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There is no single answer to the question: What is intellectual history? Commenting in the mid-1980s on two recent volumes dedicated to the sub-discipline's methods and perspectives, John Pocock wryly remarked: "I recommend reading them, but after doing so myself, I am persuaded that whatever 'intellectual history' is, and whatever 'the history of ideas' may be, I am not engaged in doing either of them." In the United States, in many respects the heartland of intellectual history, the scholarly community has grappled with the ambiguous relationship of "intellectual history" to "the history of ideas" for almost a century.
"Global history" refers to a wide range of research approaches that are typically characterized by a rising interest in alternative conceptions of space beyond methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism. It builds on a multitude of detailed research projects in all branches of historiography, ranging from economic history to cultural history and from gender history to environmental history.
‘Silenced Power’. Warfare Technology and the Changing Role of Sounds in Twentieth-Century Europe
(2011)
How did the technological ability to manipulate the sounds of weapons affect warfare in Europe during the twentieth century? The article first observes the role of warfare sounds in Europe prior to the First World War. The focus here is on the connection between the large-scale use of artillery and rapid-fire technologies and the development of sonic perceptions of ‘sounded power’ during the late nineteenth century. The second part discusses the introduction of ‘soundless weapons’ during the First World War. The horror of ‘silenced power’ as a force undermining the long-term tradition of ‘sounded power’ on the battlefield is exemplified by the case of gas warfare in the First World War and its long-term influence in Germany during the Weimar Republic and National Socialism. The paper points to existing gaps in research regarding the role of sound and silence on the battlefield, and further argues that although the notion of ‘silenced power’ was more prevalent in the first half of the twentieth century its potential horror could not be ignored after 1945.
Having for a long time been an area of research mainly reserved for specialists in international relations and political scientists, the international organizations (IOs) that first emerged in the twentieth century’s pre-World War II decades have also attracted renewed interest of historians for the past several years. This development has its place in a movement of ‘globalization’ within the discipline, evident in both themes and practice. The nation, the region, and the village remain pertinent units for study, but the historian interested in global history approaches them in relation to other spaces, reflecting renewed attention to connections and forms of circulation traditionally neglected in specialized studies. As will be argued below, in their role as observation posts, the IOs and international associations here comprise an especially productive area of research, in effect opening access to work on complexly intermeshing ‘circulatory regimes’.
Gendered critiques by historians and feminist international relations scholars have been animating international history for a good thirty years by complicating the supposedly binary relationships between states and societies, private and public, and local and international that traditionally structured the discipline. In this essay we would like to ask what a sensitivity to gender might add to international histories that are shifting their focus away from intergovernmental relations towards a reassessment of internationalisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through studies of transnational social movements, international organizations and norms, or practices of global governance. We are especially interested in how gender might contribute to a major emerging theme of international history today: the history of internationalism and international organizations as a struggle between competing or converging universalisms – ‘imperial and anticolonial, “Eastern” and “Western”, old and new’ – that sought to speak in the name of all humanity, rather than as the triumph of an international order imposed by the “West” on the rest.
The study of organized sound is the business of musicology – yet this routine observation carries a wealth of complexities, especially in the context of interdisciplinary discourse. Although musicology’s pluridisciplinary foundations offer open access to such disciplines as history, literary studies, mathematics, or sociology, the field’s intradisciplinary discourses and methodologies have shaped musicology in ways that turn most interdisciplinary exchange into a challenge. The scholarly exploration of sound in the twentieth century presents a case in point. Meaningful research on, for example, the music of the contemporary avant-garde composer Kaija Saariaho demands highly sophisticated technical skills in the spheres of the analysis, aesthetics, and technologies of music. While one could imagine interdisciplinary research on Saariaho involving, for example, the humanities or social sciences – perhaps with respect to, say, cultural politics in the late twentieth century – the specialist areas of music research usually remain disciplinarily hermetic. My current work on music in the USA during World War II offers striking examples of the need for, yet problems of, squaring interdisciplinary engagement with intradisciplinarities. The following remarks will address some of those disciplinary intersections.
This article investigates the little known phenomenon of tourism to the Iron Curtain, using the example of the inter-German border. The practice of traveling to the demarcation line to see where Germany and Europe were divided peaked during the mid-1960s but was already in full swing by the mid-1950s and lasted until the fall of the border in 1989. Based on archival documents, postcards and tourist guidebooks, the article analyses the growth of a tourist infrastructure on the western side of the inter-German border and situates this travel as a form of ‘dark tourism’. It argues that seeing the border and visualising the partition of the country did little for overcoming it but rather tended to underwrite the political and territorial status quo. In the Cold War battle for public opinion, seeing the border allowed West Germans and their visitors from abroad to juxtapose freedom and prosperity with captivity and decay, thus advertising the superiority of the capitalist model over its socialist other.
In this Issue
(2011)
The American evangelist Billy Graham held several revival meetings – so-called crusades – in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. Many thousands of Germans came to hear him. This article explores the reasons for Graham’s success in the Federal Republic in the context of a transatlantic religious and cultural history. Graham’s campaigns were embedded in the discourse of rechristianization and secularization after the end of the Second World War. Leading Protestant bishops such as Otto Dibelius and Hanns Lilje supported him. Furthermore, Graham’s campaigns played an important role in the West German culture of the Cold War as political stagings of the Free World consensus. In addition, the orchestration of the crusades reconciled religion and consumerism. Billy Graham’s crusades are a prism through which to explore important modernization processes in German Protestantism in the first two decades of the Federal Republic.
The word "anti-Semitism" serves on the one hand as a generic term for every type of hostility towards Jews. More specifically on the other hand, as a term formed in the final third of the 19th century, it characterizes a new, pseudo-scientific anti-Jewish prejudice that no longer argued religiously but employed qualities and characteristics associated with "race". A distinction needs to be drawn between the older religiously-motivated anti-Judaism and modern anti-Semitism.
By expanding historical image research, visual history has in the recent past established itself as a field of research in late modern and contemporary history, which considers images in a wider sense both as sources as well as independent artifacts of historiographical research and likewise looks at the visuality of history and the historicity of the visual. Its exponents advocate understanding images beyond their pictorialness as a medium and as an activity with an independent aesthetic that condition the way of seeing things, shape perceptual patterns, convey interpretations, that organize the aesthetic relationship of historic subjects to their social and political reality and which are able to generate own realities.
The peculiar admiration that National Socialists had for Henry Ford and the supposed sympathies that the Detroit industrialist harbored for Nazism keep attracting the curious, both academic historians and Internet dilettantes. There is something irresistible about the connection between the man taken to symbolize American industrial modernity and the quintessential villains of the twentieth century.
Towards Another Concept of the State: Historiography of the 1970s in the USA and Western Europe
(2011)
After years of neglect, the 1970s have recently entered the array of academic interest. In the USA and in Western Europe a growing number of historians are finally pulling the decade out of the shadows of the 1960s and the 1980s. As can be expected in such an early phase of academic exploration, there is still littel that ties all publications about the Seventies together.
In the 1980s, when computers became affordable for private households, a hacker or cracking scene, which was the term used by members of this subculture, developed in several western and northwestern European countries. These (almost exclusively male) groups of adolescents ‘cracked’, copied and exchanged computer games. On the basis of magazines and published interviews with former members of this scene, this article shows how cracking became an important current in the broad spectrum of teenage subculture – with specific ethical codes and rituals of masculinity. Its members were by no means lone specialists who eschewed contact with the outside world, but rather developed their own forms of community and communication. This scene did not construe itself as a political counter-culture; it was rather part of the diversifying popular and consumer culture of the 1980s. In the early 1990s, when law enforcing agencies began to prosecute software piracy more resolutely, this computer subculture began to fade. However, it lived on in the field of computer graphics, in electronic music and in the growing IT sector.
By the late 1970s, it was technologically possible to manufacture microcomputers – very small, stand-alone computers for personal use – in very large quantities. Selling them, however, meant creating a mass market where none existed: conventionally, only trained professionals, and a few devoted enthusiasts, interacted directly with the machines. Designers, marketers, retailers and other promoters therefore sought to build meanings into the design and presentation of computers which would connect them with new audiences. Such meanings reflected – and might themselves modify – the prevalent hopes, fears, desires and expectations of the users’ cultures.
The web and tomorrow’s historiography. Since the 1990s the world wide web (or simply, the web) has been an integral and important part of the communicative infrastructure of modern societies. On the one hand the web has developed as a new medium in its own right, in continuation of other media types such as newspapers, film, radio and television. On the other hand, the web has been intimately entangled in the social, cultural and political life taking place outside of the web. For example, within the realm of politics the web has been essential for the extreme left and right since the mid 1990s (as a platform for discussion and mobilisation as well as for the diffusion of political ideas). And in everyday life an important part of modern youth culture has for a number of years been closely connected to such web phenomena as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
Caricature can be defined as an art engagé which aims to transmit a social or political message. In order to achieve this goal, the satirical picture triggers an emotional reaction in the audience and guides it through a cathartic coming-of-awareness process. The feelings evoked by caricature must not necessarily be expressed through laughter; but they are a joyful or indignant shock reaction to gazing at something absurd. William A. Coupe, following Schiller, therefore defines the nature of caricature as the outcome of a dialectical struggle between the ideal and the real: ‘This conflict of ideal and real may, however, be seen and expressed in two different ways, in an emotional and serious or in a humorous and jesting fashion.’
In this Issue
(2012)
Timothy S. Brown highlights in his article that the year „1968” must be conceived as a cipher for the political and social change in the second half of the 20th century. He inquires the generational connection and the transnational entanglement of the “Global Sixties”. Despite the numerous research in the course of the 50th anniversary of “1968” remains the subject fruitful: Brown points out the potential of interdisciplinary studies, which give more weight to the cultural aspects of “1968” and the new kinds of the political, focus on the analysis of reactions of the states and their elites as well as on the changes in gender relations and in general on the long-term effects of this “epoch-making” year.
Writing in the 1960s, the novelist and essayist Wallace Stegner insisted that the postwar history of Berlin cried out for epic literary treatment: "The great book on Berlin is going to be a sort of Iliad, a story that dramatizes a power struggle in terms of the men who waged it." Indeed, the experience of Germany's once and future capital after 1945 is full of high drama and powerful personalities, from Stalin and Truman to Ernest Bevin, Lucius Clay, Ernst Reuter, Willy Brandt, Walter Ulbricht, John F, Kennedy, and the "daring young men” who flew the Airlift in 1948—49. Berlin seemed to be the epicenter of the Cold War, the site of superpower confrontation, of “wars of nerves,” of America’s “finest hour," the place where two competing political, economic, and cultural systems collided and competed spectacularly. After August 1961 it was the site of the Wall, that grisly and constant reminder of the abnormal division of the world and of a great city.