Loading...
Please wait, while we are loading the content...
Similar Documents
A Period of Global Revolutions A Period of Global Revolutions Veranstalter:
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Berger, Stefan Weinhauer, Klaus |
| Copyright Year | 2018 |
| Abstract | Revolutions have traditionally been integral parts of national historical master narratives. Consequently, most research on the ‘Period of Global Revolutions’ from mid-1900s to mid1920s has focused on regional and local aspects of revolutions. However, the transnational dimension of revolutions during that time span was neglected. To reconsider the transnational aspects of revolutions, an international conference was held at Bielefeld University and the Institute for Social Movements in Bochum, funded by the Institute for Social Movements, the German Research Foundation and the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1288. International scholars spent three days discussing long term social and cultural changes connected to revolutions. In addition, they debated definitions and narratives of revolutions, and outlined the roles of competing social movements and practices of comparing in revolutionary moments. The contributions focused on Europe, Russia, South Africa, Mexico, Australia, the USA, as well as translocal and transnational transfers between these entities. The revised papers will be published in a special issue of a peer-reviewed historical journal. The organizers of the conference, STEFAN BERGER (Bochum) and KLAUS WEINHAUER (Bielefeld) offered guiding questions as framework for the discussion of the conference papers, which had been distributed beforehand: Did the time span under scrutiny mark a culmination point as well as an endpoint for political hopes, fears, and utopias, which were related to a proletarian revolution and rooted in the 19th century? Or was this period the beginning of revolutionary struggles, that were part and parcel of the global Cold War and the anti-colonial struggles of the second half of the 20th century? To what extent did the revolutionary movements face competition of other culturally and politically diverse social movements? Did transnational or translocal connections matter in their respective settings? WALTER ERHARD (Bielefeld), co-speaker of the SFB 1288, opened the conference by welcoming the participants to Bielefeld University, and by highlighting the important role of comparisons in revolutions. The United States did not experience a revolution from mid-1900s to mid-1920s. Nevertheless, SHELTON STROMQUIST (Iowa City) outlined three ‘revolutionary waves’ occurring between 1892 and 1922: first, the mass strikes and the populist revolt 18921896, second the laborer’s revolt and socialists’ advance 1909-1914, and third the wartime labor mobilization and postwar upheaval 1917-1922. Convincingly, Stromquist identified three ‘breakwaters’, on which the ‘revolutionary waves’ crashed upon. Consisting of employers’ mobilization and workingclass disfranchisement, ‘progressive’ reforms, wartime state repression and local class reckonings, these ‘breakwaters’ impeded the dynamics of revolutionary moments in the United States. MATT KERRY (Durham) discussed the Asturian October of 1934. So far, the historiography of the event mainly focused on the question, whether the ‘Asturian October’ was an ‘offensive’ or a ‘defensive’ insurrection, and whether it was a revolution at all. Arguing for a revolutionary nature of the Asturian October, Kerry showed that it brought a period of revolution to a close and at the same time initiated a particular wave of activism, defined as antifascism. Therefore, Kerry argued, the Asturian October resists easy categorization, as it is influenced by the Russian revolutionary insurrection of 1917 as well as an antifascist culture of the late 1930s. Klaus Weinhauer and Stefan Berger presented their contribution on social movements, transnational and translocal transfers, as well as narratives of revolution of the German Revolution. They showed that the German Revolution was not a planned, top-down revolution of the social democratic party, but a result of the breakdown of the German army and the German Reich, as well as the more |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/index.asp?id=7800&pn=tagungsberichte&type=tagungsberichte&view=pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
