Freemasons often referred to an ideal of “humanité” (Humanität, umanità, humanity) in order to bridge all differences separating mankind. In doing so, they rendered these differences all the more visible, especially in the international arenas. This was definitely the case when freemasons tried to deduce from this ideal “universal” standards…[Read more]

The article outlines how comprehensive works on the history of Europe conceptually deal with religion – with regard to the relationship between religion, society and culture, the handling of the theory of secularisation and the significance of religion for the construction of Europe.

Der Beitrag skizziert, wie Gesamtdarstellungen zur Geschichte…[Read more]

This May 1st piece offers a brief look at some online Progressive Era sources relating to child labor and public knowledge of the issue. We published it on History of Knowledge to illustrate a possible blog post format.

In Part II of my survey of the blog ‘Migrant Knowledge,’ I turn to a rich set of posts that treat societal knowledge about migrants from the perspective of two elite groups, so to speak, the state and its agents, on the one hand, and scholars, here primarily historians, on the other hand. Two additional perspectives appear in these accounts: the…[Read more]

An introduction to the blog ‘Migrant Knowledge’ as an editorial project for the readers of ‘History of Knowledge.’ It concentrates on a rich and dynamic group of studies centering around young migrants and the historiographical problem of their agency. It also considers the topic of adult experts on these children.

Review of a book that probes how soldiers and civilians on each side of the Rhine experienced the Franco-Prussian War. Using people whose practical circumstances changed during the course of hostilities in ways both foreseen and unforeseen by the laws and customs of war, the book asks how and to what extent such wartime experiences promoted…[Read more]

This piece uses Shadi Bartsch’s five tenets for understanding knowledge and several previous posts on History of Knowledge to discuss what histories of knowledge are about.

Personal reflections on historiographical publishing cultures in the United States and Germany by way of trying to understand some of the differing attitudes to blogging that we were encountering at the beginning of History of Knowledge.

This blog post interrogates a mid-nineteenth-century map for German emigrants, using it as a way to talk about the central concept behind the “Migrant Knowledge” blog.

Review of an anthropological study of East German expectations of and experiences with the West’s consumer culture after the Wende.

This dissertation analyzes the career and attitudes of Wilhelm Groener (1867-1939), whom it uses as a vehicle for understanding the Imperial German army officer corps and the assumptions that guided the General Staff war planning process that culminated in the Schlieffen Plan and the German invasion of Belgium and France in 1914.

Photocopy of MA thesis in English with quotes from source material in German