Andreas Daum

University at Buffalo, The State University of New York | SUNY Buffalo · Department of History

This article investigates why Humboldtian Science, as a heuristic concept, has gained prominence in the historiography of science and requires clarification. It offers an ideal-type model of comparative research and exact measurements across vast spaces, which Susan F. Cannon and others tied to Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Yet, he himself wa...

Historische Porträts ergründen die deutsche Filmgeschichte von Metropolis (1927) bis Goodbye Lenin (2003). Als historische Quellen weisen Filme auf die Vielgestalt der deutschen Geschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts hin. Sie machen kollektive Vorstellungen sichtbar, transferieren also Wahrnehmungen und Denkweisen in ein audiovisuelles Medium. And...

Die sich wandelnden Interpretationen von Alexander von Humboldt weisen eine bemerkenswerte Konstante auf. Seit den 1840er Jahren und bis heute wird die zentrale Rolle Humboldts und seines Werks für die Popularisierung von Wissen betont. Gerade aus Sicht der globalen Wissensgesellschaft erscheint Humboldt als Trendsetter der epochalen Tendenz, Wisse...

Georg G. Iggers (1926–2017) - Volume 51 Special Issue - Andreas W. Daum

Problems connected to Berlin left a deep imprint on the Kennedy presidency. Moving beyond both heroic and revisionist views, this chapter argues that the story of Kennedy and Berlin is full of contingencies, crises, and contestations – both vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and within the Western alliance. JFK himself stood at the center of his administra...

Wars are undeniable events in history, and - as constantly reported in the daily news - they still occur all over the world, even in an age that has produced more legal and political mechanisms to avoid war and has drafted more manifestos to decry violent conflict than any other epoch in history. As soon as we embark on scrutinizing the meaning of...

This 2006 collection examines the urban spaces of Berlin and Washington and provides a comparative cultural history of two eminent nation-states in the modern era. Each of the cities has assumed, at times, a mythical quality and they have been seen as collective symbols, with ambitions and contradictions that mirror the nation-states they represent...

This 2006 collection examines the urban spaces of Berlin and Washington and provides a comparative cultural history of two eminent nation-states in the modern era. Each of the cities has assumed, at times, a mythical quality and they have been seen as collective symbols, with ambitions and contradictions that mirror the nation-states they represent...

Presenting new perspectives on the Vietnam War, its global repercussions, and its role in modern history, this volume reveals "America's War" as an international event that reverberated worldwide. The essays address political, military, and diplomatic issues and the cultural and intellectual consequences of "Vietnam." They compare the Vietnam War t...

Noch nicht einmal sieben Monate waren seit seinem Tod vergangen. Wie kein anderer hatte er die Welt von den Himmelsgestirnen bis zu den Erdhöhlen erforscht und mit immer neuen Details beschrieben. Endlich erschien nun das große Buch über die Natur, auf das viele gewartet hatten. Der Name des Autors war in aller Munde, auch wenn das Echo auf seine P...

This essay suggests that we should understand the varieties of "popular science" as part of a larger phenomenon: the changing set of processes, practices, and actors that generate and transform public knowledge across time, space, and cultures. With such a reconceptualization we can both de-essentialize and historicize the idea of "popularization,"...

Wissenschaftliche Weiterbildung bildet eine Brücke zwischen Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. In einer bis in die Poren von Wissenschaft und Technik durchdrungenen Welt ist heute das Begreifen wissenschaftlich-technischer Phänomene für jedes Mitglied einer Gesellschaft zentral für sein Weltverständnis. In den Anfängen der Erwachsenenbildung stand dies...

Book reviewed: William Glenn Gray. Germany's Cold War: The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany, 1949–1969. Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xii + 351 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 (cloth).

Scholarship and research –– encapsulated in the German term Wissenschaft, which includes the sciences, social sciences, and human-ities–– developed in such a dramatic way in Germany between 1800 and 1870 that it is tempting to resort to a sort of ‘big bang’ theory to describe this development. In the beginning, so the story would go, there was an e...

Between 1830 and 1870 the infrastructure of civil society in Germany expanded significantly. In spite of the failure of the 1848 revolution, the culture of the Bürgertum, the middle classes, began to flourish through associations, educational efforts, and diverse media and institutions of public life. The study of natural history and the new natura...

Recent historiography has demonstrated a growing sensitivity toward space as a geographical and cultural category. The following article expands on this theme by focusing on Alexander von Humboldt and his understanding of nature as >cosmos<. Humboldt's cosmic concept stressed the interrelatedness of all natural phenomena and their historicity. Humb...