Research Area A Lives Beyond Borders (A10)

Lives Beyond Borders: Toward a Social History of Cosmopolitans and Globalization, 1880-1960

Project Leaders: Ines Prodöhl, Madeleine Herren-Oesch

This project culminated in a conference in Heidelberg in February 2010.

Behind all self-explanatory literature and source material published by busy internationalists between the 1870s and World War II, global history has missed to analyse the border crossing community as a category of a global social history. We have hardly any ideas on the conditions people needed to grasp the opportunity of a border crossing life, how they managed the coincidence of nationalism and social identity on one side and the increasing presence of the world by border crossing medias. A workshop at the German Historical Institute in Washington on February 12/13, 2009 brought together scholars specialised in different types of internationalists and cosmopolitans and prepared the intellectual framework for a book projects. Cluster and GHI shared the costs.