Lezing | David Blackbourn: Germany in the World
A Global History, 1500-2000

With Germany in the World, award-winning historian David Blackbourn radically revises conventional narratives of German history, demonstrating the existence of a distinctly German presence in the world centuries before its unification -and revealing a national identity far more complicated than previously imagined.

Blackbourn traces Germany's evolution from the loosely bound Holy Roman Empire of 1500 to a sprawling colonial power to a twenty-first-century beacon of democracy. Viewed through a global lens, familiar landmarks of German history - the Reformation, the Revolution of 1848, the Nazi regime - are transformed, while others are unearthed and explored, as Blackbourn reveals Germany's leading role in creating modern universities and its sinister involvement in slave-trade economies.

A global history for a global age, Germany in the World is a bold and original account that upends the idea that a nation's history should be written as though it took place entirely within that nation's borders.

About the speaker

David Blackbourn is Cornelius Vanderbilt Distinguished Chair and Professor of History Emeritus at Vanderbilt University. He taught for twenty years at Harvard, and before that at London University. Educated at Cambridge, where he was also a research fellow, he has held fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and been a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and served for thirty year on the editorial board of Past and Present. He is a Trustee of the National Humanities Center and a former President of the Friends of the German Historical Institute, Washington and member of the Institute’s Advisory Board. His books include Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany, The Peculiarities of German History (with Geoff Eley), Populists and Patricians, Marpingen, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780-1914, The Conquest of Nature (winner of three book prizes), and Germany in the World: A Global History, 1500-2000, which appeared last year and will be published in German, Russian and Chinese translations.

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In cooperation with Goethe-Institut Amsterdam