history

The cultural heritage of the early Dutch settlers in South Africa still plays an important role in the life of this ‘rainbow nation’.

The Dutch had a big influence on the cultural, linguistic and physical landscape of countries surrounding the Baltic Sea.

Pinkster came across to the United States with the 17-th century Dutch settlers.

Two Flemish merchants left an imprint on the history of the Portuguese island of Madeira that is still visible today.

A selection of recent university press publications about the Low Countries in English.

400 years ago Johan van Oldenbarnevelt was beheaded.

Over the centuries, many Dutch people have contributed to Asian culture and society in various ways.

The English city of Norwich owed its prosperity in part to immigrated weavers from the Spanish Netherlands.

The Low Countries are the only area in the world where nearly every city and most large towns are home to a carillon.

Have you ever wondered why orange is the colour of the Netherlands? You find the answer in the sixteenth century.

The distorted image that many Dutch people have of the overseas territories during the colonial occupation is often based on movies.

The Treaty of London of 19 April 1839 meant the definitive international recognition of Belgium's independence.

It is the first time the role of Maori in the First World War has been recognised in this way in Europe.

A young, progressive generation is genuinely interested in Belgium’s colonial past, mainly because they realise that the origin of today’s racism can often be found in this period.

What are those Low Countries actually that we are always talking about? Editor-in-chief Luc Devoldere explains.

A hundred years ago the world encountered a Spanish flu pandemic which cost an estimated 50 to 100 million lives. But in the Netherlands it was long underestimated by the government. Medical historian Leo van Bergen sketches the devastation caused by Spanish flu between 1918 and 1920.

This beautiful city palace in Mechelen has re-opened its doors to the public after a year of renovations.

Hundreds of thousands of people have visited the scars left by WWI in recent years, but war tourism is not a new phenomenon.

A small history of the Adornes domain: a unique heritage of the Middle Ages.

After five years of renovation and decolonisation, the AfricaMuseum in Tervuren opened again. Dutch writer of Congolese descent, Kiza Magendane visited the museum with mixed feelings.

What did the Dutch know, through the ages, about what went on in their colonies, in the East and West Indies? Ewald Vanvught gives an outline of the current changing view of the colonial period in the Netherlands with reference to four monuments.

To mark the 100th anniversary of the Great War, numerous events have been held. This anthology brings together some of the finest essays we have published.

The United States of Belgium tells the story of the First Belgian Revolution before the creation of a language barrier between French and Dutch.

On April 19 1839 the European Great Powers signed the 24 Articles of the Treaty of London and by doing so legally dissolved the ‘United Kingdom of the Netherlands'. From then on Belgium and the Netherlands would go their separate ways. It was a painful break that had been building up over many years, and its effects would reverberate for many decades to come.

Review of Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch. How England Plundered Holland's Glory. New York: HarperCollins, 2008, 406 pp.

Helping to celebrate Henry Hudson's arrival 400 years ago on the shores of what is now New York, will be a replica of his ship the Halve Maen. This ship has been sailing up and down the Hudson River for many years. Captain Chip Reynolds witnessed the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11 2001 while his Halve Maen was moored in the Hudson in New York City. This is the second replica of the Halve Maen, after the first came to a sad end in upstate New York.

The Dutch period in North America began in 1609 with Henry Hudson's exploration of the river that would be given his name. In 1614 the New Netherland Company was licensed by the States General of the United Provinces for fur trading in the newly discovered region, and in 1621 the West India Company was chartered to trade in Africa, Brazil, and North America. The Company sent the first colonists to New Netherland in 1624, and by 1664 the population is estimated at around 9,000. While it's clear that there was a lot going on in Dutch America, it has undeservedly remained a historical backwater. The reason was the lack of usable primary source materials for critical examination and interpretation. But the story of New Netherland warranted a more extensive analysis. But how was that to be achieved? The answer was the creation in 1974 of the New Netherland Project, leading to Charles Gehring's translations of the surviving seventeenth-century Dutch records. This was a turning point in American historiography, and the work still goes on after thirty-four years. To understand the true importance of this work it is necessary to see how things were before.

It is hard to imagine an academic historian today receiving the kind of public acclaim that befell the Belgian Henri Pirenne (1862-1935). He provided the Belgian nation with a common past in which trade and manufacturing brought people together, regardless of ideological or linguistic differences. In this he really was a man of the nineteenth century.