History has been part of the Brexit madness from the start. It’s hardly news that thinking about things that happened in the past is often directly shaped by perceived priorities in the present, but something rather more one-sided has been going on with history under Brexit. The problem isn’t so much that apparently everyone feels entitled to serendipitously dip into the past for findings to support whatever they believe in; it is rather that much of this history is so very un- and anti-historical. History has become a caricature of parochial dreams, nostalgias and made-up analogies to prop up binary political choices.
www.cambridge.org/ceh/brexit

In this roundtable discussion, the historians Martin Conway, David Edgerton, Pieter Lagrou, Sandrine Kott, Kiran Patel and Jessica Reinisch debate the role and relevance of history and historians in making sense of Brexit and the future of the European Union. It accompanies the journal Contemporary European History’s publication of a special issue on the subject. 

The upshot of this roundtable cannot be easily reduced to a political headline, and that is precisely the point. Serious history rarely works that way. As the contributors show, the prospect of Brexit has revealed deep historically-rooted misperceptions between the UK and its European neighbours; Brexit in this sense is a process of stripping away dusty historical delusions about national paths and those of neighbouring countries.

Organised by: Contemporary European History (Cambridge University Press), the Université Libre de Bruxelles and its research unit Mondes modernes et contemporains (MMC).

Historians discuss Brexit

In this talk, recorded at Wollaton Hall, Nottingham, the editor of An Account of an Eliabethan Family, Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran Cruz, recalls the "disobedience" of the women of the Willoughby family as revealed by their letters.  The letters were saved for posterity by being copied and annotated by their descedant Cassandra Willoughby a century after they were written.

The edited volume is available to purchase www.cambridge.org/9781108492515

An Account of an Elizabethan Family is part of the Royal Historical Society Camden Fifth Series, published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Historical Society.  Browse other volumes in the series www.cambridge.org/rhc

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