Von Marietheres Pirngruber

Editorische Notiz: Professorin Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson ist seit 2016 Lehrstuhlinhaberin für die Geschichte des Europäisch-Transatlantischen Kulturraums an der Unveristät Augsburg. Zuvor war sie fünf Jahre lang als stellvertretende Direktorin des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Washington, D.C. tätig. Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte liegen auf transatlantischen Beziehungen, afroamerikanischer Geschichte, Frauengeschichte und Religionsgeschichte. Als

Als Teil ihrer Blogserie zur Geschichte der Frauenbewegung in transatlantischer Perspektive hat sich Marietheres Pirngruber mit Professor Waldschmidt-Nelson im April 2021 unterhalten.

Sie haben während Ihrer Zeit am GHI einen Sammelband zum Thema transatlantische Verflechtungen der Frauenrechtsbewegung herausgegeben.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1985

Editorial note: Allison Ruman received her Bachelor of Arts in German, Political Science, and Classics & Ancient Mediterranean Studies from Penn State University in 2020 and will be studying European History, Politics, and Society (Master of Arts) at Columbia University this fall. Her primary focus is on interwar Germany, and she is especially interested in studying religious divisions and their role in the rise of far-right extremism. She is currently completing her remote internship at the GHI.

The biggest project of my undergraduate career was, without a doubt, my honors thesis, “Temperate Brutality”: The AfD and Right-Wing Extremism in Postwar Germany, a subject that fundamentally requires knowledge of the Nazi regime and the conditions leading to it.  One crucial element of my research was the use of primary sources, the invaluable “raw data” that remain from ages past and provide a firsthand account, which form the basis of our entire understanding of history.  This was especially important for my first chapter, in which I compared language and rhetoric patterns between the National Socialists and the Alternative for Germany (AfD going forward), a nationalist and far-right populist party established in 2013.  It is one thing to claim that a right-wing populist party resembles the National Socialists, it is quite another to prove it.  Since it is not 1928 and the AfD is not concerned with the Treaty of Versailles or communists in the Soviet Union, any similarities would be on a much broader, more nuanced level rather than glaringly obvious.

Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1948

By Marietheres Pirngruber

In my second blog post about the US Suffrage movement, I ‘m taking a closer look at one of the sources: The Scrapbooks of Elizabeth Smith Miller and Anne Fitzhugh Miller. After sharing short biographies of both women, I will present and analyze the sources.

Elizabeth Smith Miller and her daughter, Anne Fitzhugh Miller, were both active advocates and financial supporters of the women’s rights movement. Elizabeth Smith Miller was the only daughter of famous abolitionist landowner and Congressman Gerrith Smith and lived her life in large houses known for as centers of hospitality and philosophical discussion. Her childhood home in Peterboro, New York, was widely known as a refuge for reformers and nineteenth-century thinkers. Elizabeth Smith Miller continued this tradition at her estate, Lochland in Geneva, New York, which became known as a place suffragist supporters and social reformers frequently visited. Elizabeth’s only daughter, Anne Fitzhugh Miller, grew up in this environment and lived at Lochland for her entire adult life, helping her mother to uphold its atmosphere of hospitality. They became particularly active as a mother and daughter team after the death of Anne’s father in 1896 that persuaded the New York State Woman’s Suffrage Association to hold its annual convention in Geneva, among other initiatives.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1935

Editorial note: Marietheres Pirngruber is studying Global History (M.A.) at the University of Heidelberg. Her primary focus is on women’s and gender history, and she is especially interested in studying the transatlantic suffrage networks of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. She is currently completing her remote internship at the GHI. On the occasion of women’s history month, she  shares some of her interesting research on US suffrage history on href.

Finding primary sources is essential for any historian, yet during the ongoing pandemic it is also the biggest struggle. Online collections have provided much needed access to primary sources. Therefore, I’d like to highlight a collection from the Library of Congress (LOC), the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Records, which is partially accessible online.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1928

By Alexa Lässig

Recently we sat down with Sebastian Bondzio, the 2021 Gerda Henkel Stiftung Digital History Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Dr. Bondzio is a historian affiliated with the Chair for Modern History and Historical Migration Research at Osnabrück University. His research fields include digital history with a focus on “historical big data” and digital methodologies; he also has interests in the genealogy of cultures, migration history, and the history of knowledge.

Dr. Bondzio began his academic career in 2006 in Osnabrück where he studied philosophy and history. In his master’s thesis and then his Ph.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1893

We would like to extend a warm welcome to our new Digital History Fellow Jana Keck. Her fields of research include German and American Literature and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, Periodical Studies, and Digital Humanities. She began her academic career at the University of Stuttgart, where she studied English and Linguistics. In 2017 she received her Master’s from the University of Stuttgart with her thesis “Gottfried Duden’s Bericht über eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten Nordamerikas (1829) and Its Emigration Stimulus.” In the same year she joined the DFG-funded research project “Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840-1914” as a Doctoral Researcher. She is also a member of the CRETA/Center for Reflected Text Analytics, funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF).

Recently we sat down with Jana to discuss her academic career, her work, the field of digital history and its impact on the field of humanities, as well as her current goals and duties at the GHI Washington.

Could you give us some insight into the Oceanic Exchanges Project?

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1881

I have vivid memories of visiting the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas as a child in 2007. Fredericksburg, hometown of German-American and Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, hosts this expansive museum complex in honor of Nimitz’s role as Commander in Chief, United States Pacific Fleet in the Second World War. This museum complex includes the original Nimitz Hotel, with an exhibit about Nimitz’s life, and the George H.W. Bush Gallery, with a larger gallery covering the entirety of the Pacific Theatre of World War II. The old gallery as I remember it, featured three walk-through dioramas, each immersing oneself in a specific scene from the war: the deck of a Japanese submarine just before the attack on Pearl Harbor about to launch an authentic mini-submarine, the deck of the USS Hornet as it prepared to launch Lt. Col. James Doolittle’s B-25 bombers for the raid on Tokyo, and Henderson Field on Guadalcanal at night. Of these the Henderson Field display was the most memorable. The whole setting was dark to simulate night on the island, with ambient jungle sounds in the background.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1837

As summer begins in Germany most establishments have reopened in some capacity, including museums. All are still operating under restrictions, with limits on numbers of visitors and mask requirements being ubiquitous. All museums, municipal and private, are required to adhere to national and local government regulations. This series so far has covered municipal and state-funded museums, but not a privately-run museum. This article will investigate the International Maritime Museum in Hamburg, one of the largest private museums in Germany, and how it is handling COVID-19. 

The International Maritime Museum is located in a circa-1879 harbor warehouse in Hamburg’s Speicherstadt (“City of Warehouses”) near the city’s port. The museum’s collection was gathered by Hamburg journalist and maritime enthusiast Peter Tamm, who began collecting after receiving a toy boat from his mother at the age of six in 1934.¹ The museum opened in 2008, featuring a collection of around 40,000 model ships (including Tamm’s toy boat) and a plethora of shipping and naval artifacts. The museum has eight floors total, each dedicated to a specific theme of maritime history or technology.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1825

During the current COVID crisis, people around the world have felt more physically isolated than ever. Yet, digital media have offered an exciting range of experiences to explore history in a virtual environment. For example, the German National Library currently offers seven virtual exhibitions in German and English accessible from anywhere around the world. From the exhibition “5000 years of media history online,” in which you can learn about the importance of Egyptian hieroglyphs as one of the first written systems of humanity, to the exhibition “Arts in Exile,” online visitors have the opportunity to still engage with history as COVID-19 has forced cultural institutions to close their doors this spring temporarily. The German National Library (DNB) has been collecting and archiving over 30 million media items in the German language since 1913.[1] While education and culture are the responsibility of the individual German states, there exists one national library is decentralized in its structure, with two branches, one in Frankfurt am Main and one in Leipzig. This is a result of the postwar German division and reunification.

I took a closer look at two of the seven virtual exhibitions, both of which have been permanent exhibitions at the German National Library before.

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Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1816

Almost two years ago, the Library of Congress launched the crowdsourcing platform By the People, which invites volunteers to transcribe, review, and tag digitized images of manuscripts and typescripts from the collections of the Library of Congress. The project runs on the open source software Concordia, developed by the Library of Congress to support crowdsourced transcription projects.

Among the manuscripts made available for transcriptions are documents in German script. In a fascinating recent blog post, David B. Morris, the German Area Specialist, European Division, at the Library of Congress, discusses the art of Unlocking the Secrets of German Handwritten Documents.

The blog post will be particularly interesting for contributors to GHI’s German Heritage in Letters Project, which uses Scripto as the platform to crowdsource transcriptions of German letters, including letters written in Kurrentschrift.

Quelle: https://href.hypotheses.org/1813