Research, Resources, Perspectives
In spite of all, in spite of all—the time will come when man will reach out his hand to his brother, all over the world. —Magnus Hirschfeld Magnus Hirschfield (1868–1935) was a world-renowned pioneer...
But within a week I’d already found work. —Herr Winter Citizens of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) who moved to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the 1980s later incorporated their migration experience...
We are members of knowledge societies, but we live in “an age of ignorance.” We are swimming in “oceans of ignorance” that have been consciously, unconsciously, and structurally produced “by neglect, forgetfulness, myopia, extinction,...
What kind of knowledge are we addressing when we talk about folk culture? What can we extract from work songs, ballads, lullabies, and reels? What do stories of various kinds, relayed by word of...
In October 2017, Simone Lässig and Swen Steinberg convened a panel series at the German Studies Association’s annual conference that focused on the roles of family and kinship, including children, in knowledge and migration processes.… Continue reading
This post is part confession and part revelation. When Simone Lässig approached me about collaborating on migration and the history of knowledge, I immediately agreed.1 I began writing about German scientists and the production...
In the first week of October 1932, an International Conference on Migration Statistics was held in Geneva. Over the course of five days, some thirty statisticians from twenty-six countries discussed how to produce more...
Knowledge and Migration, a special issue of Geschichte und Gesellschaft edited by Simone Lässig and Swen Steinberg, is appearing very soon (vol. 43, no. 3, 2017). Here is an overview of the predominantly English contents… Continue reading
While studying the scholarly literature on immigration in post–World War II Switzerland, the personal dedication in a 1964 dissertation about the “assimilation of foreign workers” caught my attention: “In memory of my paternal grandmother...
A good decision is based on knowledge… –Plato
I never thought Plato and I shared a common scholarly interest. My research on the millions of eastern Europeans who emigrated to the United States (ancestors of the subjects of Bruce Springsteen songs) at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seemed far removed from what I had once thought were the lofty realms of the the history of knowledge… Continue reading
