It is my assertion that looking at the exchange and discourse between European art, with an emphasis on French and German artists, German culture was revived. Through dOCUMENTA’s aims to regenerate the traditions of modernism and German modernist art, the
Project Proposal: The Place of the Bootlegger in the Public Sphere of the Michigan-Ontario Borderland
The cultural, political, and social changes of 1920s North America present the historian with a rich tapestry from which to draw inspiration. Rapid urbanization was accompanied by the rise of the speakeasy, the advent of jazz, and the origins of
Project Proposal- The international Ghadarite network: The role of violence in the development of a transnational organisation
On March 18th 1915, Sir Reginald Craddock delivered a speech to the Imperial Legislative Council addressing the “rapidly developing disturbances of the past few weeks”. He explicitly cited the Ghadar party: “a party of anarchists and revolutionaries, who have been
Project Proposal: The Two Celtics – A Transnational Reassessment of the Scots-Irish.
Football is inherently defined by the concept of well defined nation states. Clubs play in national leagues that feed into national teams that compete against other nations at the World Cup. Occasionally, however, clubs break this mould and appear to
Project Proposal: Neutral Moresnet as a Microcosm of Nineteenth-Century Lotharingia
In this essay, I intend to portray a transnational history of the territory of Neutral Moresnet that demonstrates its nature as being representative of wider trends taking place in the multinational region of Lotharingia. The territory of Neutral Moresnet, a
Project Proposal: The Global Rise of Football as a Spectator Sport
The sport of football has become a worldwide phenomenon. Millions of children and adults alike passionately take part in casual street matches or organized leagues all around the world, and on the weekends, those same people and others attend professional
Unconference Thoughts and Conclusions
(Apologies for forgetting to upload this last week) After the Unconference on Saturday, February 14th , I was amazed by how successful the day had been. The setup and running of a pair programming format was extremely useful for shaping my
The melting pot of ideas, connections and flows- flattening boundaries in South and Southeast Asia
Having initially brought a proposal of travellers in South-East Asian port cities to the table for discussion at the unconference, I was able to test different approaches, and experiment with prospective angles in this free-flowing space. The discussions I had,
Prohibition Bootlegging on the Detroit River
In the days since the ‘Unconference’ I have been exploring the possible developments of my ideas surrounding transnational alcohol smuggling into the USA during Prohibition. What I have found are a wealth of both primary and secondary sources, convincing me
Unconference Aftermath: Globalization and Sport
After an intellectually rigorous but stimulating day at the Unconference today, my ears are ringing with some fantastic ideas from my fellow students. Everything from ’the scourge of sectarianism’ to ‘hosing whisky’ was mentioned today, and I eagerly anticipate hearing the presentations
The Nation, a Construct of the Global
Last week discussion of the role of nation proved personally challenging. Having struggled with determining where the nation was situated in a previous post, and with great thanks to Dr. Lawson’s metaphor, Sebastian Conrad’s Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany further helped
Globalisation Revisited – 21st Century Millennialism?
The accepted narrative of globalisation places it as a phenomenon born out of post-Cold War American capitalism; a creation of the late twentieth century manifested in the inescapable homogenising successes of McDonalds, Apple and liberal democracy. However, as Conrad, Tyrell
Transnational History and the riddle of how to connect the Matryoshkas
In last week’s seminar we discussed (among other points) the role of the nation and modern-nation state in trans-national history. Questions were raised – as in some of the blog posts – as to how the nation-state interconnects with other
National Identities and Interconnectedness
Sebastian Conrad stated in the introduction of his book, Globalization and the Nation in Imperial Germany, that it is generally assumed that nation states existed before there were interconnections between peoples of different nations. The issue with this assumption though is that
The transnational histories of nations
The reaction against the ‘nation-state’ paradigm as the inevitable status quo has become well entrenched in recent historical discourse. Gellner’s and Anderson’s seminal works in the 1980s have spawned a plethora of re-evaluations of how we can conceptualise the world.