In this issue, the first essay in a new series, Creative Approaches to the Past, appears. Michael Geyer's “The Prague Cookbook of Ruth Bratu, or: How a Historian Came to Feel the Past” is an evocative meditation on the time-and-place boundedness of recipes, family history's artefacts, and the sensations of the past that those artefacts impart to us.
Along with The Present is History series introduced in 52:4, which offers central European historians an opportunity to apply their own research to issues of contemporary interest or concern, Creative Approaches to the Past is intended as a venue for historians who wish to explore ways of writing unconstrained by certain conventions of research articles.
If you have an idea for an essay suitable for Creative Approaches to the Past or The Present is History, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please contact me at ceh@utk.edu to discuss your ideas.
