Online Book Launch and Discussion: Claiming the People’s Past: Populist Politics of History in the Twenty-First Century

From Thierry Baudet’s videos about Dutch history on YouTube to Jair Bolsonaro’s revisionist statements about the military dictatorship in Brazil: populists all over the world are using the past. The edited volume Claiming the People’s Past. Populist Politics of History in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2024) offers the first global and systematic overview of populist politics of history in the twenty-first century. This digital MSA session combines the launch of Claiming the People’s Past with a critical discussion by two experts on the volume’s contribution to the growing body of literature exploring the intrinsic relationship between memory and populism. How can we recognize populist engagements with the past? What challenges do populist engagements with the past bring for historians and memory scholars? Bringing insights from a variety of contexts together, the session discusses what the ‘populist moment’ means for new developments within the dynamic field of memory studies.