"Reaching the People": Communication and Global Order in the 20th Century
Final Report Abstract
The aim of the Emmy Noether Group was to investigate the role of communication and information in concepts of global order in the twentieth century. One characteristic of the century, according to the research group's initial thesis, was the emergence of publics that often went beyond national frameworks, but also affected new parts of the world's population beyond elites. Which strategies and methods were developed to involve different actors in global publics and to give women or rural populations access to information? What political goals and interests were these strategies and methods linked to? Which groups sought global attention for their endeavours? And how was access limited and controlled? The sub-projects of the Emmy Noether group explored how cross-border publics were constituted, imagined, opened and closed. The edited volume Global Publics: Their Power and Their Limits (ed. Valeska Huber and Jürgen Osterhammel, Oxford University Press 2020) addressed these questions on a conceptual level. The AHR History Lab Forum Globalizing Publics (American Historical Review 129/2, 2024) developed the concept of global publics further and communicated it to a broader academic audience through short essays on different practices of “public-making”. Other articles and chapters such as Valeska Huber’s “Openness and Closure: Spheres and Other Metaphors of Boundedness in Global History” added to more general reflections on global history. Beyond the edited volume, AHR Forum and articles, four monographic sub-projects were carried out as part of the Emmy Noether Group and have by now been completed. Valeska Huber's monograph "A World of Readers: The Project of Universal Literacy in the Twentieth Century" deals with literacy campaigns as a central method used by states and international organizations to reach broad sections of the population in the twentieth century. In her dissertation, Lea Börgerding examined the connections of the GDR women’s movement with the “Global South”. Sophie-Jung Kim researched the Indian monk Vivekananda as a global icon who connected different public spheres. Subsequently she began a second project that investigates how Indian and Korean anti-colonial protest movements interacted with each other and were perceived globally. Daniel Kolland used the example of an illustrated magazine to explore how late Ottoman publics were constituted and conceived as part of a global public. All four studies examined actors and their access to global publics. Through its archive-based and empirically grounded approach, the work of the Emmy Noether Group developed new approaches in the research fields of internationalism and global orders and of global communication history.
Publications
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Women's International Thought and the New Professions, 1900–1940. Modern Intellectual History, 18(1), 121-145.
Huber, Valeska; Pietsch, Tamson & Rietzler, Katharina
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Global Publics: Their Power and their Limits, 1870–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)
Valeska Huber & Jürgen Osterhammel
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Pandemics and the politics of difference: rewriting the history of internationalism through nineteenth-century cholera. Journal of Global History, 15(3), 394-407.
Huber, Valeska
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“An International Event and Its Multiple Global Publics: The Parliament of the World’s Religions (Chicago, 1893), and Vivekananda”, in Valeska Huber und Jürgen Osterhammel (Hg.), Global Publics: Their Power and their Limits, 1870–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), S. 177–201
Sophie-Jung Kim
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„Introduction: Global Publics“, in Valeska Huber und Jürgen Osterhammel (Hg.), Global Publics: Their Power and their Limits, 1870–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), S. 1–60
Valeska Huber & Jürgen Osterhammel
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An international language for all. Internationalists in European History, 51-67.
Huber, Valeska
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Cosmopolitanism in the Nineteenth Century: Empire, Humanity, Rights, dossier, Humanity Journal 12/1 (2021)
Valeska Huber; Jan C. Jansen & Martin Rempe
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Dealing with Difference: Cosmopolitanism in the Nineteenth-Century World of Empires. Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 12(1), 39-46.
Huber, Valeska & Jansen, Jan C.
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Uma história global do internacionalismo. Esboços: histórias em contextos globais, 28(48).
Schveitzer, Ana Carolina; Börgerding, Lea; Broughton, Oscar & Schveitzer, Ana Carolina
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„Der Kalte Krieg im Internationalen Jahr der Frau: Westdeutsche Fraueninitiativen und der Weltkongress in Ost-Berlin“, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 69/2 (2021), S. 109–124
Lea Börgerding
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Staging emancipation and its limits: East German cultural diplomacy, the German Democratic Women’s League, and the 1975 World Congress of Women in East Berlin. Women's History Review, 34(1), 8-26.
Börgerding, Lea
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The Global Turn in Nationalism: The USA as a Battleground for Hinduism and Hindu Nationalism. Religions, 14(10), 1265.
Kim, Sophie-Jung H.
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Between World-Imagining and World-Making: Politics of Fin-de-Siècle Universalism and Transimperial Indo-U.S. Brotherhood. Journal of World History, 35(1), 53-83.
Kim, Sophie-Jung Hyun
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Globalizing Publics, AHR History Lab Forum, American Historical Review 129/2 (2024), S. 545–627
Valeska Huber (Hg.)
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Globalizing Publics. The American Historical Review, 129(2), 545-550.
Huber, Valeska
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Mobilizing. The American Historical Review, 129(2), 616-624.
Börgerding, Lea
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Openness and Closure. Rethinking Global History, 139-160.
Huber, Valeska
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Reading. The American Historical Review, 129(2), 566-571.
Huber, Valeska
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Staging. The American Historical Review, 129(2), 578-586.
Kim, Sophie-Jung Hyun
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“German Democratic Women’s League: The First German Women’s Delegation to Stockholm (1947)”, in: Zsófia Lóránd, Adela Hîncu, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc, and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz (Hg.), Texts and Contexts from the History of Feminism and Women’s Rights. East Central Europe, Second Half of the Twentieth Century (Budapest, New York: CEU Press, 2024), S. 277–286
Lea Börgerding
