scholarly journals THE VIRTUES OF A GOOD HISTORIAN IN EARLY IMPERIAL GERMANY: GEORG WAITZ'S CONTESTED EXAMPLE

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 681-709 ◽  
Author(s):  
HERMAN PAUL
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Issues ◽  
Imperial Germany ◽  
Basic Understanding ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Third Person

Recent literature on the moral economy of nineteenth-century German historiography shares with older scholarship on Leopold von Ranke's methodological revolution a tendency to refer to “the” historical discipline in the third person singular. This would make sense as long as historians occupied a common professional space and/or shared a basic understanding of what it meant to be a historian. Yet, as this article demonstrates, in a world sharply divided over political and religious issues, historians found it difficult to agree on what it meant to be a good historian. Drawing on the case of Ranke's influential pupil Georg Waitz, whose death in 1886 occasioned a debate on the relative merits of the example that Waitz had embodied, this article argues that historians in early imperial Germany were considerably more divided over what they called “the virtues of the historian” than has been acknowledged to date. Their most important frame of reference was not a shared discipline but rather a variety of approaches corresponding to a diversity of models or examples (“scholarly personae,” in modern academic parlance), the defining features of which were often starkly contrasted. Although common ground beneath these disagreements was not entirely absent, the habit of late nineteenth-century German historians to position themselves between Waitz and Heinrich von Sybel, Ranke and Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, or other pairs of proper names turned into models of virtue, suggests that these historians experienced their professional environment as characterized primarily by disagreement over the marks of a good historian.

Making a Space for Antisemitism: The Catholic Hierarchy and the Jews in the Early Twentieth Century

2003 ◽  
pp. 415-430
Author(s):  
Brian Porter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

This chapter argues that as recently as the 1880s, Catholicism, as it existed in Poland at the time, was still somewhat resistant to expressions of antisemitism. Catholicism, in other words, was configured in such a way in the late nineteenth century as to make it hard for antisemites to express their views without moving to the very edges of the Catholic framework. Catholicism and antisemitism did overlap at the time, but the common ground was much more confined than it would later become. If one moves forward fifty years, to the 1930s, one sees a different picture: the discursive boundaries of Catholicism in Poland had shifted to such a degree that antisemitism became not only possible, but also difficult to avoid. The upshot of this argument is that Catholicism in Poland is not antisemitic in any sort of essential way, and that religion did not directly generate the forms of hatred that would become so deadly and virulent in the early twentieth century. None the less, Catholicism did become amenable to antisemitism in Poland, so much so that the Church in Poland between the wars was one of the country's leading sources of prejudice and animosity.

‘Business Imperialism’ and Argentina, 1875–1900: A Theoretical Note

1980 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 437-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Jones
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Economic Advantage ◽  
The State ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
South American ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
British State

The facts are by now sufficiently clear for it to be common ground in any discussion of late nineteenth-century imperialism that the British State was disinclined to interfere on behalf of British capitalists with Latin American interests when these were threatened by local firms or States. Equally it is clear that British capitalists did not invest in Argentina in the belief that, by so doing, they were actively assisting the foreign policy of the British State. The State provided no grounds for this belief and no inducement to invest, and had it done so it is unlikely that the capitalists concerned – a pretty liberal bunch by and large – would have responded to any greater extent than they felt was consistent with their economic advantage. Again, there were not, in Britain, territorially ambitious militarists and aristocrats with their sights set on the South American republics. This element was quite adequately catered for in the Empire. In short, the models of imperialism favoured by Hobson, Schumpeter, and other conspiracy theorists, however appropriate they may be in particular cases, cannot be generalized and have very little relevance to Argentina.

Politics, Social Movements, and the Periodization of U.S. History

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Edwards
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Considerable Doubt

It may be perilous for a member of the Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to propose, in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, that we cease using the term “Gilded Age” as a label for the late nineteenth century. Since I admire Mark Twain, who famously coined the term in a novel that he cowrote with Charles Dudley Warner, such a suggestion feels disloyal if not downright un-American. But in struggling recently to write a synthesis of the United States between 1865 and 1905 (cutoff dates that I chose with considerable doubt), it became apparent to me that “Gilded Age” is not a very useful or accurate term. Intended as an indictment of the elite, it captures none of the era's grassroots ferment and little of its social and intellectual complexity. A review of recent literature suggests that periodizing schemes are now in flux, and a reconsideration may be in order.

Locating Therapeutic Vaccines in Nineteenth-Century History

2008 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Gradmann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Therapeutic Vaccines ◽  
Facilitated Communication ◽  
Imperial Germany ◽  
Industrial Culture ◽  
Public Health Officials ◽  
Cultural Origins

ArgumentThis essay places some therapeutic vaccines, including particularly the diphtheria antitoxin, into their larger historical context of the late nineteenth century. As industrially produced drugs, these vaccines ought to be seen in connection with the structural changes in medicine and pharmacology at the time. Given the spread of industrial culture and technology into the field of medicine and pharmacology, therapeutic vaccines can be understood as boundary objects that required and facilitated communication between industrialists, medical researchers, public health officials, and clinicians. It was in particular in relation to evaluation and testing for efficacy in animal models that these medicines became a model for twentieth-century medicine. In addition, these medicines came into being as a parallel invention in two very distinct local cultures of research: the Institut Pasteur in Paris and the Institut für Infektionskrankheiten in Berlin. While their local cultural origins were plainly visible, the medicines played an important role in the alignment of the methods and objects that took place in bacteriology research in France and Germany in the 1890s. This article assesses the two locally specific regimes for control in France and in Imperial Germany. In France the Institut Pasteur, building on earlier successful vaccines, enjoyed freedom from scrutinizing control. The tight and elaborate system of control that evolved in Imperial Germany is portrayed as being reliant on experiences that were drawn from the dramatic events that surrounded the launching of a first example of so-called “bacteriological medicine,” tuberculin, in 1890.

Friendship on the Margins: Jewish Social Relations in Imperial Germany

2001 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 471-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
German Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fully Integrated ◽  
Imperial Germany ◽  
Relative Success ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Integrated Or

Historians who look at the stark contrast between the spectacular successes of Jews in late nineteenth-century Germany and their horrific end in the Holocaust only a few decades later continue to argue about the relative success or failure of Jewish integration into German society. Were Germany's 600, 000 Jews — only 1 percent of the population — fully integrated or not? Did they have non-Jewish friends or not? Were they accepted or were they strangers in their own land?

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