The Trans-Atlanticist

This episode is part of the ChicagoHamburg30 podcast series, celebrating the 30-year anniversary of the Chicago-Hamburg Sister-City Partnership. No industry shaped Chicago more decisively than the meatpacking industry, and no book exposed the rapacious, exploitative and vicious character of the meatpacking industry more than Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906). In this episode, we explore the origi...

Many of the EU's 370 million eligible voters from 27 countries went to the voting booths between 6 and 9 June 2024 in order to cast their votes for the European Parliament. In this episode, Andrew Sola and our resident EU expert Günter Danner discuss the EU Parliament, its powers, its role in the constellation of EU institutions, and its inner workings. Furthermore, they discuss the results of the...

This episode is part of the ChicagoHamburg30 podcast series, which celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Chicago-Hamburg Sister-City Partnership. Happy Pride Month! We celebrate with an episode about Queer Chicago featuring two historians of Queer History, Owen Keehnen and Timothy Stewart-Winter. Topics include the following: -The difficulties of accessing Queer history since it was repressed and...

This episode is part of the Amerikazentrum's ChicagoHamburg30 series, celebrating the 30-year anniversary of the Chicago-Hamburg Sister-City partnership. Happy Jewish American Heritage Month! In this episode, we explore the rich and complex history of Jewish Chicago, from the 1850s to the present. Topics include the following: -the first Jewish settlers and politicians in Chicago -the influence of...

This episode is part of the ChicagoHamburg30 podcast series, celebrating the 30-year anniversary of the Chicago-Hamburg Sister-City partnership. In this episode, Dominic Pacyga (Emeritus Professor of History, Columbia College Chicago) and Tobias Brinkmann (Malvin and Lea Bank Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History, Penn State) discuss the immigration of Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians and Lit...

This episode is part of the ChicagoHamburg30 podcast series, celebrating the 30-year anniversary of the Chicago-Hamburg Sister-City partnership. Learn more about the history and culture of Black Chicago with award-winning scholar Dr. Mary Pattillo, Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and Black Studies at Northwestern University. Topics include the difficulties in defining Black Chicago, which...

In the final episode of 2023, Sola and Danner look ahead to 2024. They discuss three issues that will influence a number of elections in 2024: the immigration crisis, the war in Ukraine, and the macroeconomic situation. They then use these issues as a lens to analyze five upcoming elections: the Russian presidential elections in March; the EU parliamentary elections in June; the east German state...

In our wrap-up of political developments in the EU in 2023, Sola and Danner discuss the results of the five big European elections this year in Italy, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. Are we seeing the entrenchment of the far-right across Europe? Or are centrist politicians regaining the advantage? The second topic is the European Council Summit that took place last week and that yield...

In the second of our two-episode series about Jane Addams, we continue telling the story of Hull House and Addams' impact on the development of the the city of Chicago. Addams was a keen advocate for worker's rights and helped mediate the labor unrest that had been shaking the city since the Haymarket Affair of 1886. We survey the long list of projects she supported from juvenile justice reform to...

"The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life." Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910) In the first of our two episodes on the life of Jane Addams, we learn about her formative years in a small farming village outside of Chicago, her education, and her relationship with her progressive Republican father...

Poet and scholar Lindsay Tuggle is Stefanie Schaefer’s guest in this episode. They talk about "solastalgia," the feeling of loss that occurs when you are "home" but your home is destroyed. This concept has acquired a new global relevance in the Anthropocene as a climate-related mental health concept. They also discuss solastalgia’s meanings as pathology and as a strategy for resilience. Lastly, th...

In Episode 4 of our history of Chicago, we discuss the continuing growth and then decline of German Chicago, which largely disappeared with America's entry into WWI in 1917. Topics include the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), which united the German community in Chicago; the importance of German-language newspapers, namely the Illinois Staats-Zeitung; the impact of the Great Chicago Fire (1871) on...

In Part 3 of our history, Dr. Sola and Dr. Wuepper, historian of German immigration, explore the first two waves of Germanic migrants to Chicago, the so-called Dreiziger (the 30-ers, the ones who arrived in the 1830s) and the Vierundachtziger (the 48-ers, or the ones who arrived due to the 1848 revolutions in various German-speaking states, duchies, and principalities in what is now modern Germany...

In the second episode of the series, Dr. Sola and his guests, Dr. Low (Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, Ohio State University-Newark) and Dr. Karamanski (Loyola University-Chicago) tell the story of the indigenous people of Chicagoland from the War of 1812 through their violent removal from the region. Specific topics include the various origin stories of the Potawatomi; the willingness of tribes to ac...

In the first episode of this series about Chicago history, Dr. Sola and his expert guests, Dr. Keating (North Central College) and Dr. Karamanski (Loyola University-Chicago) discuss the history of the indigenous people of Chicagoland from the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago through the War of 1812. Specific topics include the arrival of Paleo-Indians and the development of Mississippian cultur...

Stefanie Schäfer kicks off the new season of LadyFiction with her guest Katharina Motyl. They confront many difficult and complex questions about feminist solidarity with the Iran protests, imperial feminism, and the Western obsession with the burka as the only symbol of female oppression, liberation, freedom, or self-determination. Mohja Kahf's poem "My Body Is Not Your Battleground" provides a s...

It's turning into a hot summer in Europe. France is burning in protest after the killing of an ethnic teenager by the police. A Koran was torched in Stockholm, inflaming tensions with Turkey about Sweden's membership in NATO. The far-right AFD party won a local election in East Germany, stoking anti-immigrant tensions. And Ukraine continues to burn after 500 days of war. Andrew Sola and Günter Dan...

The past is present and the present is personal. With her guest, German American author and illustrator Nora Krug, Stefanie Schäfer talks about visualizing Timothy Snyder’s "On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century," about flowered wallpaper and swastika trees, and about dealing with German Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung as a West German 40-something in this day and age.

Narratives of immigration and identity formation are never fully told, and they change as we mature. In this episode, Stefanie Schäfer talks to author and activist Oksana Marafioti about her Romani-Armenian-Ukrainian background, her personal American success story, as well as her memoir project "All of Us Fragile and Brave." Touching on the "what" and the "how "of identity assemblage, they also tu...

In this episode, Lady Fiction returns to the First Lady mystique with a particular glance at 'the Jackie moment' with Oline Eaton, the author of "Finding Jackie. A Life Reinvented" (Diversion Books, 2023). They discuss the link between biography and 'capital H' historiography, the American craze around Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and the need for “just one more story” to get to the essence of this...

In this episode, Douglas Cowie and Adrienne Brown (University of Chicago) discuss the life and poetry of Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. They talk about her poems that document life in Chicago, "Kitchenette Building," "In the Mecca," "Chicago Picasso," and "The Wall," and unpack the social, economic, racial, cultural, and political history that informs her life and work. Please see t...

Andrew Sola provides a new introduction to this episode, originally published in 2021 to mark the end of the War in Afghanistan, by reflecting on the 20-year anniversary of the War in Iraq. What lessons can we learn from America's blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan? Has Russia avoided the same mistakes in its war against Ukraine? And if Russian has learned nothing, are there reasons for Ukraine to b...

Our first politics podcast of 2024 begins on a tragic note after the mass shooting in Hamburg, which claimed the lives of at least 7 victims and injured many more. The Amerikazentrum would like to express its heartfelt condolences to the victims' families and friends, as well as to the all of the citizens of Hamburg. After a discussion of gun laws in Germany, Sola and Danner turn to the concept of...

In this special Women's History Month episode, Stefanie Schäfer discusses gossip with American Studies Scholar Katrin Horn, head of the research project www.archivalgossip.com. Following the trajectories of American artists in Rome, and specifically the making of actress Charlotte Cushman's celebrity persona, they read the functions of gossip in 19th-century US magazines between the intimate and t...

In Episode 2 of A Better Democracy Is Possible, Antoine Vergne from Missions Publique and our sortition expert Ahmed Radi Teleb continue the conversation about new democracy initiatives. They highlight current efforts by the European Commission to engage citizens throughout the European Union in the EU decision-making process regarding issues such as the reduction of food waste and the future of t...