History has found itself dusting off the cobwebs lately and moving from backdrop to foreground. Controversies roil over Confederate statues in the United States and memorials for Cecil Rhodes in the U.K., and Sir John A. Macdonald in Canada—not to mention celebrations of the sesquicentennial. Countries around the world are grappling with dark chapters in their pasts, and with difficult questions: How do we memorialize the past while interrogating and challenging it? How do we move forward from its fraught legacies?
Historians seem uniquely poised to shed light on such challenges, and the LRC brought together two of the country’s preeminent history scholars last month for a lively discussion of the issues at stake. Margaret MacMillan is a professor at Oxford University and former warden of St. Antony’s College, and the much-decorated author of Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World and History’s People: Personalities and the Past. She is...
Margaret MacMillan is a professor at Oxford University and former warden of St. Antony’s College, and the much-decorated author of Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World and History’s People: Personalities and the Past. She is also the chair of this year’s jury for the prestigious Cundill History Prize, administered by McGill University, which awards US$75,000 for the best history book of the year.
Randall Hansen is the interim director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and the director of Munk’s Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies. He is author of Disobeying Hitler: German Resistance After Operation Valkyrie and Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany 1942–1945, which was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction.
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