Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Washington DC
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Fall 2020 Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Washington DC Editor: Richard F. Wetzell Assistant Editor: Insa Kummer The Bulletin appears twice a year and is available free of charge. Current and back issues are available online at: www.ghi-dc.org/bulletin To sign up for a subscription or to report an address change please send an email to [email protected]. For editorial comments or inquiries, please contact the editor at [email protected] or at the address below. For further information about the GHI, please visit our web site www.ghi-dc.org. For general inquiries, please send an email to [email protected]. German Historical Institute 1607 New Hampshire Ave NW Washington DC 20009-2562 USA Phone: (202) 387-3355 Fax: (202) 483-3430 © German Historical Institute 2020 All rights reserved ISSN 1048-9134 Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 67 | Fall 2020 3 Preface FORUM: NEW RESEARCH IN TRANSATLANTIC HISTORY Edited by Axel Jansen and Claudia Roesch 7 Introduction: New Trends in Transatlantic History Axel Jansen and Claudia Roesch 17 “The Indians must yield”: Antebellum Free Land, the Homestead Act, and the Displacement of Native Peoples Julius Wilm 41 Trading in the Shadow of Neutrality: German-Speaking Europe’s Commerce with Union and Confederacy during the American Civil War Patrick Gaul 71 A Tumultuous Relationship: Nicholas Murray Butler and Germany in the Era of the Two World Wars Elisabeth Piller 101 “Taken on faith”: Expertise in Aerial Warfare and the Democratic “West” in the Twentieth Century Sophia Dafi nger CONFERENCE REPORTS 125 Recreating Separate Spheres Across Not-So-Separate Worlds: Gender and Reeducation in Japan, Germany, and the USA after World War II Claudia Roesch 133 GHI NEWS New GHI Publications Staff Changes GHI Fellowships and Internships GHI Fellowship Recipients for 2021 GHI Research Seminar and Colloquium, Spring & Summer 2020 Digital Cultural Heritage DC Meetup #DCHDC GHI Calendar of Events 2020/21 GHI Library 2 BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 67 | FALL 2020 PREFACE As readers of the Bulletin know, the German Historical Institute Washington is not an institute for the study of German history but a German institute for the study of history. From its foundation, the Institute has sought to support not only the study of German history in North America but also the study of North American and transatlantic history in Germany — by connecting German academics studying North American and transatlantic history with the rich archival and academic resources of the United States and Canada as well as their colleagues on this continent. Beyond that, the Institute has, for some time now, also supported and conducted research in Atlantic and global history, some of which will be featured in our next issue. This issue of the Bulletin presents recent research in American and trans- atlantic history by junior historians who have recently published their fi rst research monographs in the GHI’s peer-reviewed “Transatlantic Historical Studies” (THS) book series; in one case, the book is forth- coming next spring. This special thematic Forum on “New Research in Transatlantic History” is edited and introduced by Axel Jansen, the GHI Deputy Director, and Claudia Roesch, GHI Research Fellow. In the Forum’s fi rst article, Julius Wilm, whose book Settlers as Conquerors: Free Land Policy in Antebellum America (THS, 2018) recently won the University of Cologne’s 2020 Off ermann-Hergarten Prize, and who held the GHI’s Gerda Henkel Postdoctoral Fellowship during the 2019-2020 academic year, deploys digital history meth- ods to examine the 1862 Homestead Act in order to determine the extent to which homesteading was connected to the displacement of North America’s Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands. In the second article, Patrick Gaul, whose book on the impact of the American Civil War in German-speaking Europe will be published in the THS series next spring, draws on the material turn and the meth- ods of transnational economic history to reveal that, despite political rhetoric voicing support for the cause of the Union or, at least, strict neutrality, in fact, the German states continued to conduct trade with and ship arms to the Confederate states during the U.S. Civil War. The Forum’s third contribution presents the research of Elisabeth Piller, whose book Selling Weimar: German Public Diplomacy and the United States, 1918–1932 was awarded the 2019 Franz Steiner Prize for Transatlantic History and has just been published in the THS series PREFACE 3 (and is available in open access). Piller’s article focuses on the role of Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University from 1902 to 1945, in U.S. cultural diplomacy with Germany in order to reveal not only the importance that this leading academic had for cultural rela- tions between the two countries, but also the tortuous path of Butler’s relations with Germany in an era marked by the First World War, a diffi cult period of recovery, and the rise of Nazism. In the Forum’s fi nal article, Sophia Dafi nger presents research drawn from her book Die Lehren des Luft kriegs: Sozialwissenschaft liche Expertise in den USA vom Zweiten Weltkrieg bis Vietnam, also recently published in the THS series (and available in open access), which is based on her disserta- tion, for which she was awarded the Mieczysław Pemper Research Prize. Dafi nger uses the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey conducted aft er the Second World War as a point of departure for examining the emergence of American experts and expertise in aerial warfare, which, she argues, was closely connected to the increasing infl uence and prestige of quantitative empirical research in the social sciences. Due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the GHI’s conference program was suddenly and drastically curtailed, so that this issue can only report on one conference from the spring of 2020, namely the conference “Recreating Separate Spheres Across Not-So-Separate Worlds: Gender and Reeducation in Japan, Germany, and the USA aft er World War II,” reported on by Claudia Roesch. While the pandemic continues to make in-person academic meetings impossible, the GHI has begun to make the switch to virtual formats, both for seminars, such as this fall’s Young Scholars Forum (on which we will report in the next issue) and a number of panel discussions — including panels on “Rethinking Memory and Knowledge during Times of Crisis,” on “Rethinking Health and Power During Times of Crisis” as well as a conversation with the author Ingo Schulze on his recent book Die rechtschaff enen Mörder — video recordings of which you can access on our website. Please turn to our news section for recent GHI news. For up-to-date information on upcoming (virtual) events, publications, fellowships, and calls for papers, please consult the GHI website (http://www. ghi-dc.org), Facebook page, and twitter account. Please stay safe. We look forward to the day when we can welcome you again in both Washington and Berkeley. Simone Lässig (Director) and Richard F. Wetzell (Editor) 4 BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 67 | FALL 2020 Forum: New Research In Transatlantic History Edited by Axel Jansen Claudia Roesch Forum Conference Reports GHI News INTRODUCTION: NEW TRENDS IN TRANSATLANTIC HISTORY Axel Jansen and Claudia Roesch GERMAN HISTORICAL INSTITUTE Not long ago, in October 2020, the Süddeutsche Zeitung observed that German-American relations had reached a new low point.1 A chang- ing global order and the rise of nationalism, the British Guardian explained on a diff erent occasion, had led to a decline of political networks as important pillars for an earlier era’s transatlantic rela- tionships by 2018.2 Since the 2016 presidential election in the United States, a number of developments have eroded opportunities for exchange. President Donald J. Trump decided that troops stationed in Germany would be either relocated to Poland or withdrawn from Europe altogether, and allies such as Germany have been openly criticized by the U.S. for not doing their share in supporting NATO. This year, the Covid-19 pandemic prompted the United States to impose travel bans on arrivals from the European Schengen zone, a decision followed by the E.U.’s own restrictions on arrivals from the U.S. While the second Iraq War serves as an important reminder that German-American relations have a much longer history of post-Cold War strain, more recent political developments certainly accentuate the challenges to transatlantic relations. In view of such antagonism, however, it is important to remember that transatlantic 1 Kurt Kister, “Verlorene Li- trade, where it remains unaff ected by the pandemic, remains vital to ebe,“ Süddeutsche Zeitung, both the U.S. and Europe and that transatlantic cultural affi liations Oct. 11, 2020, https:// www.sueddeutsche. in recent decades have intensifi ed rather than weakened. Arguably, de/politik/usa-trump- deutschland-verhaeltnis- some of these developments have not been interrupted by the cur- kommentar-1.5060318? rent health crisis, as participants of transatlantic video conferences reduced=true will groggily concede. 2 Madeleine Schwartz, ”The End of Atlanticism. Has Current events and developments prompt us to revisit the history of Trump killed the Ideology that Won the Cold transatlantic relations. At the German Historical Institute Washington, War,” The Guardian, we have received inquiries from German audiences wondering about Sept. 4, 2018: https:// www.theguardian.com/ American populism a nd its eff ects on trade relations, tourism, and news/2018/sep/04/ professional exchanges. At the same time, colleagues in the U.S. have atlanticism-trump- ideology-cold-war-foreign- looked towards Germany as an example of a functioning social state policy.