Data

‘Changes were in the air’ – is perhaps the best way to describe the social mood at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. On the international stage, the gap between the post-war generation, known as the ‘baby boomers’ and the generation that had experienced World War II as adolescents or young adults came to light in the form of student protests, anti-war movements and new concepts of life. It is scarcely a coincidence that there were protests in eastern Belgium too at this time. What were the ‘young wild ones’ protesting against in the German speaking region of Belgium?

This paper examines images of industrial work(ers) as contributions to visual meaning-making. The selected examples illustrate the deployment of industrial work(ers) as a motif in a variety of artistic genres and media that circulated in interwar Luxembourg. The different depictions, which were distributed and promoted by different actors with different interests, show the industrial worker as affiliated with or a representative of a particular steel company, the industrial sector as a whole, the Luxembourg nation or the working class.

Due to the separation between the historical and legal fields which have examined the issue of WWII reparations, no generally accepted definition of their current status exists either in the historical, legal or political spheres. This lack of clarity has greatly contributed to this issue remaining unresolved until the present. In his talk, Spero Paravantes looks at the way the issue was used by the Big Three in their dealings with each other after WWII.

This paper argues for a hybrid approach to historical research that combines ’traditional’ with digital hermeneutical approaches in a new practice of doing history. As the digital turn alters and affects all parts of the historical research process, this is a pressing challenge and need for all historians, not just for those engaged in ‘big data’ projects. Indeed, hybridity is, and should be, the new normal.

Ian Grosvenor is Professor of Urban Education History at the School of Education, University of Birmingham, and director of the Voices of War & Peace Centre.

This article reflects on the borderline between factual and fictional storytelling in history, arguing that the different narrative formats of historical storytelling are based on narrative conventions that play with rhetorical and stylistic strategies of authentification and objectivation.

Dr Paravantes' presentation, " European Migrations post-WWII: Past, Present and Future, " will discuss the history of migrations and migration/refugee policy within the EU, from the beginning of the integration process and the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) until the present. The talk will focus on earlier migrations within Western Europe, the rules established to regulate internal and external migration, and the steps which the various iterations of the European Union and its individual members took to deal with them.