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Fractured Modernity

  • Herausgeber(in): Professor Dr. Thomas Welskopp, Professor Dr. Alan Lessoff (Hg.)
  • Titel: Fractured Modernity
  • Untertitel: America Confronts Modern Times, 1890s to 1940s
  • Reihe: Schriften des Historischen Kollegs. Kolloquien
  • Bandnummer: 83
  • Verlagsort: München
  • Erscheinungsjahr: 2012
  • Umfang: IX, 242 S.
  • ISBN: 978-3-486-71695-5
  • Beschreibung:

    The ten essays in this volume deal with the debates and conflicts about modernity in a period of American history when the tensions and strains caused by seemingly unrestrained change and the reactions to it were particularly severe and tangible. Partly concentrating on the margins or dark underworlds of modernity, such as racism and violence, partly focusing on the allegedly unlimited space to negotiate and create social order from scratch, the contributions to this volume show that, and discuss why, modernity was an issue in contemporary United States which seemed to have been even more hotly contested than in Europe at the same time, albeit sometimes in terms of „Americanism“ rather than „modernism“. In this book, European scholars of the United States apply variations on the transnational discourse on modernity to unexpected dimensions of U.S. history, making this volume a fascinating example of the present-day enterprise of internationalizing American studies.

  • Inhalt:
    Table of Contents (S. V–VI)
    Vorwort (S. VII)
    List of Conference Participants (S. IX)
    Thomas Welskopp/Alan Lessoff
    Fractured Modernity – Fractured Experiences – Fractured Histories: An Introduction (S. 1–17)
    Jürgen Martschukat
    „Peculiarly a phenomenon of modern times“: Bachelors, Urban Vice, and Strategies of Regulation in Modern America, 1870–1930 (S. 21–42)
    Daniel Siemens
    The „True Worship of Life“. Changing Notions of Happiness, Morality, and Religion in the United States, 1890–1940 (S. 43–60)
    Alan Lessoff
    American Progressivism. Transnational, Modernization, and Americanist Perspectives (S. 63–80)
    Frank Uekötter
    Conservation. America’s Environmental Modernism? (S. 81–94)
    Linards Udris
    The Press and the Repeal of National Prohibition (S. 97–127)
    Christopher McKnight Nichols
    Modernity and Political Economy in the New Era and New Deal (S. 129–150)
    Manfred Berg
    Lynching and the Ambivalence of Modernity (S. 153–168)
    Silvan Niedermeier
    Torture and „Modern Civilization“. The NAACP’s Fight against Forced Confessions in the American South (1935–1945) (S. 169–189)
    Norbert Finzsch
    The Harlem Renaissance, 1919–1935. American Modernism, Multiple Modernities or Postcolonial Diaspora? (S. 193–212)
    Michael Hochgeschwender
    The Scopes Trial in the Context of Competing Modernity Discourses (S. 213–233)
    Alan Lessoff
    Conclusion (S. 235–239)
    Authors (S. 241–242)