On the Waterfront 48

This year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the IISH, which will be celebrated in various ways. Also, it has been twenty-five years since the Friends of the IISH was established. Reflections on the history of the Institute have featured regularly at Friends Meetings and in the columns of On the Waterfront. For several years we have tried to document them via interviews with staff, many of whom have worked at the Institute for most of their careers and are now retiring. The interview with Eef Vermeij is another contribution to this series. Eef already contributed to the first Friends Meetings and to On the Waterfront in 2000 and figures again in this issue, marking his twenty-fifth anniversary as a contributor as well. In the interview he looks back on his long and variegated career within the IISH, in which he participated in bringing about the Asia collections.
The institute’s history also recurs in contributions from younger staff members, about digitization of the SDAP archive by Jelle Verdijk, about satirical pamphlets from the General Jewish Labour Bund by Shanie de Graaf Kalikow, and about the personal papers of the Indonesian leftist revolutionary Francisca Fanggidaej by Rika Theo. The history of women’s work, to which the Friends contributed significantly by funding the “Women’s work in the Netherlands, 1500-1850” project during their first ten years (see e.g. On the Waterfront 7 (2003), pp. 13-15 and 24, (2012), pp. 14-15), is back in the spotlight, as highlighted in the report on the lecture by Selin Dilli on women entrepreneurs in the Netherlands, whose presence historians have tended to overlook as much as or perhaps even more than that of women workers.

Aad Blok