David Blackbourn

The authors’ willingness to step outside the accepted realm of historiological discussion and question the Sonderweg ideas is itself a major contribution and achievement. Assumptions, they said, should not be taken as fact, and further discussion was required before facts were able to be presented. Their questioning of normalcy is a good example of their refusal to accept assumptions at face value. Their ability to “think out of the box” in terms of just what constituted a successful revolution also showed amazing dexterity in thought and argumentation.… (meer)

2672 Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany, by David Blackbourn (read 3 Nov 1994) Till I saw this book I had never heard of Marpingen. In 1876 in Marpingen in the Saar in Germany, three young girls (age 8) said they saw the Blessed Virgin! This entire book, by an Englishman born in 1949 and now a Harvard history professor, is devoted to these alleged apparitions. They were never accepted by any official Church study--though they were never publicly condemned by any bishop. It is a fascinating account, and even though this is a very balanced book, I found myself attracted to the people who believed in the validity of the visions. The heavy-handed efforts of Bismarck's Kulterkamp to stifle the innocent faith of the believers was part of what attracted me. The visionaries all went into convents, and did not live long. The main one made a written retraction--which was not made public at the time. This is a very carefully researched, heavily-footnoted book, and certainly a classic on the subject. There is a bibliography, listing many interesting-sounding books.… (meer)

4348. The Long Nineteenth Century A History of Germany, 1780-1918, by David Blackbourn (read 4 Aug 2007) This is a pretty formidable work, and it is decidedly not narrative or popular history, but is an analytically penetrating study of Germany's history during the years indicated. Some chapters are heavy in analyzing parts of history which have never excited my interest. But there are many things of interest in the book and the last two chapters, dealing with the German experience in World War I and its aftermath make the book worth reading even for a non-specialist like me. My rating of the book is higher after finishing it than it would have been during some of the dryer chapters. Blackbourn is a master historian.… (meer)