Leen Dresen, Towards a national landscape: botanical walks in the journal Album der Natuur (1861-1909)This article traces developments within the 'botanical walks' that were featured in the successful Dutch popular science journal Album der Natuur, and proposes to interpret these…

Willemien Roenhorst, The ‘natural’ nation.The monumentalisation and nationalisationof nature and landscape in the Netherlands in the early 20th century The first part of this article traces the origins and development of the idea of ‘natural heritage’ - the attribution of…

K. van Berkel, Landscape, nature and national identity. An introductory noteIt was one hundred years ago, in 1905, that a group of schoolteachers, biologists, merchants and members of the nobility founded the Dutch Society for the Preservation of Natural Monuments…

Karel Davids, Low countries, faraway horizons. The relation between nature, landscape and ‘Dutch’ identity in a comparative perspectiveHow did nature, landscape and identity in the Netherlands become intertwined during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? And more particularly,…

Wessel Krul, The Hague School and the national landscapeFrom the 1870s onward, the so-called ‘Hague School’ was credited with the invention of a type of landscape painting which was felt to be truly national, in the sense that it realistically…

Andreas Stynen, Native wealth charted. Belgian botanists, scientific zeal and patriotic motivesThis article analyses the importance of patriotic motives in nineteenth-century Belgian botany, without reducing the study of indigenous plants to a vehicle of aggressive, blatantly biased chauvinism. Different forms…

Ed Taverne, The controversial landscape of the HaarlemmermeerIn the context of this article, ‘controversial landscape’ refers to the rather bad reputation of the reclamation of the Haarlemmermeer (1851): one of the greatest technical projects in the Netherlands during the nineteenth…

Pim Kooij, The Green Heart of the Netherlands. A transient inventionAround 1960 in the Netherlands the ‘Green Heart’ was invented: this was the name given to a vast area of polders, cleared peat areas, ponds and villages, on the borders…

Historical Research into the Nobility during the Late Mediaeval and Early Modern Period in Belgium and the Netherlands: A SnapshotThis introduction to a special issue on the history of the nobility in the Netherlands and Belgium gives a ‘snap-shot’ of…

Nobility in the Low Countries from Medieval Times to the Modern Era. The Creation of a Dynastic Nobility (from the 15th to the 17th Century)In order to gain the allegiance of the major families during the creation of their new…