Swen Steinberg – författare

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.

Forced migration always takes place within specific cultural, social, political, and spatial environments. This volume focuses on the interaction between those forced to migrate and their environments in the contexts of escape and exile from Nazi-occupied Europe. Forced emigration from Nazi Germany was a global phenomenon that took refugees to regions they often knew very little about. Not only did they have to adapt to foreign cultures, but also to unfamiliar natural environments that often exposed them to severe temperature conditions, droughts, rainy seasons, and diseases. While some refugees prepared for the natural conditions of their exile destination, others acquired environmental knowledge at their host countries or were able to adapt prior knowledge to the new environment. Consequently, specific knowledge about the environment had a large influence on the forced migration experience.

Verfaultes Korn im Brot, gepanschter Wein, Pferdefleisch in der Lasagne, Hühner im Käfig oder Metallspäne in der Milch – die Liste der Lebensmittelskandale ist lang. Die Beiträger_innen dieses Bandes nehmen Lebensmittelskandale des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts aus einer wissenshistorischen Perspektive in den Blick: Sie hinterfragen solche Medienereignisse um die Herstellung, den Handel oder den Konsum von Nahrungsmitteln in ihrem Verhältnis zu bestehenden Wissensordnungen. Ein besonderes Augenmerk liegt dabei auf unterschiedlichen Formen des Wissens, die teils miteinander konkurrierten, teils aber auch in den Debatten konvergierten – die Beiträge interessieren sich für wissenschaftliches Wissen ebenso wie für Alltags- und Erfahrungswissen, welches im Zuge von Lebensmittelskandalen immer wieder von entscheidender Bedeutung für die Wahrnehmung derselben war.