Spectacular Acts of Violence Transnational public spheres and terrorism, 1890-1914
Final Report Abstract
The aim of the project was to investigate the history of spectacular acts of violence in the first global age of terrorism. Between 1880 and 1914, radicalized political groups around the world sought to draw public attention to their causes by means of attacks and assassinations. Their acts of violence triggered global reactions: Newspapers, magazines, and journals around the world received the news immediately after the act via telegraph, they dispatched reporters to the sites of the events, they wrote headlines and commentaries, and they printed drawings, photographs, and cartoons. Politicians and activists, in turn, reacted to the news, and they felt compelled to take a political stand. They expressed disgust, sometimes also their solidarity, and thus positioned themselves within an increasingly interconnected transnational public sphere. In the project, these reactions were analyzed based on newspaper reports from Germany, France, the United States, the Habsburg and Russian Empires, China, Japan, and a number of other countries. The DFG funding made it possible to conduct a number of archival research trips: to Berlin, London, Paris, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vienna and Stanford. Additional planned archival trips had to be cancelled due to the pandemic. As a result, the work relies more heavily than originally planned on newspaper sources, which are now available in large numbers as digitized copies and can be accessed from home. Overall, the project funding made it possible to comprehensively analyze the global debates on the history of terrorism around 1900. In the course of the research, the Russian Empire increasingly emerged as a key point of reference for the work. In the period under investigation, Russia became the focal point of global debates about the causes, consequences, and legitimacy of terrorist forms of violence. To this day, the Russian Empire is considered the birthplace of modern terrorism. The first age of terrorism was global primarily in its media representation and in the consciousness of contemporaries. The project has shown that spectacular attacks of violence triggered public reactions that went far beyond the expectations of the perpetrators. The debates that followed the acts of violence thus point to deep intra-societal and international conflicts in the last decades before the outbreak of the First World War.
Publications
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A big difference? Irische und russische Revolutionäre in US-amerikanischen Karikaturen des 19. Jahrhunderts, in: Maria Rhode und Ernst Wawra (Hg.): Quellenanalysen für das Studium der Geschichtswissenschaften. Ein epochenübergreifender Leitfaden aus der Praxis für die Praxis, Paderborn 2020, S. 353–368.
Moritz Florin
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Ikonen der Gewalt. Eine visuelle Geschichte spektakulärer Gewaltereignisse im Russischen Reich, Westeuropa und den USA, 1881–1914, Vortrag auf dem 53. Deutschen Historikertag in München, 6.10.2021.
Moritz Florin
