Virtues as a Lens: Exploring Science, Scholarship, and Politics under Soviet Domination
Reflects on how to use virtues as a lens in historical research, i.e., to ask what virtues underpin scholarly and political discourses and practices.
Tagged: post–World War II
Human Genetics with(out) Eugenic Knowledge? Towards a History of Knowledge about Human Heredity in West Germany
Since 1945, no German book on eugenics has been published. However, during two decades of reconstruction of the science of human genetics, which is fundamental to eugenics, the problems of eugenics repeatedly came to...
Freedom through Knowledge: Liberalism, Censorship, and Public Health in Early Planned Parenthood Campaigns
“Freedom through knowledge” was one of the slogans of Planned Parenthood’s first national campaign in 1942.1 Publishing pamphlets, posters, and testimonials under the headline “Planned Parenthood in Wartime,” the organization related contraception to the...
Provenance Research and Circulation: Examples from the Maximilian von Goldschmidt-Rothschild Collection
This is the final of three pieces on provenance research that we are publishing in conjunction with the 6th German/American Provenance Exchange Program (PREP) in Washington, DC. As art objects circulate over time, they...
The Politics of Measurement: Knowledge about Economic Inequality in the United Kingdom and Beyond since 1945
If you had a conversation about the growing gap between rich and poor almost anywhere in today’s world, you would very likely refer to “the top one percent,” a phrase that evokes the skyrocketing...
Knowledge about Democratic Silence: Political Science and the Rise of Electoral Abstention in Postwar Switzerland (1945–1989)
In recent decades, a diagnosis of democratic crisis or even of a post-democratic condition has emerged in public debate in many Western states. The rise of electoral abstention, particularly since the 1970s and 1980s,...
Knowing Otherwise: The Transatlantic Travels of Creative Thinking Expertise in the 1950s
Brainstorming as a way to organize ideation was first practiced in the United States in 1938 in the advertising firm Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO). One partner, Alex Osborn, later described it as...
Report: Kinship, Knowledge, and Migration
Panel Series at the 41st Annual Conference of the German Studies Association in Atlanta, GA, October 5–8, 2017
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
Political Interpretations of Knowledge in Colonial Contexts
In the 1970s and 1980s, the concept of the “knowledge society” (Wissensgesellschaft ) rapidly gained in popularity among social scientists and politicians in Western countries.[1] The concept referred to a socioeconomic system that was no longer organized around the manufacture of material—especially industrial—goods but instead around the production of knowledge, expertise, and highly specialized skills. Continue reading
The Granddaughter’s Dissertation: Some Thoughts on Knowledge about Migration in 1960s Switzerland
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...
