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The Treaty of Trianon (1920) & the Memorial of National Unity (2020)
One of my favorite moments when teaching history is when a student realizes the way a specific event in the past directly affects them. The American Historical Association is fond of the phrase “Everything has a History.” Yet this disconnect between past and present is rather foreign to Hungarian culture, a notable example of this…
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What I Do: What is Digital Humanities?
Another aspect of my work is the attempt to answer historical questions with computers, a concept known as digital history or digital humanities.[1] Before starting my doctorate program, I worked fulltime in Information Technology for twelve years. During that time, I worked in several sectors and verticals and across various subspecialties within the IT domain. So,…
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Lánchíd, Chain Bridge
If Rome is the city of seven hills, Budapest is the city of seven bridges. In fact, Budapest did not come in existence until 1873, prior to that it was two cities, Buda and Pest, divided by the Danube River. The process that would merge the two cities began in 1840 with the commencement of…
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Hungary, Russia, and the History Textbook Feud
On September 1, the New York Times carried an article about the new Russian history textbook and its descriptions of Ukraine and the ongoing “special military operation.” The next week, The Hill, a US political news site ran a similar piece. Both panned the new textbooks as inaccurate and propaganda. Unless you closely follow US politics or Eastern Europe, it…
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Travelogue: Visegrád & Mátyás Királyi Palota
This past week I attended orientation with the Hungarian-American Fulbright Commission which allowed me to meet the other students and scholars visiting Hungary from the US. In addition to crash courses in language, culture, music, politics, economics, higher education, and living abroad, we also had a couple of guided tours. So, it seems an appropriate…
Patrick C. Leech 