Working group for modern social history
The working group for modern social history is a historical-scientific discussion forum, which is organized as an association today and which aims to critically examine questions of modern social history , especially the structural changes in society since the 18th century.
The working group was founded in 1957 by Werner Conze in Heidelberg and was based on his concept of social history as a structural history . Initially it was linked to the Institute for Economic and Social History, which was newly founded in Heidelberg. Initially, only a few established historians such as Otto Brunner and Theodor Schieder were involved, but young historians such as Reinhart Koselleck , Wolfgang Köllmann , Wolfram Fischer and Wolfgang Zorn soon joined. Since 1962 the working group has published research results in the series Industrial World .
The working group strives for the interdisciplinary cooperation of social and economic history, cultural, religious, legal and constitutional history as well as the exchange with neighboring social sciences. The general themes that the circle sets for itself included “workers and labor movements” in the 1970s and the “social history of the family” and the “history of the educated bourgeoisie” in the 1980s. During the 1990s, the group mainly discussed the “Social History of Europe in the 20th Century” and in the 2000s “Work from a Global Perspective”. Since 2014 he has been dealing with the main topic " Capitalism ".
To this end, the AK organizes regular conferences, currently a spring and autumn conference at the Center for Contemporary History Research in Potsdam. The chairman is Ulrike von Hirschhausen , University of Rostock, her deputy is Sebastian Conrad , FU Berlin.
The working group is regarded on the one hand as an “innovative minority phenomenon” in German post-war history and, on the other hand, as an important factor in the development of socio-historical approaches that have been established since the 1960s. The basic work published by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, the lexicon " Basic historical concepts ", was conceptually developed and largely written by the members of the working group.
literature
- Ulrich Engelhardt: Concepts of “social history” in the working group for modern social history. A look back . Klartext-Verlag, Essen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89861-908-0 .
- Werner Conze: The founding of the working group for modern social history . In: Hamburg Yearbook for Economic and Social Policy 24, 1979, pp. 23–32.
- Winfried Schulze, German History after 1945, Munich 1989, pp. 254–265.
Web links
- Homepage of the AK for modern social history.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jin-Sung Chun: The Image of Modernity in the Post-War Period . The West German "structural history" in the field of tension between criticism of modernity and scientific innovation 1948–1962 . Oldenbourg, Munich 2000, ISBN 978-3-486-56484-6 , p. 145.
- ^ Industrial world: newer volumes at Böhlau-Verlag. Retrieved August 15, 2018 .
- ^ Working group for modern social history eV - conferences. Retrieved January 20, 2019 (German).
- ^ Working group for modern social history eV - members. Retrieved January 25, 2020 (German).
- ^ Jürgen Kocka: Werner Conze and the social history in the Federal Republic of Germany . In: Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Studium 37, 1986, pp. 595–602, here p. 596.