Nation building

Iceland was a largely uninhabited island in the northern Atlantic Ocean where Norsemen settled around 870. It began as a ‘free state’ but became a…

Even though Iceland remained under Danish rule, the Icelandic ‘Althing’ was restored in 1845 as a national consultative assembly, and in 1874 the…

In the summer of 2019, the Trump Administration voiced an interest in buying Greenland from Denmark. The historical background for this stretches at…

After a referendum almost unanimously in favour, Iceland was declared an independent republic on 17th June 1944 at Þingvellir. Denmark did not,…

Read a potted history of Iceland from the Vikings to today.

An international discussion on decolonisation followed in the aftermath of the Second World War in the mid-1940s. The newly formed United Nations…

On 4th August 1916, the American government issued a declaration to the Danish government that it would not raise objections if Denmark extended its…

Go to Flensborg, Germany, in 1920 and see firsthand what it was like during the plebiscite on 14th March. Would Flensborg and central Schleswig remain…

Go with Klaus Tolstrup Petersen, historian and director of the Schleswig Collection (Danish Central Library for South Schleswig), back to 1920 when a…

Denmark lost a third of its territory and 40% of its population in the Second Schleswig War in 1864 to Prussia and Austria. Seen as both a national…