The plan for today was that I would give you an update of the garden (still in deep crisis) and then tell a bit about the new kid on the block, the robin, and the question where does his/her beauty come from. But politics intervened. Last Thursday our prime minister Rutte blocked in a not…

As mentioned in the previous post I spent Friday and Saturday working at the open days of the History and PPE programmes. One of the things prospective history students get asked by their family and friends is what they’re going to do with their degree (the cliché question is do you want to be a…

On the 21st of March next year the Netherlands will have a referendum on something that is generally referred to as the ‘sleepwet’. This bill proposes that the Dutch intelligence and security services, the AIVD and MIVD, should be authorized to collect and store data from citizens on a massive scale, regardless of whether they…

As a group the economic and social historians at Utrecht University are actively involved in a number of different educational programmes. In all our courses we confront students with the relevance of historical research for current-day problems and highlight the use of interdisciplinary methods. Maarten Prak delivers a number of the lectures and has long…