America 250: Lecture Series
Over the past two months, DAIS has had the pleasure of hosting a lecture series at Leipzig University in cooperation with American Studies Leipzig. Against the backdrop of the 250th anniversary of the United States, America 250: Society, History, and Politics offered four distinct historical perspectives on 1776 and beyond to better understand the United States in the past and present. The number of students and non-university guests who attended lecture after lecture, and the many questions the presenting scholars received after their presentations, showed that nuanced understandings of the U.S. remain sought after.
Dr. Frank Usbeck, Curator for the Americas at the Ethnographic Collections Saxony, opened the series with a lecture on “Indigenous America at 1776” to provide a historical overview of Native American sovereignty before and after 1776 and the relationships between Native nations and the government of the United States since.
In “1776: Pop Culture and Politics,” Prof. Dr. Charlotte Lerg, professor at LMU Munich, explored how pop culture and politics have lodged the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence in the memory, culture, and identity of the U.S., to reveal how memory and history become usable for nationalist propaganda.
Dr. Robert Zwarg elaborated in “Nature, Progress, Frontier” on the myth of founding and the so-called “westward expansion” during the 19th century. The latter still informs the U.S.’ understanding as a nation symbolically and ideologically, far beyond its impact on material conditions.
In the last lecture of the series, Prof. Dr. Heiko Beyer, professor of Sociology at HHU Düsseldorf, explored the three system parts of early sociology and how their historical development relates to the American Revolution, the American political experience, and frontier mythology, to argue that modern social thought partially originated in North America.
