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Transnational. Schweizer im Amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg und die Genese der Republik
Journal
Schweizerisches Jahrbuch für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte
Volume
34
Pages / Article-Number
189-206
Keywords
transnational historiography, US history, History of Switzerland, migration, Civil War, Rudolf Aschmann, intersectionality, gender, race, materiality, class, identity, otherness, historiography
Abstract
Based on the study of lives of one hundred Swiss fighters in the U.S. Civil War , this essay presents three theses as the foundation for a topical transnational Swiss historiography: Firstly, transnational (Swiss) history traces human and material circulations in multiple directions. Thereby the essay draws the attention to the complicated entanglements resulting from people and objects moving not only away , but also back (and maybe away again). Secondly, race, gender and class are essential drivers of transnational Swiss history. Swiss people moved to other places with ideas of - as in this case - race, acted along those concepts and learned how to adapt them to the new situation abroad. Later on, these modified understandings travelled back with their bearers and influenced Swiss cultures of identity and otherness. Intersectionality is transnational, respectively trans- nationalism is intersectional. Thirdly, we need more transnational history from below , because the large scale research focus, the search for the one, matching example and the resulting production of global narratives risk to suppress those stories, that don't fit, which from a historiographical and a political perspective is unsatisfactory. Each of these three theses are illustrated with examples in the article.
