Bulletin of the German Historical Institute
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Spring 2018 Bulletin of the German Historical Institute German Historical Institute Washington Fellows and Staff For further information, please consult our web site: www.ghi-dc.org Prof. Dr. Simone Lässig, Director History of knowledge; German social and cultural history; Jewish history; history of religion and religiosity; historical education; educational media and digital humanities PD Dr. Axel Jansen, Deputy Director History of the United States; history of science Anne Kadolph, Administrative Director Dr. Elisabeth Engel, Research Fellow North American history; race and empire; modern colonialism; Atlantic and transnational history; postcolonial studies; history of capitalism Dr. Matthew Hiebert, Research Fellow Digital history and digital humanities; transnational intellectual history and literary movements; Canadian social and cultural history; cosmopolitanisms and community; new media, scholarly publishing, and knowledge creation Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Dr. Jan C. Jansen, Research Fellow Washington DC Modern European, North African, and Atlantic history; colonialism and decolonization; memory studies; migration studies; global history of freemasonry Editor: Richard F. Wetzell Dr. Kerstin von der Krone, Research Fellow Jewish history and culture; modern European history; history of media and communication; Assistant Editor: Insa Kummer intellectual history; history of knowledge The Bulletin appears twice a year and is available free of charge. Dr. Atiba Pertilla, Research Fellow and Digital Editor Digital history, fi nancial history, U.S. history, 1865–1945, history of migration, Current and back issues are available online at: history of masculinity and gender, urban history www.ghi-dc.org/bulletin Dr. Claudia Roesch, Research Fellow History of the family; history of migration; gender and sexuality; transatlantic exchanges; To sign up for a subscription or to report an address change history of knowledge please send an email to [email protected]. Dr. Anne Clara Schenderlein, Research Fellow For editorial comments or inquiries, please contact German Jewish history; migration and transnationalism; everyday life and consumption; the editor at [email protected] or at the address below. memory and emotion Dr. Sören Urbansky, Research Fellow For further information about the GHI, please visit our Global and transnational history; microhistory; Russia, the Soviet Union and China web site www.ghi-dc.org. (18th to 20th centuries); Chinese diaspora in the Pacifi c; borders and infrastructures Dr. Andrea Westermann, Research Fellow and Head of GHI West – Pacifi c Regional Offi ce For general inquiries, please send an email to [email protected]. History of the earth sciences, environmental history, history of technology, material German Historical Institute culture studies, history of knowledge 1607 New Hampshire Ave NW Dr. Richard F. Wetzell, Research Fellow and Editor of the GHI Bulletin Washington DC 20009-2562 Modern European history; modern German history; intellectual and cultural history; USA legal history; history of science and medicine; history of sexuality Dr. Thomas L. Hughes, Senior Visiting Research Fellow Phone: (202) 387-3355 Dr. Robert Gerald Livingston, Senior Visiting Research Fellow Fax: (202) 483-3430 Jana Adkins, Assistant to the Director © German Historical Institute 2018 Dr. Sarah Beringer, Head of Section, Research Strategy & Communications All rights reserved Anna Maria Boß, Head Librarian Anita Brown, Library Associate ISSN 1048-9134 Daniel Burckhardt, Technical Developer Sally Dill, Administrative and Research Assistant Susanne Fabricius, Foreign Language Assistant Heike Friedman, Program Coordinator, GHI West Christiane Geidt, Receptionist Bryan Hart, Program Offi cer (Fellowships) and Webmaster Dr. Katharina Hering, Digital Project Librarian/Metadata editor Insa Kummer, Project Editor Alexa Lässig, Social Media Coordinator David B. Lazar, Senior Editor Elisabeth Mait, German Language Research Associate Dr. Kelly McCullough, Project Manager Stefan Sachser, Administrative Associate Melanie Smaney, Administrative Associate Dr. Mark Stoneman, Editor Dr. Patricia Casey Sutcliffe, Editor Atanas Vasilev, IT/Systems Manager Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 62 | Spring 2018 3 Preface FEATURES 9 Calculation and the Division of Labor, 1750-1950 Lorraine Daston 31 The Overburdened Peace: Competing Visions of World Order in 1918/19 Jörn Leonhard 51 The German Moment in 1918 Jennifer L. Jenkins 69 The Re-Germanization Procedure: A Domestic Model for Nazi Empire-Building Bradley J. Nichols 93 Legitimizing New Knowledge: American Debates about Adult and Embryonic Stem Cells, 1998-2004 Axel Jansen CONFERENCE REPORTS 113 Learning at the Margins: The Creation and Dissemination of Knowledge among African Americans and Jews since the 1880s Lisa Gerlach 119 Inheritance Practices: Family, Property and Wealth Transfers in the Twentieth Century Jürgen Dinkel 123 Empires of Knowledge: Expertise and Imperial Power across the Long Twentieth Century Amanda Domingues 131 Kinship, Knowledge, and Migration Lisa Gerlach 137 Creating Historical Knowledge Socially: New Approaches, Opportunities and Epistemological Implications of Undertaking Research with Citizen Scholars Matthew Hiebert 145 Bucerius Young Scholars Forum Histories of Migration: Transatlantic and Global Perspectives Atiba Pertilla 153 Knowledge in Flight: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Scholar Rescue in North America Anne Schenderlein and Judith Beneker 159 GHI NEWS Obituary: Jeanne Mallett (1944-2017) GHI Washington Celebrated Thirtieth Anniversary GHI awarded two-year grant by the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius for German History in Documents and Images Innovation through Migration: New Senior Fellowships and Practitioners in Residence Program at GHI West, UC Berkeley 2017 Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize New Staff Publications Staff Changes GHI Fellowships and Internships GHI Fellowship Recipients GHI Research Seminar and Colloquium, Fall 2017 GHI Spring Lecture Series 2018 GHI Calendar of Events 2018/19 GHI Library 2 BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 62 | SPRING 2018 PREFACE This issue of the Bulletin refl ects two main themes: the history of knowledge, which is one of the Institute’s current areas of research concentration, and the centenary of the end of the First World War in 1918. The issue opens with an article by distinguished historian of science Lorraine Daston (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin) on the history of “Calculation and the Division of Labor” from 1750 to 1950, which is based on the presentation she delivered as GHI’s 31st Annual Lecture last November. Daston begins with the observation that while there is now a rich historical literature on the history of reading and writing, we still know very little about the history of calculation. Daston’s penetrating analysis of how the introduction of calculating machines changed the organization of labor in the “Big Calculation” projects of astronomy, railways or government statistics reveals that the capacity of machines to cal- culate did not lead contemporaries to the conclusion that machines were intelligent (as the current fascination with Artifi cial Intelligence might suggest) but that most calculation was mechanical and mind- less. The eff ect of making calculation mechanical was “to disqualify it as an intelligent activity,” which helps to explain why the history of calculation has attracted much less scholarly attention than that of reading and writing. Our second article is the keynote lecture delivered by Jörn Leonhard (University of Freiburg) at this year’s Annual Conference of the GHI’s parent foundation, the Max Weber Foundation, which was organized by the GHI Washington on the topic “Settlement and Unsettlement: The Ends of World War I and their Legacies.” In his lecture, “The Overburdened Peace: Competing Visions of World Order in 1918/19,” Leonhard, the author of the acclaimed Pandora’s Box: A History of the First World War, off ers a comprehensive analysis of the post- war peace settlement. Alive to the contradictory mixture of ruptures and continuities that characterized the postwar situation, he argues that the war’s long years of violence and sacrifi ce provoked enor- mous expectations that overtaxed the peace from the outset. Not only did the practical implementation of the concept of national self-determination prove contentious as it came up against the realities of multiethnic populations and competing identities, but the triumph of the nation state became increasingly dissociated from democracy. PREFACE 3 Jennifer Jenkins’s (University of Toronto) article on the “German moment” in 1918 shift s the focus from the postwar peace settlement back to the fi rst eight months of the year 1918. Originating in a confer- ence panel organized by the GHI’s “German History Intersections” Project at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, Jenkins’s article recovers the “radically diff erent picture of Germany’s future” that characterized the months following the conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk treaty in March 1918. While German wartime plans for Mitteleuropa are well-known, Jenkins examines German plans for the creation of a German economic sphere much further East, across the territories of the former Russian Empire, in what the planners called the “New Orient.” Focusing on the Caucasus and Iran, she investigates the complex interaction of German diplo- mats, the German military, and Georgian and Persian local elites in