Teaching

Wer einen Unfall hat, kann damit rechnen, in kürzester Zeit von professionell geschultem Personal medizinische Hilfe zu erhalten. Rettung und Feuerwehr gelten als kritische Infrastruktur und werden regelmäßig unter die vertrauenswürdigsten Berufsgruppen gewählt. Am Ende des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts waren Rettungsdienste jedoch noch eine Neuheit. Rettungsorganisationen wurden meist von Freiwilligen gegründet und mit Pferdekutschen betrieben. Ursprünglich für die militärische Nutzung gedacht, entwickelten sich Rettungsdienste rasch zu zentralen Institutionen der öffentlichen und vor allem städtischen Gesundheitsversorgung. Dabei standen rasch Fragen im Zentrum, die Rettungsdienste heute noch beschäftigen etwa wieviel medizinische Hilfeleistung am Unfallort geleistet werden soll ("stay and play") und ab wann rascher Transport zur klinischen Versorgung ("scoop and run") angezeigt ist.

Als Teil eines expandierenden Netzwerks an Sozial- und Wohlfahrtseinrichtungen übernahmen Rettungsdienste Aufgaben in der Pandemie Prävention und Gesundheitsbildung. Rettungsdienste waren jedoch auch Instrumente staatlicher Macht und kooperierten regelmäßig mit Sicherheitskräften und Behörden. Dabei kamen schnell weitere medizin-ethische Fragen auf. Welche Rolle nimmt der Rettungsdienst in der Unterbringung psychisch Kranker ein? Wie verläuft die Kooperation mit Polizeibehörden und wo handeln Rettungsdienste gegen die Interessen der Patient:innen? Welche Rolle spielen Rettungsdienste in der Bekämpfung von Obdachlosigkeit und Armut? Wie beeinflussen Geschlechterverhältnisse die Tätigkeit des Rettungsdienstes? Diese Fragen und die historische Genese der Rettungsdienste diskutieren wir im Rahmen dieses Seminars anhand von Fallstudien aus Europa und Nordamerika sowie Primärquellen (Erste Hilfe Ratgeber, Fallgeschichten, Zeitungsartikeln).

Von den USA ausgehend hat sich seit den 1990er Jahren eine zunehmend aktivistische und häufig auf freiwilliger Tätigkeit basierende Form der präklinischen Straßenmedizin entwickelt. Diese zielt vor allem darauf ab Personen, die am Rande der Gesellschaft leben und häufig von Wohnungslosigkeit betroffen sind medizinisch zu versorgen. Dabei stehen ein niederschwelliger Zugang sowie ein multivektorieller Ansatz, der neben akutmedizinischen, auch sozial-medizinisch und psychiatrische Hilfe bietet, im Vordergrund. Ärzt:innen, Pflegepersonal, Sanitäter:innen und Sozialarbeiter:innen haben jedoch bereits am Ende des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts die Straße und den öffentlichen Raum als medizinisches Tätigkeitsfeld erkannt. Im Rahmen dieses Seminars beschäftigen wir uns mit den historischen Vorläufern der heutigen Street Medicine. Dabei stehen Fragen von Verantwortung, Patient:innenrechten und ethischem Handeln im Zentrum. An Hand historischer Quellen, aktueller Forschung und konkreten Beispielen diskutieren wir die Rolle von Street Medicine in Deutschland und den USA.

Wer einen Unfall hat, kann damit rechnen, in kürzester Zeit von professionell geschultem Personal medizinische Hilfe zu erhalten. Rettung und Feuerwehr gelten als kritische Infrastruktur und werden regelmäßig unter die vertrauenswürdigsten Berufsgruppen gewählt. Am Ende des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts waren Rettungsdienste jedoch noch eine Neuheit. Rettungsorganisationen wurden meist von Freiwilligen gegründet und mit Pferdekutschen betrieben. Ursprünglich für die militärische Nutzung gedacht, entwickelten sich Rettungsdienste rasch zu zentralen Institutionen der öffentlichen und vor allem städtischen Gesundheitsversorgung. Dabei standen rasch Fragen im Zentrum, die Rettungsdienste heute noch beschäftigen etwa wieviel medizinische Hilfeleistung am Unfallort geleistet werden soll ("stay and play") und ab wann rascher Transport zur klinischen Versorgung ("scoop and run") angezeigt ist.

Als Teil eines expandierenden Netzwerks an Sozial- und Wohlfahrtseinrichtungen übernahmen Rettungsdienste Aufgaben in der Pandemie Prävention und Gesundheitsbildung. Rettungsdienste waren jedoch auch Instrumente staatlicher Macht und kooperierten regelmäßig mit Sicherheitskräften und Behörden. Dabei kamen schnell weitere medizin-ethische Fragen auf. Welche Rolle nimmt der Rettungsdienst in der Unterbringung psychisch Kranker ein? Wie verläuft die Kooperation mit Polizeibehörden und wo handeln Rettungsdienste gegen die Interessen der Patient:innen? Welche Rolle spielen Rettungsdienste in der Bekämpfung von Obdachlosigkeit und Armut? Wie beeinflussen Geschlechterverhältnisse die Tätigkeit des Rettungsdienstes? Diese Fragen und die historische Genese der Rettungsdienste diskutieren wir im Rahmen dieses Seminars anhand von Fallstudien aus Europa und Nordamerika sowie Primärquellen (Erste Hilfe Ratgeber, Fallgeschichten, Zeitungsartikeln).

In this seminar, students embark on a road trip to major US cities. By exploring urban histories of the post-bellum United States, key themes of US history come into view. Moral panics and progressive reform efforts often played out in cities that became testing grounds for social policies. As cities expanded, due to an influx of immigrants from abroad and the Great Migration from the South to the North, they built new housing, public transport, and communal facilities. Yet not everybody got to access these amenities. Jim Crow segregation in education, housing, and employment persisted in cities that many saw as beacons of progress. Urban renewal, undertaken to ‘revitalize’ crumbling cities, also disadvantages and displaced Americans of color. Deindustrialization decimated well-paying jobs and made members of the New Deal coalition into Reagan Democrats. Yet, activists of various persuasions chose cities as their battle grounds to fight for civil, LGBTQ, and women’s rights. Finally, access to health care and adequate food sources, the war on drugs, and the Aids crisis became salient issues in urban centers toward the end of the twentieth century. On this journey students traverse the US from Philadelphia to Los Angeles and Seattle and from New Orleans via Tulsa to Chicago and engage with urban histories and primary sources on the way.

The United States holds a dubious record, being the nation that incarcerates and surveils the largest numbers of its own citizens worldwide. This phenomenon has been dubbed mass incarceration and the machinery behind it the prison industrial complex. Individual states and the federal government began to lock up Black and Brown men in disproportionate numbers in the 1970s and 80s. Those who found themselves imprisoned, however, quickly articulated elaborate critiques of a system that knew neither fairness nor justice. Prison organizers behind and beyond bars forged coalitions and staged large scale protests. One of the most iconic—the 1971 Attica uprising—has since been remembered as the onset of prison organizing. In subsequent years, activists formed networks with the explicit aim to abolish prisons; their calls transcended prison walls and national borders and still reverberate today. Over the course of this class, students will engage histories of activism and activist histories. Working with primary sources—including underground newspapers, prison writing, poetry, podcasts, art projects, and documentaries—will be a key feature of this class.

If we fall ill or have an accident, we expect to be picked up by emergency medical personnel and carried to a hospital. Ambulance services are considered critical infrastructure and first responders regularly receive high scores when it comes to the trust people place in professionals. At the beginning of the twentieth century, ambulances were, however, still a novelty in cities like Buenos Aires, London, Philadelphia, and Vienna. Developed as instruments of modern warfare, ambulances became integrated into cities’ expanding networks of welfare and medical institutions. This class takes a fresh look at ambulances, sidestepping their military role. Rather, it dissects ambulance associations’ ascendency as key pillars of urban public health. Students get to read scholarship and case studies from the Americas and Europe. Additionally, students will engage the transnational community of physicians that birthed professional first aid at international conferences. Themes that are highly relevant to the history of public health like gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race, coloniality, and health and disability serve as both the theoretical basis and continuous companions of this class.

In the advent of the “sexual revolution”, sex education became a widely discussed practice. Equipping children with knowledge about sexuality appeared to be a key rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. While progressive reformers wanted to expand sex education, many conservatives and faith groups opposed it citing concerns over a rise in promiscuous behavior and potential teenage pregnancies. Parents also asserted their right to determine what their kids should and should not learn. Triangulating the state’s interest in educating its young citizens, the rights of parents, and children’s rights to be informed and protected has been at the heart of debates about sex education. During this seminar, students engage a variety of topics that go beyond a narrow conception of sex education as a practice tied to the classroom. Students get to reflect on and discuss knowledge creation about sex, regulation of morality and sexuality via family counseling, and sex education policy in colonial contexts. Using different historical sources from sex manuals to oral histories, photographs, TV shows, and various print media, this seminar maps a global history of sex education and the ensuing panics it triggered from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

During this seminar we will discuss conservatives’ education activism over the last century in US history. Starting in the 1920s, we look at the debates that animated conservatives and made classrooms into prime battle grounds. A series of conflicts enticed conservatives into action: From the role that evolution should play in the classroom to questions over the legitimacy of desegregation and prayer to sex education and parental authority. We will engage controversies like the Scopes Trials, landmark court cases such as Brown v. Board of Education, conservative activists like Beverly LaHaye who promoted school prayer and opposed sex education, and neoconservative Education Secretary William Bennett. Although many of these debates gained national notoriety, they largely played out on the local level. Conservative activists drew considerable energy from fights against gay and lesbian teachers in Florida, school governance in California, parochial schools in Nebraska, and textbooks wars in West Virginia. Today, book bans and ‘Don’t say gay’-laws permeate throughout the US and far-right groups like Moms for Liberty fire up their membership by running for school boards and campaigning against certain curricular content. By engaging with the extensive scholarship on conservatism in education and working with primary sources, we historicize these debates spanning from the 1920s to the 2020s.

In this class we will closely examine prison activism in the United States and Europe. Starting in the nineteenth century, we will discuss transfers of knowledge on modern incarceration practices and resistance to these practices between Europe and the United States. Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, one of the early modern prisons, led Europeans to adopt prison reform and questions on the relationship between asylum and prison and abolitionist sentiments also crossed the Atlantic. In the twentieth century radical critiques of incarceration inspired activists in Europe and the US and birthed transnational prison activism. Finally, during the Covid pandemic, jails and prisons became fertile breeding grounds for the virus across the globe. Yet incarcerated peoples' resistance to abuse and neglect during the pandemic again aimed at transgressing prison walls and national borders. Over the course of this seminar, we will read histories of activism and activist history and engage various sources surrounding the complex of incarceration in the US and Europe.

Religious freedom has long been touted as the cornerstone of American democracy, however, in practice it is more often applied to protect the rights of Christians rather than religious minorities. Throughout the history of the Americas, Christian identity has functioned to rationalize the enslavement of Black bodies and the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples. In the contemporary climate, whiteness and Christianity coalesce in conservative evangelicals’ vision of “one nation, under God.” Pastors like Peter Peters preach the gospel of Christian Identity and white supremacists march with crosses in hand for a nation free of abortion, gays, and racialized Others. Over the course of this seminar, we will discuss where and how religion, racism, and conservative politics came to intersect to form the ideology which scholars such as Anthea Butler, Kristen Kobes Du Mez and Philip Gorski are calling white Christian nationalism. We will also discuss historical challenges and resistance to racism e.g., religious abolitionism, Black churches, and the importance of Christian belief in the Civil Rights movement. Starting in the revolutionary period we will read primary sources and key scholarship on race and religion in US history, politics, and culture.

Even before Donald Trump, Republican politics tilted heavily to the right. Evangelicals, Teapartyers, and neoconservative intellectuals wrestle over control of the Grand Old Party. The eclectic conservative movement only gained traction in the second half of the twentieth century; today large swaths of the United States remain steadfastly conservative. This class focuses on the conservative shift in contemporary US politics, culture, and history. The first sessions provide students with a historiographical overview on the conservative movement and introduce pivotal political figures like Ronald Reagan and Phyllis Schlafly. The following sessions will cover key topics that dominate the conservative discourse like family values, religion, racism, gun culture, criminal justice, masculinity, and the urban-rural divide. We explore a wide range of primary sources including newspapers, court cases, speeches, TV and radio spots. Understanding what conservatives believe in and how they operate is the main goal of this class.