A steady stream of creative new scholarship on Central and Eastern Europe has been arriving at the desks of reviews editors in Contemporary European History. Commissioning and editing essays on this scholarship has persuasively demonstrated its wider importance, not least in challenging the ambiguous and arbitrary line that continues to divide European historiography between East and West. We have therefore taken the decision to present the following five articles collectively, as a means of reflecting on and interrogating assumptions in European historiography. Why do Germany and France still dominate narratives of the Great War? Can we speak of urban continuities and similarities across the socialist and capitalist spheres? How does studying food offer new insights on the global phenomenon of socialism and socialist production?

Through close readings and a critical engagement with the texts, the authors of these articles ask readers to re-evaluate broad European narratives by integrating new places, methodologies or historiographical canons. Interdisciplinarity figures prominently in new conversations on Central and Eastern Europe. Among the many books reviewed in the pages that follow, we find studies in art and architectural history, anthropology, food studies and sociology. We also find creative ways of rethinking international history. But, above all, these essays confirm – should we need any reminder – that English-speaking historians must seek out conversations with the diverse historiographical literatures across Europe. From the rigorous Polish scholarship on the First World War to the extensive sociological literature produced in socialist Hungary, historians in and of East Central Europe have a vital role to play in rewriting the new narratives of contemporary European history.