During the third Drongo festival for multilingualism in September, there was a special stage for Afrikaans. Adriaan van Dis talked to the African writer Kirby van der Merwe and linguist Pieter Muysken. They looked back at history and looked ahead to the future of Afrikaans. Not entirely coincidental
In the future, the Netherlands will have to deal with increasing salinization of the coastal areas. Salinization is already underway in the Haarlemmermeerpolder. The origin of the salt goes back thousands of years, when the coastline was still deep inland. PhD candidate Joost Delsman argues for smar
In the early Middle Ages Old Dutch and Old Frisian were spoken in North and South Holland. Unfortunately, few texts from this early period have survived. What we do have are place names. Historical linguistics enables us to distil a piece of cultural history from these place names. We go back to th
Painter George Hendrik Breitner (1857-1923) had never made a fool of himself in a CSI series, he observed locations and scenes so closely a hundred years ago. It just had nothing to do with murder:Breitner actually recorded life. On the spot, he made quick sketches and photos to elaborate in his stu
Rich and poor, they are relative concepts. In the early modern period, people were poor if they earned too little to stay alive. Now the Dutchman is poor if he becomes socially isolated due to a lack of money. The view on poverty has changed several times in the past:a walk through the past to close
The United States has a strange kind of democracy. They are the only democratic country where the chief executive is not directly elected by the people. That is what the electoral college, 535 men and women who appoint a president on behalf of the people. That system is as old as the US itself. The
It caused quite a stir in the media, the report that a historian from the prestigious Harvard University had discovered a fragment of an unknown gospel in which Jesus addresses his wife. Preliminary investigation showed that it was an authentic document. The Vatican soon spoke of a forgery. Whos rig
The 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded yesterday to Chinese writer Mo Yan for his hallucinatory realism with which he combines folktales, history and the contemporary. Today, Mo Yan was in the news again for urging the Chinese government to release compatriot and dissident Liu Xiaobo, who wo
The Golden Age is in the spotlight at Kennislink. And not just with us:the NTR/VPRO broadcasts a series about the famous seventeenth century, which is also linked to a book and an exhibition in the Amsterdam Museum. Maarten Prak talks about his role as an advisor for the television series. It all s
What was the music culture of East German youths like during the GDR and how did the communist state deal with it? To answer that question, Marlene Schrijnders, a former student of Germany Studies at the University of Amsterdam, delved into the Berlin archives. She won the Volkskrant/DIA thesis priz
During the Republic of the United Netherlands, important state tasks such as waging war at sea were outsourced to capitalist entrepreneurs. These commercial wars were an important source of power during the Golden Age. But in the end, the focus was on short-term gain and the Republic went under. Thi
Due to the growing prosperity and wealth at the beginning of the Golden Age, a specific youth culture emerged in the higher circles of society, with a lot of attention for fashion, music, drinking and smoking. The preachers of the 17th century were not happy about that and grumbled about that licent
It is so hard to imagine that our country was buried in the distant past by miles of pack ice and advancing glaciers. The fact that the Netherlands was once a polar desert is proven by a vertical sand wall in Drenthe, recently christened the Steilrand Donderen. The sand wall reads like a book about
Archaeologists are increasingly finding remains of Roman military settlements east of the Rhine in Germany. This indicates that the Romans were much more active outside the Limes, the fortified frontier of their empire. A life-size monument to the Germanic hero Arminius, known in German as Hermann,
Wonderful:simultaneously with your feet in the warm sand and with your head in the world of science. All Kennislink editors tip the readers the best scientific books of the past year. Vote for your favorite below. We raffle a copy of the Kennislink book Why do men go bald? 101 smart questions among
The history exam for high school students is coming up again. To lend you a hand, Kennislink lists all articles about the Netherlands and the Republic between 1477 and 1702. Here you will find extra depth and explanation about difficult subjects from the final exam. The History exam always consist
Seventy years later, we still cannot let the painful events surrounding the occupation and the persecution of the Jews rest. This is apparent now that Bart van der Boom, who is criticized for his research We know nothing about their fate, into the Holocaust in the Netherlands. The point of contentio
If you want to understand American post-war foreign policy, there is one person you should definitely know:George F. Kennan, diplomat, historian and geostrategist. His insights shaped Americas anti-communist policies like no other. But Kennans ideas were misused for an aggressive arms race. Despite
Strict internet censorship and arrests of bloggers. It is well known that the Chinese government monitors its citizens online. But the Chinese government is not only blocking certain information, it is also embracing the internet as a medium to spread its own truth. In the Chinese game War of the R
Art historian Jan de Jong comes up with surprising results in his book The Power and the Glorification. His research shows that popes in the 15th and 16th centuries systematically falsified history. With this they tried to boost their crumbling power a bit. For centuries the papal power had been un
They murdered priests, raped nuns, destroyed churches. But not only. It is said that they impaled innocent women and even infants. Brutal and primitive spared no one. But does this black legend correspond to historical truth? The German chronicler Peter of Dusburg, who lived at the turn of the 1
He flew night and day, hunting and covering bombers. He has seen his colleagues die more than once. When he set off on the unlucky mission, he did not expect that this time his plane would be hit by enemy bullets. How did he manage to travel thousands of kilometers and return to base? The alarm
Thousands of years ago, humans tame and become attached to wild animals. They even had their pets in cemeteries. And much sooner than you might think. A tomb from ... fourteen thousand years ago. This is the estimation of the oldest animal remains found so far, bearing the features of a burial. B
He wears alabaster ointments. In Egypt, perfume had a sacred value That the Egyptians, already thousands of years ago, made extensive use of perfumes, is testified by the archaeological finds of Luxor, only that their use had a partly different meaning from what they later assumed. In fact