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This article traces the history of paper patterns from the formation of the German Empire to the early days of the Federal Republic of Germany. These patterns are often overlooked, yet provide glimpses into the transformative power of everyday fashion. I show that sewing with paper patterns both consolidated and challenged ideas of gender and the female body. The article finally argues that by delegating the making of women's clothes to the private sector, however, the responsibility for the adaption of social bodily norms was also handed over to individual women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ambivalent Matter: Rags as Waste and Resource in the Eighteenth Century This article examines the dual role of rags as waste and a potential resource during the early modern period. Rags were indispensable to the early modern paper production, yet they also bore the potential to be perceived as mere refuse, which underscores the complexities involved in the commodification of waste. While much of modern research has predominantly emphasized the value of rags, the waste aspect of the paper rag trade has often been underestimated. This study seeks to offer a broader understanding, shedding light on the multifaceted nature of rags and the related economic implications. To address the ambivalent nature of rags, it is crucial to adopt a multi-perspective approach, looking beyond the paper industry alone. This means taking into account household practices regarding textile remnants and surrounding contemporary discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud's Lost Neighbours: Ways of Presenting Historical Documents in Exhibition Catalogues Historical documents such as forms and other writings are usually subordinated to linguistic narratives and used in exhibition catalogues to illustrate the necessary contextualization. Using the example of the exhibition catalog Freud's Lost Neighbours, designed by Walter Pamminger, this paper examines a mode of presentation that avoids illustration. Instead, forms from the National Socialist era make it possible to understand the bureaucratic procedures for confiscating the property of Viennese Jews. According to my hypothesis, the catalogue achieves this by placing the documents on an equal footing with the text, shifting the focus to the media implications. Drawing on Sybille Krämer's reflections on medial performativity, this article examines questions of the construction of truth through the media and the visual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropotechnologies of Learning: Optimization between Experiment and Exercise in Edward Lee Thorndike's Work Over the course of the twentieth century, "human beings" have optimized themselves through external (prosthetic, pharmaceutical, biotechnical) interventions to the point of being partially transformed. "Learning", on the other hand, is often not recognized as self-optimization. At first glance, learning seems to have little to do with human experiments or the technical utopias of transhumanist actors, including their optimized cyborgs. But even "learning", as this paper will show using Edward L. Thorndike's concept of "exercise" as an example, has been about the human self-optimization of its future development (as an individual or as a society) in Western cultural history. Specifically, I will look at the practices of experimentation and how these brought an actual economic concept of "success" into the focus of analyses of learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Habitus of Self-improvement. Resolution and Reflection in the Diaries of Lausanne's Philippe Secretan (1756-1826) This paper examines the hitherto little-known diaries of Philippe Secretan (1756-1826) from Lausanne. Over a period of almost half a century (1778-1826), the young tutor, later judge and politician recorded in 18 volumes not only his experiences during this revolutionary period but also his personal ambitions. Secretan's diary also documents his methods, which makes it a rich source for exploring the relationship between writing practices and self-improvement at the end of the Ancien Regime. Secretan used his diary as a medium to optimize himself. Accordingly, its analysis reveals various techniques and the diarist's specific habitus of self-improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-optimisation in the Early Middle Ages: A Useful Anachronism Most research conceives of self-optimization as a phenomenon specific to modern "western" societies. It is characterized by a strong focus on the individual, techniques of self-control, and purpose-oriented methods of pursuing a goal that is, by definition, unattainable. It thus seems like a serious anachronism to speak of "early medieval self-optimization". However, used as an analytical term, it allows us to investigate premodern discourses on competition, performance and perfection. This paper aims to explore its heuristic potential, starting from the key term "athlete" as found in the sources. Based on a wide range of texts, such as hagiography, guidebooks and historiographical testimonies, it gives us first insights into the means and goals of early medieval "self-optimization". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tree diagrams have dominated the visual diagrammatic representation of kinship since the late fifteenth century. Such diagrams were often part of proofs of ancestry in late medieval and early modern Europe. But especially in the Spanish Empire existed proofs of ancestry that lacked diagrams altogether. This paper explores what reasons, circumstances and processes can be argued for the fact that certain proofs got along without any diagrammatic visualization of ancestry. Furthermore, it tries to explain what makes it necessary to represent ancestry visually through diagrams. Finally, by showing alternative ways of representing descent, it aims to question the western diagram as a logical and natural model of visualizing kinship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses ancient sources about the fall of the city of Sybaris. Sybaris' downfall is commonly attributed to luxury and transgression against the divine order, and the representation of the sybaritic past has some similarities to the platonic myth of Atlantis. The paper shows that the discourses of decadence and luxury had its origins in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While women's agency in the context of early modern diplomacy have recently come into focus, little attention has been paid to the fact that they were also involved in the system of European status competition. Using examples from Vienna and Rome, the paper shows that diplomatic ceremonial was by no means a 'male affair', as it has long been perceived. Rather, the wives of the House of Habsburg were an integral part of diplomatic ceremonial, as were the wives of ambassadors of other European rulers, with their own audiences and representative tasks. Subsequently, it will be discussed how these audiences were also used for the symbolic communication of power relations. This was based on the fact that ambassadors and ambassadresses as a couple not only embodied the sending ruler but also the dynasty and thus the ruling couple. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A research project conducted in 2014 and presented on perspective and deconstruction of the imperial eye in German colonial photography from Togo concludes that images from the German colonial period carry different forms of interpretation. Their categorization shows how some images served colonial propaganda, while others refer to the missionary "Kulturaufgabe" (cultural task). Still others have social aspects, such as images of memory. Thus, colonial images circulate in different social spaces depending on how they are perceived in Togo. This paper aims to show how people in Togolese society deal with these images today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a broad concept of wealth as a tool for analysis, this paper examines the wills of the writers Anna Louisa Karsch (1722–1791) and Caroline Luise von Klencke (c. 1750–1802), the grandmother and mother of Helmina von Chézy (1783–1856). It aims at determining how material and immaterial goods were transferred between women writers around 1800, what attributions and uses were thereby produced, and how persons were placed or placed themselves in the process. By using a gender-historical approach, it explores which assets were bequeathed in wills and what could be transported in testaments through and beyond material assets. In this way, a variety of intergenerational testamentary economies and a testamentary practice of (im)material (self-)positioning will be revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the question why the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire did not fall in the seventh and eighth centuries, although it was exposed to similar threats and structural problems as the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century. To explain this phenomenon, the arguments that John Haldon put forward several years ago are taken up and supplemented by a further aspect that seems to have played a relevant role: apparently, a new definition of Roman identity (Romanness) had been developed in the East between the late fifth and the late sixth centuries. It caused the Eastern Roman population to remain loyal to the emperors during the crucial period of the seventh and eighth centuries and was able to face the challenges despite the heaviest burdens it was confronted with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the new language of "scientific colonialism" emerged and was shaped in a transnational communicative space by the members of a European colonial community. In this article, I explore key moments of this process that I call the "scientization of colonialism" leading to both the establishment of the colonial as object of scientific knowledge and administrative regulation. The paper investigates in a first section the formation of "scientization" as a cultural code through international practices and institutions highlighting in the second and third section the establishment of an educational landscape and the construction of hybrid and interdisciplinary knowledge fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colonial Germany erected numerous monuments during (but especially in the wake of) its short period of expansion into Africa, Asia, and Oceania. When the Treaty of Versailles abruptly ended this period, these monuments, among which one commemorated the plenipotentiary Clemens Baron von Ketteler (1853–1900), who had fallen by the hands of the so-called 'Boxers' during the war in China, were left behind in the former colonies, or – in this case – in a so-called 'half-colony'. After a heyday of colonial revivalism in the 1920s and 1930s, they were mostly understood as forgotten 'remains' and commonly disappeared from the Eurocentric narratives of German Colonialism. However, this perspective undermines their constant entanglements with local as well as trans-national histories. The history of China's Ketteler-monument is one of power, appropriation, and silencing, with multiple meanings and understandings. Therefore, the paper argues that the current perspectives on the former Ketteler-monument, as presented in academic research so far, should be expanded by broadening the time frame and following the history of the monument up until today, by consulting Chinese sources and by incorporating its 'after-' and 'social-life' into the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nazis heavily propagated wine consumption during the mid-1930s. Their aim was to transform it into a Volksgetränk ("people's drink"). The paper argues that the promotion of wine primarily served ideological and political purposes by linking it to the idea of the Volksgemeinschaft (people's community). Nationwide wine festivals were held which celebrated the coming together of peasants and city-dwellers. Volksgemeinschaft was performed through newly invented rituals involving the consumption of wine. The festivals are an example of how the Nazis used alcohol as a means of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The establishment of the South Seas Development Company in 1921 quickly transformed the Northern Mariana Islands, ruled by a Japanese League of Nations mandate after World War I, into the Japanese empire's next 'sugar islands' (following on from the colonization of Taiwan). In previous research, connections between the Company and various Japanese colonial authorities, including the South Seas Government and the government-sponsored Oriental Development Company, have been the focus of analyses of the development of the sugar industry under Japanese rule. However, little attention has been paid to the indigenous Chamorro people who were forced out from their homes, or to the Okinawan people who constituted the primary labour force of the sugar plantations and who resisted the Company. Instead of seeing the Company-led development of the sugar industry as an example of Japan's expanding colonial powers, this article argues that the tensions and conflicts between the Company and the Chamorro and Okinawan peoples were part of the process by which the industry developed. By providing the perspective of 'the excluded', this paper aims for a more impartial and comprehensive description of the history of the sugar industry in Japan's Northern Mariana Islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares the work of two innovative institutions for research on non-elite culture throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England, and the Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für empirische Kulturwissenschaft in Tübingen, Germany. In their objects of study, their approaches, the main protagonists' biographies and in their relationship to the New Left, among other aspects, they overlap considerably, yet they also took some divergent routes. Highlighting studies of mass media, pop phenomena and political-theoretical „problematics”, the paper contributes to an understanding of the different paths the study of (common) culture in Germany and in English-speaking countries has taken since then. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that contemporary history cannot operate as a mere continuation of sociological analysis with the means of historical research. Nor should we try to frame the recent past as the dissolution of a conceptually unified past stumbling through a phase of murky transition into the abyss of the very present problems. While it might be helpful to think about the time between 1980 and 2010 as an 'age of fracture' (Daniel T. Rodgers), we stress the importance of considering the means by which this age has found a way to reintegrate. Our paper on the age of configuration explores two fields of practice that both experienced a dramatic development in these three decades, Personal Computer and Personalized Medicine, and discusses the possibilities to generalize our framing for the very recent past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When in the mid-1960s the movement of the New Left emerged in Continental-Europe, a group of antiquarians, booksellers and -distributers as well as archivists, established an informal transnational network. This network turned out to be crucial in providing the material groundworks for the production of a certain type of knowledge--a formation of knowledge of the political left that would enable scientists or political activists to compare the current present with the interwar-past of the 1920s and 1930s. This paper follows one of these agents of knowledge: Theo Pinkus (1909-1991), a socialist Swiss antiquarian, literary agent, publisher and founder of a public library of the working-class movement in Zürich. His company's „Büchersuchdienst" vast catalogues of antiquarian books quickly established themselves as vital tools in restocking war-damaged libraries all over Europe in the 1950s and 1960s and building a potent network of specialized antifascist and working-class archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for the significance of landing stages as socio-cultural sites of knowledge practice for the cross-oceanic transport of live plants. Focusing on the French attempts to collect nutmeg native to the Maluku Islands in the second half of the 18th century, it explores the role of landing stages across the Malay Archipelago where the French collaborated with local populations and where plant material was being collected, packed, and shipped. By using a praxeological approach it explores landing stages through their interaction with socio-environmental factors that conditioned them as places of applied knowledge. Here, I insist on moving away from the Eurocentric concept of the harbour by introducing the more neutral term of,landing stages', which are determined by logics and logistics being adapted according to situational possibilities and limits of historical actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I pursue the problems and discussions raised by colonial objects such as the Benin Bronzes, which had been stolen by British troops in 1897 from the Westafrican kingdom Benin and are exhibited now in European and American museums. I argue that there are two openly discussed problems, which are due to an overwhelming "colonial aphasia" on the one hand and to severe legal and financial conflicts on the other hand, and a third not openly addressed issue related to theses objects. This third aspect is silenced, even though it neither refers to a violent colonial past, nor to financial claims. Instead it is related to a rich shared Afro-European history, full of fascinating stories about academic disciplins and the making of modernity, which knowingly are not known at least in cultural heritage institutions such as European museums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers beaver fur traded by the Dutch in the 17th century as a global object and transaction currency. The analysis of the fur's material texture helps to understand how beaver fur could be traded across continental, national, colonial and cultural borders. Beaver fur differed from other Early Modern global objects like cotton, silk, chocolate or porcelain because the skins were used as commodities, resource, dress and currency alike. Beaver furs became global objects because the animal and its habits were known globally even though beaver fur was not globally available in the same quantity and quality. Yet beaver furs were valuable to all participants in the market: native hunters, middlemen, traders, company soldiers and hatters were involved in a global trade fueled by scarcity and longing for fur in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opium was a major cash-crop in nineteenth-century India. Over a million peasants cultivated poppy for the British-Indian government, which held a monopoly over the production of the drug and could thus keep the prices paid to the cultivators at an extremely low level. The major question this paper seeks to answer is why so many peasants cultivated this laborious crop despite a clear lack of financial incentives. This problem is tackled by applying two approaches from development economics, i. e. interlinked transactions and Kaushi Basu’s triadic relations model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russian food politics protect and sponsor popular Soviet brands that are perceived as healthy and natural in contrast to chemically contaminated imported foods. This paper investigates “Soviet” ice cream in its role as a nostalgic food item. Promoted as evidence of a better, homely past, its reminiscence facilitates identity formation and the demarcation between the self and the other. Cultural attributions turn the “cold delicacy” into an emotionally invested Soviet comfort food of legendary “pure milk” quality, offered by the paternalistic state and its food industry. The pickled gherkin is the exact opposite, a symbol of self-sufficiency and independence from the erratic Soviet retail system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russian food politics protect and sponsor popular Soviet brands that are perceived as healthy and natural in contrast to chemically contaminated imported foods. This paper investigates "Soviet" ice cream in its role as a nostalgic food item. Promoted as evidence of a better, homely past, its reminiscence facilitates identity formation and the demarcation between the self and the other. Cultural attributions turn the "cold delicacy" into an emotionally invested Soviet comfort food of legendary "pure milk" quality, offered by the paternalistic state and its food industry. The pickled gherkin is the exact opposite, a symbol of self-sufficiency and independence from the erratic Soviet retail system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the Carolingian polity was one of the most aggressive and successful military agents of Early Mediaeval Europe, war does not seem to play a prominent role in recent conceptions of its political culture. Current research sees the political and the religious systems of the Carolingian world as converging, with ‚church‘ being the frame of reference. Within this discourse, the only person allowed to take military action was the king, while the lays were thought to fight only at his command and to follow an ideal of peaceful „secular sanctity“. Since nearly all of our sources are originating from this royal-ecclesiastical context, divergent discourses are difficult to be found. By analysing regulations from penitentials and synodal acts which served to suspend lays from society, this paper identifies the politically significant elements of a lay habitus. As it turns out, this habitus was predominantly martial, it therefore differs from the „secular sanctity“ defining lays. An alternative to the political discourse on ecclesia, which could be labelled as guerra-discourse, emerges and reveals the diversity of Carolingian political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the German perception of landscapes during the First World War. It approaches the issue by consulting the letters and diaries of ordinary soldiers, alongside other publications such as military newspapers and pictorials. Whereas soldiers often privately emphasized the alienness of landscapes ravaged by war, the image most dominant in the public’s consciousness was one of a heroic landscape. It was already accepted during the war that soldiers were influenced and changed by their surrounding environment. After the war, the notion of heroic landscapes was utilised by the political right and had prevailed by 1930, despite disagreement from the pacifist left. These narratives gained widespread acceptance because they were rooted in well-known wartime language and provided an affirmative way of speaking about soldiers’ experiences of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the case of the serial killer Peter Kürten (1929/1930) the police was not only tracing a murderer, but at the same time concepts and techniques to strengthen its epistemic authority. The result was that the investigators brought the social factor vocation (“Beruf”) into play. First, they declared vocation to be a distinctive feature of the unknown murderer. Second, they characterized Kürten as a “Berufsverbrecher”. The paper analyzes how criminalists and criminologists transferred “Berufswissen” of the early 20th century into the realm of deviance, e.g. the notion of a lifelong connection between a person and his vocation and the concept of Taylorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a topic that is not usually part of the history of historiography: technological developments. It starts from the obvious observation that historiography always takes place in a constantly changing and evolving environment of hardware, infrastructure, and machinery and argues that this environment significantly affects the methodological standards, research practices, and concepts of truth that guide historiography. One technological invention that obviously affected historiography very deeply was photography. Photos and images of documents had already been produced before the 19th century, mostly for purposes of paleographic training. Photography, however, opened entirely new possibilities. In the middle of the 19th century, photographic images became a key component of paleographic training in Paris, Vienna, and elsewhere. Soon, also paleographic research became dependent upon images, especially overseas where only few original documents were available for direct autopsy. Around 1900, photography also became part of historiographic research practices. Scholars started to combine personal travel to archives with requests for reproductions. Micro-filming made this even more popular, and from the 1930s onward commercial enterprises satisfied the need for an ever growing amount of archival images. Digital imaging, finally, opened an entirely new world of making and distributing pictures of documents. While initially hailed enthusiastically as enabling a much more rapid progress of higher-quality scholarship, recent authors have added also more cautious and skeptical voices to the evaluation of these technological developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]