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Dear colleagues,

The History under Debate list is facing a growth problem. The messages and debate proposals accumulate awaiting distribution. We try, as you all know, not to send more than two messages per day. And we shall maintain this criterion as long as Internet access and use does not become widespread among our professional community.

In order to make our on-line debate more dynamic we have decided -after consulting the current subscribers to our list - to transform, as of January 1st 2001, the debates on Immediate History into a list of its own, thus facilitating its free development as well as taking pressure off the general list.

We shall maintain in the new phase the criteria on which Immediate History operates, i.e. our main focus will be events with a degree of historical relevance, proposals for debate originating in colleagues from the affected countries along with historical/ historiographic approaches. Such criteria, if applied flexibly, are unavoidable in order to accomplish our objectives to understand the past through the present and the present through the past.

It is certainly true that many of the opinions expressed in the Immediate History debates are no different from those any citizen with an interest in social and political events may express. But what we find in these debates are opinions of historians (or future historians) on events that become history instantly and, consequently, are the interest, or should be the interest, of our communities of historians, even of those colleagues who still believe that the study of the past has nothing to do with the present (and even less with the future).

The opinions of historians as citizens, whether we want it or not, make up the history we write .And historians’ plural commitment as citizens should be a motive of pride for all of us. Let us remember, for instance, those two individual paradigms, which represent the great Twenty Century Schools Marc Bloch, the proponent of Annales, who fought against the Nazi occupation (and paid with his life for it) and E.P. Thompson, the master of British Social History and the organiser of the European Pacifist Movement, who died recently.

Let us go ahead with the new phase of the Immediate history debates, which are one of the distinguishing marks of History under Debate as a historiographic movement for the twenty first century.

Sincerely yours

Carlos Barros
Coordinator of History under Debate
E-mail cbarros@retemail.es
Web personal http//personal5.iddeo.es/cbarros