Clipping for the Commission: Creating Digital Educational Tools about the Global History of Religious Toleration

Abstract

This Report from the Field discusses the methodology of “clipping history” developed by the European Union-funded research initiative RETOPEA (Religious Toleration and Peace). This project, launched in 2018, uses the history of religious toleration to stimulate educational and policy-related reflection on contemporary religious coexistence. The article discusses the initial doubts about doing public history within conditions pre-set by the European Commission; the difficulties faced by the academically trained researchers in handling the educational and digital ambitions of the project; and the eventual strategies that the researchers followed to produce sufficiently contextualized “clippings, ”-short pieces of historical information that European teenagers could use to reflect on the topic of religious coexistence.