Suchergebnisse

Eva Bischoff s Imperialism in Modern German History is the first comprehensive, English-language exploration of the history of German imperialism. It follows German colonial aspirations from their imaginary beginnings in the 1880s through to the plans of the Nazi regime to create a territorial empire in Eastern Europe and the lingering colonial legacies of postcolonial Germany in the 20th and 21st centuries. In addition, the volume introduces its readers to key aspects of research debates centring on class, race, sexuality and Nazism that shape the way historians see German imperialism today.Examining Germany s past from a transnational and global perspective, this is a vital text for all students of modern German history and the history of European empires

ABSTRACTRecent decades have seen a productive methodological debate about how political scientists "do history." However, on one important point, the discussion has been surprisingly thin. This concerns the problem of reading history backward rather than forward. To understand this problem, we need to embed it in broader methodological discussions of how the selection of evidence is shaped (and potentially biased) by all sorts of prior assumptions going into the evidence-collection process. Thus, reading history backward makes scholars refrain from posing certain questions, become blind to certain descriptive developments and explanatory factors, and fail to enlist certain historical data. This article pulls together the fragmentary insights about this problem and devises an alternative, prospective approach centered on an open reading of the work of historians. Although this is a "low-tech" issue, it is one that has huge ramifications for the way we do historical analysis as political scientists.