From the Union sacrée to trench warfare, these sources have been effective in introducing to one of the most formative events of twentieth-century France: World War One (or “The Great War” as it was called before there was a second).…
Delving into “les années folles” means talking about the trauma of rebuilding after the Great War, “les classes creuses” it caused and by extension, the pronatalist movement, a new silhouette for women’s fashion, Josephine Baker and the jazz clubs of Paris, surrealism… Below…
It is often observed that the French model of integration differs greatly from the U.S. idea of multiculturalism, in both theory and practice. When the term “multiculturalism” even comes up in France, it is without fail with negative undertones, referring…
While living in France a few years ago, I found this old agenda in a pile of post-flea-market trash. Not knowing exactly what I had found, I picked it up along with some other books someone deemed no longer relevant.…
The Public Domain Review just put together this collection of images published as postcards for the 1900 World’s Fair. This would be a great source for discussing the turn of the 19th century (civilization/culture/society/technology) or for practicing the imperfect and…
Images Postcards from the Bowman Gray Collection at the University of North Carolina You can browse by country, name, or subject (includes photos and many caricatures as well, like the one on the left). Photos from the French site 1914-1918.fr. Texts…
Throughout a course on 20th-century and contemporary France, I’ve been incorporating popular songs into our analysis of what it means to be French, from the post-war period to the present day. I’ve used music in a variety of ways: comparing…
Patrick Weil, a research fellow at the CNRS and also a former professor of mine, has just published an essay entitled Etre français, les quatre piliers de la nationalité (Editions de l’Aube, January 2011). Although I haven’t yet had the…
Welcome to a new semester! I’m teaching a civilization class this spring and thought I’d share some of the ideas I’m using for course material. In this post I talked about using Gallica to find primary sources, and used the…
I was living in France in 1999-2000 when the millennium was all the rage. On the occasion of the turn of the new century (yes, a year early), I picked up a copy of a compilation CD called Les plus grandes…