Charlotte A. Lerg – författare

This book explores the lasting legacy of the controversial project by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, funded by the CIA, to promote Western culture and liberal values in the battle of ideas with global Communism during the Cold War.  One of the most important elements of this campaign was a series of journals published around the world: Encounter, Preuves, Quest, Mundo Nuevo, and many others, involving many of the most famous intellectuals to promote a global intellectual community. Some of them, such as Minerva and China Quarterly, are still going to this day. This study examines when and why these journals were founded, who ran them, and how we should understand their cultural message in relation to the secret patron that paid the bills.

This book explores the lasting legacy of the controversial project by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, funded by the CIA, to promote Western culture and liberal values in the battle of ideas with global Communism during the Cold War.  One of the most important elements of this campaign was a series of journals published around the world: Encounter, Preuves, Quest, Mundo Nuevo, and many others, involving many of the most famous intellectuals to promote a global intellectual community. Some of them, such as Minerva and China Quarterly, are still going to this day. This study examines when and why these journals were founded, who ran them, and how we should understand their cultural message in relation to the secret patron that paid the bills.

Is the Atlantic World in a state of crisis? At a time when many political observers perceive indeed a crisis in transatlantic relations, critical evaluation of past narratives and frameworks in Transatlantic Relations and Atlantic History alike become crucial. This volume provides an academic foundation to critically assess the Atlantic World and to rethink transatlantic relations in a transnational and global perspective.The TransAtlantic reconsidered brings together leading experts such as Harvard historians Charles S. Maier and Bernard Bailyn and former ERC scientific board member Nicholas Canny. All the scholars represented in this volume have helped to shape, re-shape, and challenge the narrative(s) of the Atlantic World and can thus (re-)evaluate its conceptual basis in view of historiographical developments and contemporary challenges.

Is the Atlantic World in a state of crisis? At a time when many political observers perceive indeed a crisis in transatlantic relations, critical evaluation of past narratives and frameworks in Transatlantic Relations and Atlantic History alike become crucial. This volume provides an academic foundation to critically assess the Atlantic World and to rethink transatlantic relations in a transnational and global perspective.The TransAtlantic reconsidered brings together leading experts such as Harvard historians Charles S. Maier and Bernard Bailyn and former ERC scientific board member Nicholas Canny. All the scholars represented in this volume have helped to shape, re-shape, and challenge the narrative(s) of the Atlantic World and can thus (re-)evaluate its conceptual basis in view of historiographical developments and contemporary challenges.

Is the Atlantic World in a state of crisis? At a time when many political observers perceive indeed a crisis in transatlantic relations, critical evaluation of past narratives and frameworks in Transatlantic Relations and Atlantic History alike become crucial. This volume provides an academic foundation to critically assess the Atlantic World and to rethink transatlantic relations in a transnational and global perspective.The TransAtlantic reconsidered brings together leading experts such as Harvard historians Charles S. Maier and Bernard Bailyn and former ERC scientific board member Nicholas Canny. All the scholars represented in this volume have helped to shape, re-shape, and challenge the narrative(s) of the Atlantic World and can thus (re-)evaluate its conceptual basis in view of historiographical developments and contemporary challenges.

Is the Atlantic World in a state of crisis? At a time when many political observers perceive indeed a crisis in transatlantic relations, critical evaluation of past narratives and frameworks in Transatlantic Relations and Atlantic History alike become crucial. This volume provides an academic foundation to critically assess the Atlantic World and to rethink transatlantic relations in a transnational and global perspective.The TransAtlantic reconsidered brings together leading experts such as Harvard historians Charles S. Maier and Bernard Bailyn and former ERC scientific board member Nicholas Canny. All the scholars represented in this volume have helped to shape, re-shape, and challenge the narrative(s) of the Atlantic World and can thus (re-)evaluate its conceptual basis in view of historiographical developments and contemporary challenges.

"'The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky' offers not only a panoramic view of a country poised between devastation and an uncertain future but a gripping self-portrait of a man poised between unresolved youthful bewilderment and a mature clarity of conviction." • Wall Street JournalIn 1945 Melvin J. Lasky, serving in one of the first American divisions that entered Germany after the country’s surrender, began documenting the everyday life of a defeated nation. Travelling widely across both Germany and post-war Europe, Lasky’s diary provides a captivating eye-witness account colored by ongoing socio-political debates and his personal background studying Trotskyism. The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky reproduces the diary’s vivid language as Lasky describes the ideological tensions between the East and West, as well as including critical essays on subjects ranging from Lasky’s life as a transatlantic intellectual, the role of war historians, and the diary as a literary genre.

"'The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky' offers not only a panoramic view of a country poised between devastation and an uncertain future but a gripping self-portrait of a man poised between unresolved youthful bewilderment and a mature clarity of conviction." • Wall Street JournalIn 1945 Melvin J. Lasky, serving in one of the first American divisions that entered Germany after the country’s surrender, began documenting the everyday life of a defeated nation. Travelling widely across both Germany and post-war Europe, Lasky’s diary provides a captivating eye-witness account colored by ongoing socio-political debates and his personal background studying Trotskyism. The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky reproduces the diary’s vivid language as Lasky describes the ideological tensions between the East and West, as well as including critical essays on subjects ranging from Lasky’s life as a transatlantic intellectual, the role of war historians, and the diary as a literary genre.

With concepts of participation discussed in multiple disciplines from media studies to anthropology, from political sciences to sociology, the first issue of the new yearbook History of Intellectual Culture (HIC) dedicates a thematic section to the way knowledge can and arguably must be conceptualized as "participatory". Introducing and exploring "participatory knowledge", the volume aims to draw attention to the potential of looking at knowledge formation and circulation through a new lens and to open a dialogue about how and what concepts and theories of participation can contribute to the history of knowledge. By asking who gets to participate in defining what counts as knowledge and in deciding whose knowledge is circulated, modes of participation enter into the examination of knowledge on various levels and within multiple cultural contexts. The articles in this volume attest to the great variety of approaches, contexts, and interpretations of "participatory knowledge", from the sociological projects of the Frankfurt School to the Uppsala-based Institute for Race Biology, from the Argentinian National Folklore Survey to current hashtag activism and Covid-19-archive projects. HIC sees knowledge as rooted in social and political structures, determined by modes of transfer and produced in collaborative processes. The notion of "participatory knowledge" highlights in a compelling way how knowledge is rooted in cultural practices and social configurations.

The second issue of the yearbook History of Intellectual Culture (HIC) dedicates a thematic section to modes of publication. This volume addresses recent advances in publication studies and stresses the cultural formation of knowledge. By exploring and analyzing layers of presenting, sharing, and circulating knowledge, we invite readers to critically engage with questions of media uses and publishing practices and structures, both historically and in our contemporary digital age. The articles in this volume attest to the great variety of publication modes and perspectives, from the potential and limits of digitizing newspapers such as the New York Times to questions of positionality in building and using Wikipedia, from translation policies and female participation to the genre of university histories.

The third issue of the yearbook History of Intellectual Culture (HIC) devotes a thematic section to experimental spaces for knowledge production. The articles in this section investigate the role of experimental environments as sites for knowledge production during the long nineteenth century, thereby extending the scope beyond the confines of traditional academic institutions such as academies, laboratories, and universities. By focusing on intentional communities, colonial gardens, agricultural colonies, and artistic colonies as experimental spaces, the authors investigate the intertwined social, natural, and aesthetic aspects of environments. An overarching aim is to develop a distinct perspective rooted in the history of knowledge, wherein experiments are conceptualized both as a category employed by the historical actors and as a methodological concept. In addition, the third issue comprises several individual papers covering a wide range of topics, stretching from the U.S. patent system in the 1930s and anti-intellectualism in interwar Britain to the cultural translation of knowledge in the wake of the Holocaust and the circulation of economic knowledge in postwar Sweden. The issue also contains several theoretical, historiographical, and methodological interventions and reflections, including a conversation on decolonizing knowledge in academia and beyond.

The fourth issue of the yearbook History of Intellectual Culture (HIC) features a thematic section on the production of knowledge related to the Holocaust. The contributions focus on the circulation of knowledge via letters and other forms of written communication within and among survivor historical commissions after the Second World War with an emphasis on the interplay of gender and other differences. Although more women than men were involved in these efforts, women typically held subordinate roles to men and have largely been invisible in the historiography of these endeavors. This thematic section addresses this lacuna by exploring aspects of the “unseen labor” behind these documentation efforts that remain underexplored and marginalized in studies on the production, circulation, and history of knowledge, as well as of intellectual culture.

The thematic section “Technology and the Making of History” of the fifth issue of the yearbook History of Intellectual Culture (HIC) explores how technology has shaped historical knowledge production, addressing why this material dimension remains underexplored in historiography. From the late nineteenth century onward, tools like photography, microfilm, punch cards, digital databases, computational methods, and most recently AI have enabled, constrained, and intertwined with historians’ practices across national contexts. Grounded in the praxeological turn in the history of humanities, knowledge, and digital history, the contributions challenge intellectual-material and analogue-digital binaries. Historians’ work has always been technically mediated, reflecting agency and culture, not ruptures. It highlights data continuities (excerpts to databases), selective uptake (e.g., 1950s social-scientific history), and reliance on infrastructures like critical editions.By weaving technology into the cultural history of intellectual practices, the special section equips historians, digital humanists, students, and knowledge scholars with critical tools to reassess how knowledge about the past is made, circulated, institutionalized, and transformed amid ongoing computational and infrastructural shifts—fostering nuanced, empirically grounded research agendas for the field.

Prestige and international visibility beyond the confines of the academic world are key reasons for universities to get involved in international relations. Many of the common practices we know today, like honorary degrees, exchange programs or funding special study centres first emerged around the turn to the 20th century, especially in transatlantic relations. While the German and the French governments were vying for political sympathies in the US, newly reformed American research universities were hoping for academic recognition in Europe and social acceptance at home. Thus developed a distinct university-diplomacy, pursued in particular by university presidents, professors and educators as the foreign service was only beginning to professionalize. Even if the First World War deeply affected these networks, especially the links to Germany, they formed the foundation of the structures and strategies that afforded US-universities a crucial role in the cultural diplomacy of the so-called American century.