Author: Bernhard Struck

I was born exactly fifteen years after the Chernobyl nuclear explosion happened in 1986, and so it is always something that has intrigued me. Why did it take several days for the USSR to announce the explosion? How did people

I still haven’t nailed down what I want to do my project on, let alone articulated a theoretical base or identified my key source material. I was of half a mind to continue the theme I began in last week’s

A thought occurred to me, a striking and unsuspectingly creeping notion, about my subject. This idea had begun to hit the edges of my mind when, as a part of my research into Rapa Nui, I routinely looked at modern

The first thing that came to mind when doing this week’s readings was the idea of scale. When thinking about microhistory versus global history, they seemed to me like opposite ends of a scale – one put a magnifying glass

I struggled a bit to come up with a blog post for this week as I was torn between two very different fundamental ideas. On the one hand I wished to write and put more words down into pen about my

Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen’s “From Transnationalism to Olympic Internationalism”  was my favorite text for this week not only because of its micro-historical approach but also because of my personal connections with the content. When I first read the abstract, and then read

My previous engagement with microhistory was primarily in HI2001 when looking at The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The readings this week were no different. I found Andrade’s article particularly engaging and enjoyable,

In my mind, a key purpose of these blogs is to engage with the historiographical debates which have relevance to transnational methodologies, even tangential relevance. It is for this reason which I have decided to focus my contribution for week

I haven’t done much with nationalism prior to this course. ‘Globalisation’ is thrown around in pretty much every International Relations course in this university, but most of my personal research regarding globalisation focuses on the areas outside of Europe. I

‘German nationalism has, from its beginnings, […] always been a transnational nationalism’. Conrad makes this statement in the introduction of his iconic monograph Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (p.20). He justifies his claim by describing how the mobilisation of groups

I would like to preface my comments on this week by saying that I found Sebastian Conrad’s chapters engaging enough to work through even whilst running a fever, which says a lot for their quality.   Conrad’s suggestion that increasing

One important notion of the nineteenth century that connects each of the readings for this week is the idea of mass mobility, and the increase in the movement of people both in and out of a country. This idea of

In this week’s readings, the idea of nationalism as a reactionary force, rather than an internal process was an emergent thesis for me. Nation building and all that came with it – identity, tradition, culture was reliant on both internal and

Sugata Bose’s A Hundred Horizons chapter and Sebastian Conrad’s introduction chapter in Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany were both extremely helpful to ground me in the early stages of my brainstorming for the final essay/project topic. I found