Ursula Lehmkuhl - Böcker

It seems to be a tenet of the human condition to perceive “others” as “different” and potentially hostile. In nearly all societies stereotypes are developed to stigmatize suspected enemies within and without. The American case is particularly interesting in this respect because American society consists of nothing but “others”; to be open to “others” and welcome those who are “different” is one of the basic tenets of the country. However, this principle often conflicts with the need to integrate all these “strangers” into a homogeneous, governable society, which causes the formation of hostile stereotypes of certain ethnic groups that do not “fit in.” The authors in this volume look at the development of these “enemy images,” which form a fairly consistent pattern, from the period of the American Revolution to the post–World War II era. In doing so, they focus on the question of to what extent these enemy images influence the formulation and outcome of foreign, domestic, and immigration policies.

Historians and Nature considers five cutting-edge questions facing environmental historians today. How can we historicise nature? Is nature a historical actor? How have human beings interacted with nature and what patterns have emerged? How do we understand the ecology of urban spaces? What is the history of environmental diplomacy? Focusing on the United States and Germany, the book takes a comparative approach in examining environmental history. The authors draw on a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, including history, cultural studies, human geography, biology and ecology. Case studies include Native Americans and their relationship to the environment, the California Gold Rush and the Coal Fields of the Ruhr Basin in the nineteenth century, the controversial building of dikes in seventeenth-century Germany, cleaning up modern cities, and the Greenpeace movement and the development of international environmental activism in the 1970s.

Atlantic Communications examines the historical development of communications technology and its impact on German-American relations from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Chronologically organized, the book is divided into five parts, each scrutinizing one or two central themes connected to the specific time period and technology involved. The book starts with "speech" as a dominant medium of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when cultural brokers played a significant role in producing and spreading knowledge about "America". During the nineteenth century, the technological competition between the old and the new world became a driving force for the history of transatlantic relations. This competition developed new dimensions with the invention of the telegraph and the emergence of news agencies. Information became commercialized. At the turn of the century the mass production of print media became technologically possible. Print media, daily journals and especially weekly magazines became the medium of a critical style of journalism.The Muckrakers, representatives of a political and intellectual elite, criticized the social and cultural consequences of technological progress, thereby highlighting the negative effects of modernization. During the 1920s and 1930s, radio developed as a new mass medium, the first one to be used widely for political purposes. Not only did Josef Goebbels recognize the political possibilities of reaching the people directly via radio; Franklin Roosevelt used the radio as well to transmit his political messages in the form of "fireside chats". Eventually, in the late 1970s film and television were discovered as a means to communicate the past, especially the historical experience of the Holocaust. Specific cultures of memory developed in both America and Germany. The demand to tackle the psychological and social problems stemming from the experiences during the Third Reich, advocated especially by the student moveme