About this episode

Roderick Beaton discusses the need for a new history of Europe shaped by contemporary perspectives.

At the very beginning of his forthcoming book Europe: A New History, my guest Roderick Beaton asks a simple but disarming set of questions: Why a “new” history of Europe? Why might we need one? And what makes this history new? His answer is not merely about newly discovered facts, or even reinterpretations of old ones. It is about events. “To study history,” he writes, “is to look for patterns to make sense of the things that happen…When things change, when new and unexpected events suddenly reshape the world that we thought we knew around us, the effect is like the turning of a kaleidoscope—the whole pattern changes.” The present does not leave the past untouched. It rearranges it. So we need a new history of Europe not because the past has changed, but because our vantage point has. “The story told in this book,” Beaton writes, “has been shaped by the changed and changing perspective of the mid-2020s; it could not have been told this way before.” In this conversation, we explore what it means to write history under those conditions—and what Europe looks like when its past is seen anew. Roderick Beaton is Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek & Byzantine History…

People in this episode

Host: Al Zambone

Guest: Roderick Beaton

Topics covered

• history
• Europe
• perspective
• events
• modern history

Keywords

• history
• Europe
• Roderick Beaton
• modern history
• perspective
• events

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: King’s College London

Books & works: Europe: A New History, The Greeks: A Global History

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