Two Boston Brahmins in Goethe's Germany

Two Boston Brahmins in Goethe's Germany
Author: Anna Ticknor
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2009
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0739129112

This volume includes the travel logs of Anna and George Ticknor from two journeys to the German Confederation from 1815 to 1817 and from 1835 to 1836. As members of an exclusive social class, the Ticknors enjoyed the privilege of traveling and living for an extended period in the German-speaking world, which conferred much-sought-after cultural and social distinction on them in Boston. A valuable primary source for American and German historians alike, these journals offer insight into the construction of American identities, as well as outside perspectives on German society, culture, and politics in the Age of Goethe. Simultaneously and independently composed by this husband and wife, these journals are the only known case of parallel male and female travel writing, thus affording a unique opportunity to explore gender as a factor in shaping their perceptions. A biographical glossary and extensive explanatory footnotes make this text accessible to a wide audience.

The German Awakening

The German Awakening
Author: Andrew Kloes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2019-05-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190936878

Historians of modern German culture and church history refer to "the Awakening movement" (die Erweckungsbewegung) to describe a period in the history of German Protestantism between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the Revolution of 1848. "The Awakening" was the last major nationwide Protestant reform and revival movement to occur in Germany. This book analyzes numerous primary sources from the era of the Awakening and synthesizes the current state of German scholarship for an English-speaking audience. It examines the Awakening as a product of the larger social changes that were re-shaping German society during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Theologically, Awakened Protestants were traditionalists. They affirmed religious doctrines that orthodox Protestants had professed since the confessional statements of the Reformation-era. Awakened Protestants rejected the changes that Enlightenment thought had introduced into Protestant theology and preaching since the mid-eighteenth century. However, Awakened Protestants were also themselves distinctly modern. Their efforts to spread their religious beliefs were successful because of the new political freedoms and economic opportunities that the Enlightenment had introduced. These social conditions gave German Protestants new means and abilities to pursue their religious goals. Awakened Protestants were leaders in the German churches and in the universities. They used their influence to found many voluntary organizations for evangelism, in Germany and abroad. They also established many institutions to ameliorate the living conditions of those in poverty. Adapting Protestantism to modern society in these ways was the most original and innovative aspect of the Awakening movement.

Crossing the Atlantic

Crossing the Atlantic
Author: Thomas Adam
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2011-04-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1603442650

“ . . . travel as an exploration of ‘the other’ which becomes an exploration of the self . . . a confirmation of identity.”—from the Introduction, by Frank Trommler In an age when travel was more difficult but leisure was more available, those who journeyed across the Atlantic from the Old World to America or back created a wonderful literature about the divergent cultures and the fertile interactions among them. In travel diaries, journals, novels, journalistic reports, and guide books, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers recorded impressions and ruminations that not only offer opportunities for comparison and contrast but also shed light on the processes of modernization and the future that would emerge on both sides of the Atlantic. This latest offering from the important Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures series explores themes like urbanization, modernization, education, gender, Jewish identity, nationalism and internationalism, political and cultural values, and the experience of travel itself. Volume editors Thomas Adam and Nils Roemer have assembled a collection of varied studies that permit enlightened reflection on the ways in which travelers from the New and Old Worlds have observed, documented, understood, and negotiated their similarities and differences. The freshness and variety of the previously little-heard voices documented in Crossing the Atlantic will serve as an important reminder that an attentive interaction with “foreignness” has been and will continue to be one of the best paths to a more enlightened engagement with the familiar.

Approaches to the Study of Intercultural Transfer

Approaches to the Study of Intercultural Transfer
Author: Thomas Adam
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2019-10-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1785271660

"Approaches to the Study of Intercultural Transfer" presents a collection of compelling case studies in the areas of social reform, museums, philanthropy, football, nonviolent resistance and holiday rituals such as Christmas that demonstrate key mechanisms of intercultural transfers. Each chapter provides the application of the intercultural transfer studies paradigm to a specific and distinct historical phenomenon. The chapters not only illustrate the presence or even the depth and frequency of intercultural transfer, but also reveal specific aspects of the intercultural transfer of phenomena, the role of agents of intercultural transfer and the transformations of ideas transferred between cultures thereby contributing to our understanding of the mechanisms of intercultural transfers.

Germany's Second Reich

Germany's Second Reich
Author: James Retallack
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2015-07-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1442624108

Despite recent studies of imperial Germany that emphasize the empire’s modern and reformist qualities, the question remains: to what extent could democracy have flourished in Germany’s stony soil? In Germany’s Second Reich, James Retallack continues his career-long inquiry into the era of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II with a wide-ranging reassessment of the period and its connections with past traditions and future possibilities. In this volume, Retallack reveals the complex and contradictory nature of the Second Reich, presenting Imperial Germany as it was seen by outsiders and insiders as well as by historians, political scientists, and sociologists ever since.

The Karl Muck Scandal

The Karl Muck Scandal
Author: Melissa D. Burrage
Publisher:
Total Pages: 458
Release: 2019
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1580469507

The demonization, internment, and deportation of celebrated Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Dr. Karl Muck, finally told, and placed in the context of World War I anti-German sentiment in the United States. BEST CLASSICAL MUSIC BOOK RELEASE OF 2019 by Classical-music.com, the official website of BBC Music Magazine. 2019 SUMMER READS ABOUT CLASSICAL MUSIC by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 2019 BEST BOOK AWARD FINALIST in both the History and Performing Arts categories, sponsored by American Book Fest. 2019 SUBVENTION AWARD by the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. One of the cherished narratives of American history is that of the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants to its shores. Accounts of the exclusion and exploitation of Chinese immigrants in the late nineteenth century and Japanese internment during World War II tell a darker story of American immigration. Less well-known, however, is the treatment of German-Americans and Germannationals in the United States during World War I. Initially accepted and even welcomed into American society at the outbreak of war, this group would face rampant intolerance and anti-German hysteria. Melissa D. Burrage's book illustrates this dramatic shift in attitude in her engrossing narrative of Dr. Karl Muck, the celebrated German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who was targeted and ultimately disgraced by a New York Philharmonic board member and by capitalists from that city who used his private sexual life as a basis for having him arrested, interned, and deported from the United States. While the campaign against Muck made national headlines, and is the main focus of this book, Burrage also illuminates broader national topics such as: Total War; State power; vigilante justice; internment and deportation; irresponsible journalism; sexual surveillance; attitudes toward immigration; anti-Semitism; and the development of America's musical institutions. The mistreatment of Karl Muck in the United States provides a narrative thread that connects these various wartime and postwar themes. MELISSAD. BURRAGE, a former writing consultant at Harvard University Extension School, holds a Master's Degree in History from Harvard University and a PhD in American Studies from University of East Anglia. Support for thispublication was provided by the Howard Hanson Institute for American Music at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.

Philanthropy, Civil Society, and the State in German History, 1815-1989

Philanthropy, Civil Society, and the State in German History, 1815-1989
Author: Thomas Adam
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 1571139214

Introduction -- The competition between nobility and bourgeoisie for dominance over arts and culture -- The role of donors in shaping the intellectual elite -- Private funding for national research projects and institutes -- Philanthropy and the shaping of the working-class family -- Civil society in an authoritarian state: German philanthropy on the eve of the First World War -- The slow decline of philanthropy and civil society -- Conclusion

Germany in the World: A Global History, 1500-2000

Germany in the World: A Global History, 1500-2000
Author: David Blackbourn
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
Total Pages: 558
Release: 2023-06-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1631491849

Brilliantly conceived and majestically written, this monumental work of European history recasts the five-hundred-year history of Germany. With Germany in the World, award-winning historian David Blackbourn radically revises conventional narratives of German history, demonstrating the existence of a distinctly German presence in the world centuries before its unification—and revealing a national identity far more complicated than previously imagined. Blackbourn traces Germany’s evolution from the loosely bound Holy Roman Empire of 1500 to a sprawling colonial power to a twenty-first-century beacon of democracy. Viewed through a global lens, familiar landmarks of German history—the Reformation, the Revolution of 1848, the Nazi regime—are transformed, while others are unearthed and explored, as Blackbourn reveals Germany’s leading role in creating modern universities and its sinister involvement in slave-trade economies. A global history for a global age, Germany in the World is a bold and original account that upends the idea that a nation’s history should be written as though it took place entirely within that nation’s borders.

Literature and the Cult of Personality

Literature and the Cult of Personality
Author: Gregory Maertz
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2017-04-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3838269810

The construction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an Anglo-American sage and literary icon was the product of a cult of personality that lay at the center of nineteenth-century cultural politics. A reconstruction of the culture wars fought over Goethe’s authority, a previously hidden chapter in the intellectual history of the period ranging from the late eighteenth century to the threshold of Modernism, is the focus of Literature and the Cult of Personality. Marginal as well as canonical writers and critics figured prominently in this process, and Literature and the Cult of Personality offers insight into the mediation activities of Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry Crabb Robinson, the canonical Romantic poets, Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and others. For women writers and Jacobins, Scots, and Americans, translating Goethe served as an empowering cultural platform that challenges the myth of the self-sufficiency of British literature. Reviewing and translating German authors provided a means of gaining literary enfranchisement and offered a paradigm of literary development according to which 're-writers' become original writers through an apprenticeship of translation and reviewing. In the diverse and fascinating body of critical writing examined in this book, textual exegesis plays an unexpectedly minor role; in its place, a full-blown cult of personality emerges along with a blueprint for the ideology of hero-worship that is more fully mapped out in the cultural and political life of twentieth-century Europe.

Migrations in the German Lands, 1500-2000

Migrations in the German Lands, 1500-2000
Author: Jason Coy
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2016-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1785331450

Migration to, from, and within German-speaking lands has been a dynamic force in Central European history for centuries. Exemplifying some of the most exciting recent research on historical mobility, the essays collected here reconstruct the experiences of vagrants, laborers, religious exiles, refugees, and other migrants during the last five hundred years of German history. With diverse contributions ranging from early modern martyrdom to post–Cold War commemoration efforts, this volume identifies revealing commonalities shared by different eras while also placing the German case within the broader contexts of European and global migration.