Young Scholar Writing Seminar: How to Write a Good Article for a History Journal?

This virtual event is co-sponsored by North Carolina German Studies.

I: Introduction:

How to Write a Good History Journal Article?

MONICA BLACK is Associate Professor at the Department of History at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Her research focuses on Modern Germany and Europe with an emphasis on the era of the World Wars and the decades immediately after 1945. She is the Editor of the journal Central European History. Her books include: Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (2010); A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany (2020).

II: Presentation by the Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize Winner for Advanced Graduate Students in 2021:

A “Child Export”: the Swabian Children at the Austro-German Border, 1897-1914
Inspired by a long-brewing moral panic, a regional coalition of state actors ordered the removal of dozens of so-called “Swabian Children” back across the Austro-German border in 1911. These extraditions embedded Austrian sovereignty in the very bodies of these migrants, while simultaneously abrogating parents’ rights as legal guardians. In drafting these reforms absent corresponding legislation from the imperial centers, these bureaucrats demonstrated their capacity as agents of meaningful legal change. This paper explores how, spurred to outrage about this purported “child export,” state actors at the local level wielded the vast powers of the provincial state to exert control over these children and their families. And by introducing the possibility of physical removal, they transformed the Swabian Children into a truly transnational migration regime. This was thus the moment at which the national categories of Austria and Germany finally mattered more than regional ones like Swabia, Tyrol, or Vorarlberg.

JOHNATHON SPEED is a PhD Candidate in History at Vanderbilt University, where he is writing a dissertation on the peculiar Alpine child migrants known as the “Swabian Children.” His research was supported by the Institute for European History (IEG) at Mainz and the Free University of Berlin. His research interests focus on the intersection of the history of childhood and youth, migration studies, and legal history in Central Europe since the nineteenth century.