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British political sociology has exercised a significant impact on the transformation of the concept of the nation, both in Europe and beyond. As its most vocal protagonist Anthony Smith has argued, the approach consists in the claim that so-called “ethnies” must provide “ethnic cores” that enable the institutionalization of national collective identities. Smith postulates that such “ethnic cores” have been rare outside Europe and that measures aimed at molding collective identities were feeble elite projects elsewhere in the world. The article examines the logic underpinning these positions in the light of colonial legacies and decolonization processes.

In light of global electoral successes of right-wing populists, over the past decade the idea of a linear progress towards liberal democracy as a globally dominant form of government has lost much of its credibility. Does the rise of illiberal political movements result from the decline of Western hegemony, that is, from a refusal of non-Western cultures to “imitate” theWest? Or is it the expression of a global, open-ended conflict between the cosmopolitanism of a “new middle class” and the communitarianism of those who consider themselves the losers of globalization? This article argues that instead of replacing modernization theory with cultural essentialism, we should opt for a praxeological paradigm that acknowledges both cultural heterogeneity and historical contingency.

The authors reflect on their experiences as the founding editors of the History of Knowledge blog. Situating the project in its specific institutional, geographical, and historiographical contexts, they highlight its role in scholarly communication and research alongside journals and books in a research domain that is still young, especially when viewed from an international perspective. At the same time, the authors discuss the blog’s role as a tool for classifying and structuring a corpus of work as it grows over time and as new themes and connections emerge from the contributions of its many authors.

In a rapidly changing media landscape and with the growing importance of social media in the realm of shaping political opinion, the humanities are faced with the challenge of developing new, innovative approaches to public debates. . An example of such innovation is the online magazine Geschichte der Gegenwart, which publishes a longread twice a week. According to its concept, all articles published are supposed to depart from questions and problems of present concern. The magazine is interdisciplinary and combines historical and cultural analytical perspectives.

Before the First World War, the dam architect Otto Intze flooded extensive valleys in western Germany’s low mountain ranges in order to provide the neighboring Ruhr district with water and electricity. Intze’s biography and his giant dams are well-represented in historical research. However, very little is known about the early phases of the dam-building boom before 1900. Taking a microhistorical approach, this article reconstructs the roots of one of the earliest dam projects: the Fuelbecke dam at Altena (1894 –1896). This construction was of comparatively small dimensions, served local purposes, and was instigated by a cooperative formed by small iron producers in the local upland region. I argue that local dam-building initiatives of this kind were decisive for the boom in Western German dam construction after 1900.

Employing Ernst Fraenkel’s model of the dual state, this article examines the persecution of prostitutes in Bremen during the early Nazi years. As a city-state with an administration that closely cooperated with the regime, Bremen quickly developed a multi-stage system for confining sex workers. Newly enacted policies built on calls for preventive policing and strict legislation proposed long before 1933. The Reichstag Fire Decree marked a significant shift, since suspending fundamental rights enlarged the perpetrators’ scope of action. By legitimizing campaigns against prostitutes with the state of emergency, Bremen’s authorities contributed to a radicalization of the regime’s persecution policy.

In 1968, the anti-authoritarian student movement in West Berlin started to disintegrate into small factions. While many of them were part of the emerging leftist subculture, some of them cut all ties with their anti-authoritarian past and evolved into Leninist cadre parties with strict hierarchies and stern discipline. The article examines the microsociology behind the formation of one of these groups and draws parallels with the Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation. It argues that the Catholic aspects of the group were not so much the result of the Catholic education of their founders, but rather of the fact that they unconsciously used the dichotomy between Catholicism and Protestantism as an implicit blueprint for bipolar confrontations.

The article discusses landscapes like the “romantic Rhine,” Scotland, the Niagara Falls, and Swedish Dalarna and their importance for national identity and nation building in modernity. Since the late eighteenth century hostile nature has been transformed into landscape. Travelers discovered remote, wild areas like the Norwegian fiords, or the Alps, which they stylized as pristine land where modern man could recover from the burdens of modern life. To stimulate tourism, they restored castles, founded open-air museums and reinvented local traditions. Thus tourists, especially from urban areas, helped to shape their nation by bodily experiencing its geographical diversity and assumed great past.

Most historians agree that it would be instructive to know more about the historical reception of media products. However, many shy away from such research, contending that the primary sources available were not “representative.” This paper argues that this methodological credo of empirical social research is misleading for cultural historians interested in reconstructing the various ways in which historical audiences made sense of media products. By presenting examples from her own work, the author discusses the informative value of book and film reviews, listeners’ letters to broadcasters, and audience polls for questions that historians would otherwise be unable to answer.

These comments reflect on the articles of this issue from the perspective of non-Western, and in particular African labor historiography. This contribution emphasizes the fluidity and ambiguity of established, often Eurocentric concepts. Perspectives from the \"Global South\" not only tend to destabilize notions like wage labor, the working class, or the \"standard employment pattern\" (\"Normalarbeitsverhältnis\") that used to be taken for granted. They also provide the opportunity to pose new questions about German and Western developments. Historians of labor working with a global perspective have to confront the challenge of focusing on the necessarily specific historical trajectories of certain localities and specific patterns of regional migration without losing sight of the broader context. They see shared entanglements as being bi- or multi-directional rather than uni-directional and promote an approach that does not exclusively rely on models taken from a single period or nation.