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Traces the development of German civil society through collective actions of honor
Beyond the Gymnasium is the first systematic effort to examine the history of the body in modern Germany. By looking into medical dietetics, walking, dancing, gymnastics, cholera, and classrooms, Heikki Lempa reconstructs the ways the middle-class body became a source of political and social autonomy and a medium of social interaction. During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, German physicians defined the middle class body as qualitatively different from the lower class body. This belief was supported by a contemporary science known as dietetics. Lempa provides a comprehensive history and analysis of this science. Beyond the Gymnasium also analyzes the social implications of c...
Nature was central to the Wilhelmine German experience. Medical cosmologies and reform-initiatives were a key to consumer practices and lifestyle choices. Nature's appeal transcended class, confession, and political party. Millions of Germans recognized that nature had healing effects and was intimately tied to quality of life. In the 1880s and 1890s, this preoccupation with nature became an increasingly important part of German popular culture. In this pioneering study, Avi Sharma shows that nature, health, and the body became essential ways of talking about real and imagined social and political problems. The practice of popular medicine in the Wilhelmine era brought nature back into urban...
Play, thrills, danger and excitement
How postwar West German democracy was styled through word, image, sound, performance, and gathering
Sakurai presents a study of how scientific societies affected the social and political life of a city. As it did not have a university or a centralized government, Frankfurt am Main is an ideal case study of how scientific associations – funded by private patronage for the good of the local populace – became an important centre for natural history.
For thousands of years, people have used nature to justify their political, moral, and social judgments. Such appeals to the moral authority of nature are still very much with us today, as heated debates over genetically modified organisms and human cloning testify. The Moral Authority of Nature offers a wide-ranging account of how people have used nature to think about what counts as good, beautiful, just, or valuable. The eighteen essays cover a diverse array of topics, including the connection of cosmic and human orders in ancient Greece, medieval notions of sexual disorder, early modern contexts for categorizing individuals and judging acts as "against nature," race and the origin of hum...
Masculinity, Senses, Spirit brings together current work by leading scholars in the fields of gender studies, religion, history, and cultural studies to examine the complex interrelationship between gender, sexuality, and the realms of the spirit and the senses in the Atlantic world from the 18th century to the present. Ranging in scope from the bridal mysticism of 18th century German Moravians, through the education theories of the German 'Gymnasium,' the creation of the gendered 'gourmand,' the 'discovery' of homosexuality, and the hyper-masculinized homosocial groupings of the National Socialists, the essays explore the inflections of constructed masculinity in the religious, educational, culinary, political, and social institutions of Germany, France, and North America from the 18th century to the 20th centuries. The collection reveals the disparate and yet related worlds of masculine gender performance, recognizing the central role of the body and its relation to the spirit and senses in notions of European and Atlantic masculinity.
The notions of culture and civilization are at the heart of European self-image. This book focuses on how space and spatiality contributed to defining the concepts of culture and civilization and, conversely, what kind of spatial ramifications "culture" and "civilization" entailed. These questions have vital importance to the understanding of this formative period of modern Europe. The chapters of this volume concentrate on the following themes: What were the sites of culture, civilization and Bildung and how were these sites employed in defining these concepts? What kind of borders did this process of definition and its inherent spatial imagination produce? What were the connecting routes b...
This book explores the largely unexamined history of Africans who lived, studied, and worked in the German Democratic Republic. African students started coming to the East in 1951 as invited guests who were offered scholarships by the East German government to prepare them for primarily technical and scientific careers once they returned home to their own countries. Drawn from previously unexplored archives in Germany, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, and the United Kingdom, African Students in East Germany, 1949–1975 uncovers individual stories and reconstructs the pathways that African students took in their journeys to the GDR and what happened once they got there. The book places these experience...