Lehrende/r: Torsten Kathke
Veranstaltungsart: Seminar
Anzeige im Stundenplan: 05.866.210
Semesterwochenstunden: 2
Unterrichtssprache: Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 45
Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches: The twin transportation and communications revolutions of the railroad and the telegraph spread across the world at an increasing speed during the second half of the nineteenth century. But they did not do so in a vacuum: government, corporations, the scientific establishment, and individual boosters, inventors, and entrepreneurs all played parts – sometimes cooperating, sometimes at odds with each other in myriad ways. This class looks at the time period from ca. 1830 to the beginning of the First World War, an era in which the act of “Wiring the World“ (Simone M. Müller, 2016) was in full swing. Telegraphy and rail connections often, but not always, went hand in hand, and especially in the early stages, and later in the century in the American West, the connection of remote places into these “Networks of Modernity” (Jean-Michel Johnston, 2021) involved but also changed local communities to unprecedented degrees at a dizzying speed. We begin with a survey of the origins of long-distance travel and communication in a transnational perspective centered on the United States, and during the course of the class ask, among other questions: Who were the agents of change introducing and making use of new communication technologies in the nineteenth-century U.S.? How did faster communication affect the nation as a whole, and specific people or groups of people within it? What cultural repercussions did the information revolution that culminated into what Tom Standage has called, only somewhat facetiously, “The Victorian Internet” (1998/2014) have, and how where these expressed in literature, philosophy, or the arts? And finally, what aspects of this sea change in communication and media can be of use to us today in terms of a history of the present?
Zusätzliche Informationen: Guest lecture: Sean Theriault, University of Texas at Austin. "The Senate, the Media, and Trump" July 11, 2023.
