, or the Federalist Papers. Nonetheless, this specialist on Islamic naming practices and Ottoman-Egyptian nationalisms stepped up and risked his career at a publicly funded institution because he knew that the reach of the US culture wars is much greater than American history, affecting all historians and all the students they teach – in the United States and beyond.2 In this essay, I want to explain why Hanley's actions should serve as a model for us all. To do this, I focus on how the US culture wars – as waged by both the right and the left – are triggering a global reconceptualisation of European history that will have dangerous consequences for students, researchers, teachers, and the profession at large. I start with Florida – the state where both Hanley and I work – because it is an extreme case of how the new culture wars have taken aim at history education, a template unfortunately being replicated with similar interventions in other US states.

Almost every week brings news of another major European museum agreeing to return looted art. Since the 2000s we have grown somewhat accustomed to the headlines describing a ceremonial return to its original owners of a painting looted in the Holocaust, a process that took decades to develop and was initially met with considerable resistance in the art world and in the countries where this art was displayed.1 In the past few years, however, building in part on the perceived success of Holocaust art restitution but also on the increased visibility and impact of national and global social movements demanding racial justice and institutional decolonisation, major international museums have come under ever stronger pressure to return art looted as part of colonial occupations. Perhaps the most organised of the current campaigns is the campaign to return the so-called ‘Benin Bronzes’ – a vast collection of various artifacts looted from the Kingdom of Benin (in today's Nigeria) and dispersed across major international museums, most prominently the British Museum in London, the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, and the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, among others. Since 2020, a number of museums have pledged to return their holdings of Benin Bronzes and restitute them to Nigeria, where a major new museum is being built to display them in Benin City. All of this activity has also reenergised perhaps the most famous case for restitution – the movement to return the Parthenon ‘Elgin’ marbles from the British Museum to the Acropolis in Athens.

Debates about history have never been strictly confined to the world of scholarship. They have also been at the centre of political controversies in society. ‘The problem for professional historians’, Eric Hobsbawm once observed, ‘is that their subject has important social and political functions’.1 ‘This duality’, he noted, ‘is the core of our subject’. This essay offers some reflections on the political role of historians, exploring the relationship between their scholarly work and their involvement in political debates. A closer look at the issue shows that it is not so much a problem as an opportunity for historians to engage with their subject on various levels, from the realm of scholarship to the realm of contemporary politics, which makes their position in society both more complex and more critical.

Ever since the ground-breaking historical mini-series Holocaust (1978), television has proven to play a major role in structuring the collective memory about the past.1 This medium has, moreover, displayed a capacity to trigger a collective rendering of, and coming to terms with, painful, hidden or forgotten aspects of the past. Media specialist Garry R. Edgerton has even argued that ‘television is the principal means by which most people learn about history’.2 Even though such assertions might be tempered by today's predominance of social media – especially in generational terms – an inquiry into the politics of memory in popular television is still relevant for the field of public history, as well as for memory studies. This is particularly pertinent when representing dictatorship in the European South. Alongside public history projects of all kinds (including museums, memorials, commemorative plaques and practices), filmic representations (be it for cinematic or television use) structure the collective imaginary about the recent past. This essay briefly discusses TV shows that deal with and shape public understandings of the dictatorships in Spain (the final phase of Francoism, post-1968), Greece (the Colonels’ dictatorship, post-1969) and Portugal (the final phase of the Estado Novo (New State), post-1968).

In December 2021 a famous Greek TV and radio journalist and well-known anti-vaxxer, Yiorgos Tragkas, passed away due to Covid-19 complications. In the previous two decades, Tragkas had become a controversial figure, employing an anti-elite, pro-Russian and anti-Western narrative that fed into the country's underdog culture. His ethnocentric, populist, toxic tabloid journalism had been a popular genre in Greek political culture since the early 1980s. However, the debt and migration crises that shook Greece fuelled populist politics and a wave of misinformation.1 Tragkas jumped on the bandwagon of this new era by whitewashing the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party on national TV and by live appearances dressed up as a Second World War Nazi officer, with photos of Adolf Hitler and Angela Merkel on his desk.

One day in December 2019 I knew something was badly amiss. Russian President Vladimir Putin had called a meeting with the leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States – the vague post-Soviet association of former Soviet republics that semi-defer to Russia – in order to discuss history. Not just discuss: he actually brought a thick stack of archival documents to the meeting, which, he said, demonstrated certain truths about the history of the Second World War. These had allegedly been forgotten or perhaps deliberately ignored in the West. He then selectively cited from these documents (most, if not all, of which are well-known to historians) to prove that, effectively, the West, and especially Poland, were responsible for the war.