Kongressorte der Frühen Neuzeit im europäischen Vergleich. Der Friede von Baden (1714)

Der europäische Kontinent wurde im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert von zahlreichen Kriegen überzogen. Zugleich wurden mit dem Kongresswesen neue Formen des Friedensschließens erprobt. Der vorliegende Band zeigt ausgehend von den Verhandlungen in Baden 1714 und weiteren Beispielen aktuelle Forschungsperspektiven zur räumlichen »Verortung« dieser frühneuzeitlichen Friedenskongresse auf. In den Gastorten bildeten diese von adliger Kultur geprägten Großveranstaltungen vorübergehende Fremdkörper, was aber nicht das Fehlen von Interaktionen mit den lokalen Gesellschaften bedeutete. Die Beherbergung zahlreicher Menschen unterschiedlichen Standes und Glaubens stellte für die gastgebenden Städte einerseits eine beträchtliche Herausforderung und Belastung dar. Andererseits bot sich damit für sie die Möglichkeit, sich in der europäischen Fürstengesellschaft zu positionieren. Die Frage nach den politischen und rechtlichen Voraussetzungen für die Wahl als Kongressort weist schließlich über den Kontext der einzelnen Städte hinaus und führt zu einer Geschichte frühneuzeitlicher Neutralisierungspraktiken.

Rückblicke auf Friedrich Wilhelm IV., König von Preußen, und was haben wir von seiner Wahl zum deutschen Kaiser zu erwarten? Friedrich Wilhelm IV., König von Preußen ist geboren im Jahre 1795 ...

Welsch (Projektbearbeiter): Die Wahl Friedrich Wilhelms IV. zum deutschen Kaiser ist eine "unauslöschliche Schmach", an seinen Händen klebt 'Bürgerblut'

William Harvey revisited

William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood is often described as a product of the Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century. Modern research has, however, shown thatHarvey followed the Aristotelian research tradition and thus tried to reveal the purpose of the organs through examination of various animals. His publication of 1628 has to be read as an argument of natural philosophy, or, more precisely, as a series of linked observations, experiments and philosophical reasonings from which the existence of circulation has to be deduced as a logical consequence. Harvey did not consider experiments as superior to philosophical reasoning nor intended he to create a new system of medicine. He believed in the vitality of the heart and the blood and rejected Francis Bacon's empirism and the mechanistic rationalism of Descartes. Harvey's contribution and originality lied less in his single observations and experiments but in the manner how he linked them with critical reasoning and how he accepted, presented and defended the ensuing radical findings.

William Poel [Illustration] : (Porträt)

Alfred A. Wolmark

Professor William Wolf

A. Friedmann

Prof. William Wolf [Illustration] : (Porträt)

Scan von Monochrom-Mikroform

Antwort des Reverend William Henry Hechler

William Hechler

"An attentive Ear, a watchful Eye, and a Calm judicious Pen": William Samuel Johnson, the Colonial Agents, and the Transformation of the British Atlantic World

By looking at Great Britain and the American colonies in conjunction with the larger British Atlantic Empire, historians can better understand the political, social, and cultural transformations that occurred when transatlantic actors met. William Samuel Johnson is an example of an "ordinary" agent who nonetheless had extensive contacts with numerous British and American thinkers. While acting on Connecticut's behalf in London between 1767 and 1771, he sent reports back to Connecticut governors Jonathan Trumbull and William Pitkin on parliamentary proceedings while corresponding with the people who traveled around the Atlantic world during this critical period-merchants, seafarers, emigrants, soldiers, missionaries, radicals and conservatives, reformers, and politicians. He is also representative of the late eighteenth-century empire writ large. Agents, who had once been a source of stability in the far-flung colonies, became a destabilizing force as confusion and conflict grew over conceptual ideas of what constituted "the empire" and who was included in it. Johnson was a sane observer in the midst of the ideological and administrative upheaval of the 1760's and 1770's. His subsequent loyalism and political obscurity during the war years was in many ways a result of his attempts to reconcile various factional interests during his tenure as an agent. Although he did his best to resolve these divisions and provide an accurate account of the powerful nationalistic forces gathering on both sides of the Atlantic on the eve of the American Revolution, the agents' collective failures as transatlantic mediators helped bring about the collapse of an imperial community. This disintegration had dramatic effects on the whole of the Atlantic world.