Simon Wendt

Barbara Korte

Nicole Falkenhayner

Heroes and heroic discourse have gained new visibility in the twenty-first century. This is noted in recent research on the heroic, but it has been largely ignored that heroism is increasingly a global phenomenon both in terms of production and consumption. This edited collection aims to bridge this research void and brings together case studies by scholars from different parts of the world and diverse fields. They explore how transnational and transcultural processes of translation and adaptation shape notions of the heroic in non-Western and Western cultures alike. The book provides fresh perspectives on heroism studies and offers a new angle for global and postcolonial studies.

Heroism as a Global Phenomenon in Contemporary Culture

In this comprehensive history of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), one of the oldest and most important women's organizations in United States history, Simon Wendt shows how the DAR's efforts to keep alive the memory of the nation's past were entangled with and strengthened the nation's racial and gender boundaries. Taking a close look at the DAR's mission of bolstering national loyalty, Wendt reveals paradoxes and ambiguities in its activism. While the Daughters engaged in patriotic actions long believed to be the domain of men and challenged male-centered accounts of U.S. nation-building, their tales about the past reinforced traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, reflecting a belief that any challenge to these conventions would jeopardize the country's stability. Similarly, they frequently voiced support for inclusive civic nationalism but deliberately shaped historical memory to consolidate white supremacy. Using archival sources from across the country, Wendt focuses on the DAR's most visible work after its founding in 1890--its commemorations of the American Revolution, western expansion, and Native Americans. He also explores the organization's post-World War II history, a time that saw major challenges to its conservative vision of America's "imagined community." This book sheds new light on the remarkable agency and cultural authority of conservative white women in the twentieth century.

The Daughters of the American Revolution and Patriotic Memory in the Twentieth Century

Brian D. Behnken

Crossing Boundaries: Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in a Transnational World, edited by Brian D. Behnken and Simon Wendt, explores ethnic and racial nationalism within a transnational and transcultural framework in the long twentieth-century (late nineteenth to early twenty-first century).

Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in a Transnational World

Crossing Boundaries

Pablo Dominguez Andersen

Masculinities and the Nation in the Modern World provides fresh perspectives on the connections between gender and the nation by focusing on the role of masculinities in various processes of nation-building in the modern world between the early nineteenth century and the 1960s. This edited volume calls attention to the myriad ways in which nationalized hegemonic masculinities were produced and perpetuated in Western societies by adding a new analytical dimension, suggesting that "marginal" white masculinities frequently constituted an in-between category that helped strengthen dominant ideals of gendered nationalism. Masculinities and the Nation in the Modern World also highlights the ambiguities of hegemonic masculinities regarding the nation in transnational contexts created by colonialism, imperialism, and their legacies. Although transnational processes of exchange, translation, and adaptation allowed Western nations to subdue and marginalize non-Western and non-white masculinities, a closer look at these processes reveals how marginalized men could not only retain agency vis-à-vis Western nation-building efforts but also creatively adapt Western nationalism in their attempts to construct their own gendered "imagined communities."

Between Hegemony and Marginalization

Masculinities and the Nation in the Modern World

Manfred Berg

Emphasizing the global nature of racism, this volume brings together historians from various regional specializations to explore this phenomenon from comparative and transnational perspectives. The essays shed light on how racial ideologies and practices developed, changed, and spread in Europe, Asia, the Near East, Australia, and Africa, focusing on processes of transfer, exchange, appropriation, and adaptation. To what extent, for example, were racial beliefs of Western origin? Did similar belief systems emerge in non-Western societies independently of Western influence? And how did these societies adopt and adapt Western racial beliefs once they were exposed to them? Up to this point, the few monographs or edited collections that exist only provide students of the history of racism with tentative answers to these questions. More importantly, the authors of these studies tend to ignore transnational processes of exchange and transfer. Yet, as this volume shows, these are crucial to an understanding of the diffusion of racial belief systems around the globe.

Historical Perspectives on Cultural Transfer and Adaptation

Racism in the Modern World

Martin Thunert

Till Karmann

Tobias Endler

Als Tag der Terroranschläge auf New York und Washington ist der 11. September 2001 unvergessen. Aber war 9/11 „ein Tag, der die Welt veränderte“? Die AutorInnen hinterfragen bisherige historische und politologische Einordnungsversuche und zeichnen die Entwicklungen bis zum Sommer 2015 nach, um neue Forschungsdiskussionen anzustoßen und die transatlantischen Dimensionen des 11. September aufzuzeigen. Zeitenwende 9/11? strebt eine transatlantische Bilanz knapp anderthalb Dekaden nach den Ereignissen an. Es wird untersucht, welche historische Bedeutung das Datum 11. September in vergleichender transnationaler und multidisziplinärer Perspektive hat. Die Autoren bieten Antworten an auf die Frage, ob die Geschehnisse dieses Tages in der Innen- und Außenpolitik, aber auch der Medienlandschaft Europas und der USA so tiefgreifende Wandlungsprozesse angestoßen haben, dass man von einer „Zeitenwende“ sprechen kann.

Eine transatlantische Bilanz

Zeitenwende 9/11?

Masculinities and the Nation in the Modern World sheds new light on the interrelationship between gender and the nation, focusing on the role of masculinities in various processes of nation-building in the modern world between 1800 and the 1960s.

Table of Contents Introduction: Studying Everyday Heroism in Western Societies Simon Wendt 7 "Our Heroes of To-day": The Royal Humane Society and the Creation of Heroes in Victorian Britain Craig Barclay 25 Everyday Heroism for the Victorian Industrial Classes: The British Workman and The British Workwoman, 1855-1880 Christiane Hadamitzky and Barbara Korte 53 Everyday Heroism in Britain, 1850-1939 John Price 79 Volunteers and Professionals: Everyday Heroism and the Fire Service in Nineteenth-Century America Wolfgang Hochbruck 109 Narratives of Feminine Heroism: Gender Values and Memory in the American Press in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Janice Hume 139 Heroic Ordinariness after Cavell and Capra: Hollywood Cinema and Everyday Heroism in the Interwar Period and World War II Matthias Grotkopp 167 Everyday Socialist Heroes and Hegemonic Masculinity in the German Democratic Republic, 1949-1989 Sylka Scholz 185 Everyday Heroes in Germany: Perspectives from Cultural Anthropology Silke Meyer 217 After Watergate and Vietnam: Politics, Community, and the Ordinary American Hero, 1975-2015 William Graebner 235 "It Must Have Been Cold There In My Shadow": Everyday Heroism in Superhero Narratives Michael Goodrum 249 After the Working-Class Hero: Popular Music and Everyday Heroism in the United States in the Twenty-First Century Martin Luthe 271 Notes on Contributors 291

Everyday Heroism in the United States, Germany, and Britain, 1800-2015

Extraordinary Ordinariness

Gregory D. Smithers

Contributions by Tunde Adeleke, Brian D. Behnken, Minkah Makalani, Benita Roth, Gregory D. Smithers, Simon Wendt, and Danielle L. Wiggins Black intellectualism has been misunderstood by the American public and by scholars for generations. Historically maligned by their peers and by the lay public as inauthentic or illegitimate, black intellectuals have found their work misused, ignored, or discarded. Black intellectuals have also been reductively placed into one or two main categories: they are usually deemed liberal or, less frequently, as conservative. The contributors to this volume explore several prominent intellectuals, from left-leaning leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois to conservative intellectuals like Thomas Sowell, from well-known black feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins to Marxists like Claudia Jones, to underscore the variety of black intellectual thought in the United States. Contributors also situate the development of the lines of black intellectual thought within the broader history from which these trends emerged. The result gathers essays that offer entry into a host of rich intellectual traditions.

Simon Wendt

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