Historisches Seminar
Prof. Dr. Heike Bungert
Chair for Modern and Contemporary History/North American History
III. Doctoral Candidates
Dissertation Project: "Symbolic Communication of Colonial and State Legislatures, c. 1760-1820" (working title)
The project examines the transformation of selected colonial legislative assemblies (colonial legislatures) into republican, “American” institutions (state legislatures) from the outbreak of the American Revolution to the 1820s.
Created in the 17th and 18th centuries as political counterweights to the royally appointed governors and to
represent settler interests, the legislative assemblies of the thirteen north American colonies came into conflict with the Crown during the struggle for independence. This tension culminated in the mid-1770s, when confrontations – either with the royal governors or with the increasingly radicalized and disillusioned populace – led to the dissolution of assemblies in almost all the colonies. Under the constitutions adopted between 1776 and 1780 by the newly declared “states,” legislatures were reestablished – larger and more ethnically, religiously, and socially diverse than before. Contrary to what many historians long believed, these new bodies did not simply inherit the widespread “political attachment” once given to their colonial predecessors.
Methodologically, the project, which is located at the intersection of constitutional history, political history and cultural history, draws on theoretical and empirical work on “constitutional culture(s)”, which understand constitutions as lived orders that are staged in regular practice and created through performative acts of communication. The project examines the significance of “symbolic communication” in the staging of authority, both within parliament and in interaction with the governed. Among the events examined are, for example, elaborate and costly inauguration ceremonies at the annual openings of parliament, but also the numerous controversies fueled by zealous newspaper editors over parliamentary privileges of individual members and allegedly unconstitutional observances of Thanksgiving Day by parliaments. It has already become apparent that the replacement and substitution of familiar and proven instruments of rule was not complete with the declaration of independence in 1776, nor with its military enforcement and recognition in 1783. Until well into the 19th century, Great Britain, from which the American states had broken away in a war lasting several years, remained just as much a point of reference as other European powers or British colonies in North America and the Caribbean, which remained part of the Empire after 1776.
The legislatures are understood as arenas for the negotiation of ideological conflicts in the post-revolutionary, post-war United States and serve as a prism for the broader social changes shaping the nascent nation.
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Heike Bungert
Dissertation Project: "Between Revolution and Red Scare: Russian-Language Periodicals in the United States, 1917 – 1941" (working title)
The dissertation project focuses on the Russian-language press published in the United States in the period between the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the US entry into the Second World War in 1941. On one hand, it deals with the newspapers and magazines as media organizations within the migrant society, on the other hand with the discourses that were conducted in them and thus created their own migrant media reality.
So-called Russian Americans and their Russian-language press in the USA often lived an ideological balancing act between their old and new homeland. On the one hand, in view of the standardization of the Soviet press in the 1930s, the Russian-American press offers an insight into the actual diversity of political views of the society outside the Russian borders that considered itself part of the Russian nation. On the other hand, against the background of the ethnic diversity of US society, the Russian-American press also shows a new perspective on the USA beyond the American mainstream media. In view of the so-called Red Scare, which led to surveillance and raids on Russian organizations in the United States and to the deportation of Russian-speaking people to the Soviet Union from 1919 onwards, the perspective on Russian-language media in the USA at that time seems particularly worthwhile.
Therefore, by examining migrant and exile media, the dissertation project aims to broaden the view of both Russian and US-American history and thus contribute to the current reevaluation of the East-West conflict in academic discourse and make a decisive contribution to historical migration and exile research.
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Heike Bungert