Andrew Zimmerman
Biographic Data
| ID | 256664 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Andrew Zimmerman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Andrew |
| FAMILY NAME | Zimmerman |
| SIGNATURE | ZIMMERMAN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Washington University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4328-8115 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 218 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Scientific Seeing: Commodities, Curiosities, and Anthropological Objects
The Royal Museum of Ethnology (Königliches Museum f ür Völkerkunde), which opened in 1886 in Berlin, was intended to stabilize the bodies and the possessions of the colonized as natural scientific objects. However, the moment curators broke open the shipping crates packed with scientific cargo from every part of the globe, these objects became enmeshed in new interpretive struggles within the urban culture of Berlin. To retain the bodies and poss…
Agency, Politics, and the “Impossible Domestic”: A Response to Walter Johnson’s “On Agency”
Walter Johnson’s point about “agency” can be extended to other central concepts of historical analysis: what might appear as a salutary extension of a foundational category of liberal democracy to the histories of enslaved people in fact forces those histories into frameworks that are, ultimately, those of enslavers. The interconnected insights of Black feminism and Queer theory—particularly about “domestic institutions”—suggest that politics is …
Even the dead will not be safe
Civil War History beyond the Gender Binary
Book Review| May 01 2021 Civil War History beyond the Gender Binary Andrew Zimmerman Andrew Zimmerman ANDREW ZIMMERMAN is professor of history at George Washington University. Their recent research has focused on the global history of the US Civil War, Reconstruction, and the New South. They are the author of Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (2010) and the editor of The Civil War i…
History, Theory, Poetry
The “Theses on Theory and History” call, crucially, for a two-way relationship between history and theory, for “theoretically grounded history and historically grounded theory”: history grounded by theory, not merely decorated, as with a clever epigraph, or even just informed, borrowing a concept or an analytic gesture; theory grounded by history, not merely contextualized.The “Theses” specify what history gains from this two-way relationship wit…
Guinea Sam Nightingale and Magic Marx in Civil War Missouri: Provincializing Global History and Decolonizing Theory
Research Article| October 01 2018 Guinea Sam Nightingale and Magic Marx in Civil War Missouri: Provincializing Global History and Decolonizing Theory Andrew Zimmerman Andrew Zimmerman Andrew Zimmerman is Professor of History at George Washington University. He completed this article while a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is currently at work on a transnational history of the U.S. Civil …
Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones
Gareth Stedman Jones, like Jonathan Sperber in his own recent biography of Karl Marx, proposes “to put Marx back into his nineteenth-century surroundings” (5), leaping over the myriad posthumous interpretations of Marx’s life and thought. Yet this task is necessarily impossible for Stedman Jones, for he himself is an important part of this posthumous interpretative tradition.Stedman Jones was one of the leading historians who, in the 1980s, rejec…
The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order by Leon Fink
The Gilded Age has gained a new importance in US historical memory and imagination since the Occupy Wall Street movement drew national attention to the growing disparities between the wealthiest 1 percent and everybody else. Many have concluded that we now live in a second Gilded Age, and it thus makes sense that historians turn their attention to the first one for parallels to, and even lessons for, our present era. In The Age of Acquiescence: T…
Race against Revolution in Central and Eastern Europe
Racism and racial “science” emerged in Europe as an elite response to a worldwide wave of rural insurgencies that began in the era of the French and Haitian Revolutions and continues, in its own way, to this day. In his dialectic of lord and bondsman, g.w.f. Hegel formulated political, economic, and biopolitical ideas from the uprisings occurring in his world, creating a now long-standing dialogue between dialectical theory, including Marxism, an…
AHR Conversation: History after the End of History: Reconceptualizing the Twentieth Century
Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism
Millions of laborers, from the Philippines to the Caribbean, performed the work of the United States empire. Forging a global economy connecting the tropics to the industrial center, workers harvested sugar, cleaned hotel rooms, provided sexual favors, and filled military ranks. Placing working men and women at the center of the long history of the U.S. empire, these essays offer new stories of empire that intersect with the “grand narratives” of…
Marxism, Modernity and Marginality
Since the October Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent century of revolutions in the global South, Marxism has been more at home in the margins – in what Immanuel Wallerstein described as the periphery and semi-periphery – than anywhere else. In the core capitalist countries, Marxism continues to have a great impact among intellectuals, but also often finds itself challenged by social and cultural theory grounded in a rhetoric of marginality, us…
Culture, Psyche and State Power
The discipline of anthropology has perhaps always been especially close to the exercise of state power, but, in the last two-thirds of the twentieth century, the nature of both anthropology and state power changed dramatically. This was a period when many anthropologists distanced themselves from earlier evolutionist accounts that traced a generalized human development from “primitive” to “civilized.” This evolutionist anthropology, as many schol…
Foucault in Berkeley and Magnitogorsk: Totalitarianism and the Limits of Liberal Critique
Returning to Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization almost two decades after its publication allows us to take stock, from a slight temporal distance, of the reception in our discipline of the work of Michel Foucault. Magnetic Mountain is the one of the books that came out of a project that Kotkin and a number of other students began under Foucault's direction at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983 (p. xviii). …
Measuring Skulls: The Social Role of the Antihumanist
Skulls were paradigmatic objects for German anthropologists both because they were perfect examples of the kind of data that they sought in all their studies and because their study required precise standardization. In reaching agreements about apparently mundane issues such as how to measure and how to draw a picture of a skull, anthropologists achieved consensus both about major theoretical issues and about their own social and epistemological …
Colonialism and the Limits of the Human: The Failure of Fieldwork
The first well-organized German anthropological field expedition, and one of the earliest such undertakings ever, was mounted in 1907–9 by the Royal Museum of Ethnology in cooperation with the German navy. Contrary to the armchair-to-field narratives ubiquitous in histories of anthropology, the development of fieldwork had little to do with a desire for the kind of empathetic participant observation associated with anthropology today. As long as …
The Secret of Primitive Accumulation: The Political Economy of Anthropological Objects
The exchanges that made up colonialism—exchanges of gifts, exchanges of commodities, and even exchanges of fire—both supplied anthropologists with objects and began the process of stripping those objects of their history. Perhaps like all exchanges they introduced a moment of instability that was particularly threatening for colonists and anthropologists. Even in the face of the overwhelming power exercised by colonists, the colonized often—inten…
German Sociology and Empire: From Internal Colonization to Overseas Colonization and Back Again
German Sociology and Empire: From Internal Colonization to Overseas Colonization and Back Again
Africa in Imperial and Transnational History: Multi-Sited Historiography and the Necessity of Theory
A multi-sited, but nonetheless locally grounded, transnational history breaks with older modes of imperial history that treated Africa as little more than a setting for the history of colonizers. More recently, critical approaches to imperial history have pointed to, but not adequately pursued, the treatment of colonizer and colonized as coeval subjects of history and objects of analysis. Historians of Africa and the diaspora, however, moved beyo…
Kolonialismus und ethnographische Sammlungen in Deutschland
‘What Do You Really Want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?’ Counterinsurgency and the Science Effect in Colonial Tanzania
‘What do you really want in German East Africa, Herr Professor ?’ was a question asked of the anthropologist Karl Weule by more than a few of his fellow passengers on board a ship bound for the German colony that is today Tanzania, in 1906. At least this was what Weule himself recalled after he returned from a journey during which he was caught up, and participated in, the counterinsurgency operations that followed one of the greatest anti-coloni…
Primitive Art, Primitive Accumulation, and the Origin of the Work of Art in German New Guinea
Research Article| April 01 2011 Primitive Art, Primitive Accumulation, and the Origin of the Work of Art in German New Guinea Andrew Zimmerman Andrew Zimmerman Andrew Zimmerman is associate professor of history at the George Washington University. He is the author of Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago, 2001) and Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, 2…
Max Weber in America
Three Logics of Race: Theory and Exception in the Transnational History of Empire
Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany
Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South
In 1901, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, sent an expedition to the German colony of Togo in West Africa, with the purpose of transforming the region into a cotton economy similar to that of the post-Reconstruction American South. Alabama in Africa explores the politics of labor, sexuality, and race behind this endeavor, and the economic, political, and intellectual links connecting Germany, Africa, and the southern United…
Decolonizing Weber
Max Weber was an imperialist, a racist, and a Social Darwinistic nationalist, and these political positions fundamentally shaped his social scientific work. Weber did not merely absorb the imperial...
Africa in Imperial and Transnational History: Multi-Sited Historiography and the Necessity of Theory
A multi-sited, but nonetheless locally grounded, transnational history breaks with older modes of imperial history that treated Africa as little more than a setting for the history of colonizers. More recently, critical approaches to imperial history have pointed to, but not adequately pursued, the treatment of colonizer and colonized as coeval subjects of history and objects of analysis. Historians of Africa and the diaspora, however, moved beyo…
What Do You Really Want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?' Counterinsurgency and the Science Effect in Colonial Tanzania
What do you really want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?' was a question asked of the anthropologist Karl Weule by more than a few of his fellow passengers on board a ship bound for the German colony that is today Tanzania, in 1906. At least this was what Weule himself recalled after he returned from a journey during which he was caught up, and participated in, the counterinsurgency operations that followed one of the greatest anti-colonial…
A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers
IN 1900, BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, the founder and principal of Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, sent three Tuskegee graduates under the leadership of a faculty member to establish an experimental cotton farm in German Togo. One of those graduates, John W. Robinson, founded a cotton school in the German colony in 1904 that trained hundreds of students, recruited from every region of the country, to grow cotton for the European market. German …
The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa
Three Logics of Race: Theory and Exception in the Transnational History of Empire
Anti-Semitism as Skill: Rudolf Virchow's Schulstatistik and the Racial Composition of Germany
One of the major events in the history of German anti-Semitism has been, if not entirely overlooked, then misunderstood and misrepresented. In the 1870s, the professor of medicine, liberal politician, and anthropologist, Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), directed a study of the skin, hair, and eye color of 6,758,827 German school children, a study that marked “Jews” and “Germans” as racially different and trained a generation of Germans to perceive the…
Agency, Politics, and the “Impossible Domestic”: A Response to Walter Johnson’s “On Agency”
Walter Johnson’s point about “agency” can be extended to other central concepts of historical analysis: what might appear as a salutary extension of a foundational category of liberal democracy to the histories of enslaved people in fact forces those histories into frameworks that are, ultimately, those of enslavers. The interconnected insights of Black feminism and Queer theory—particularly about “domestic institutions”—suggest that politics is …
History, Theory, Poetry
The “Theses on Theory and History” call, crucially, for a two-way relationship between history and theory, for “theoretically grounded history and historically grounded theory”: history grounded by theory, not merely decorated, as with a clever epigraph, or even just informed, borrowing a concept or an analytic gesture; theory grounded by history, not merely contextualized.The “Theses” specify what history gains from this two-way relationship wit…
Foucault in Berkeley and Magnitogorsk: Totalitarianism and the Limits of Liberal Critique
Returning to Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization almost two decades after its publication allows us to take stock, from a slight temporal distance, of the reception in our discipline of the work of Michel Foucault. Magnetic Mountain is the one of the books that came out of a project that Kotkin and a number of other students began under Foucault's direction at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983 (p. xviii). …
Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880–1945
1The George Washington University Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880–1945 Richard F.Wetzell Chapel HillUniversity of North Carolina Press 2000348$39.95
Looking beyond history: The optics of German anthropology and the critique of humanism
The Ideology of the Machine and the Spirit of the Factory: Remarx on Babbage and Ure
Tf, as historians have recently argued, the industrial revolution happened both later and more slowly than has previously been assumed, then we cannot explain early political economic texts commenting on this industrial revolution merely as ideological distortions of economic reality.' Indeed, our very understanding of ideology has largely been inspired by a tradition beginning with Marx's reading, especially in Capital, of classical political ec…
Legislating being: The spectacle of words and things in Bentham's Panopticon
Anti-Semitism as Skill: Rudolf Virchow's Schulstatistik and the Racial Composition of Germany
One of the major events in the history of German anti-Semitism has been, if not entirely overlooked, then misunderstood and misrepresented. In the 1870s, the professor of medicine, liberal politician, and anthropologist, Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), directed a study of the skin, hair, and eye color of 6,758,827 German school children, a study that marked “Jews” and “Germans” as racially different and trained a generation of Germans to perceive the…
Looking beyond history: The optics of German anthropology and the critique of humanism
Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany
Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany
What happens when manhood suffrage, a radically egalitarian institution, gets introduced into a deeply hierarchical society? In her sweeping history of Imperial Germany's electoral culture, Anderson shows how the sudden opportunity to democracy in 1867 opened up a free space in the land of Kaisers, generals, and Junkers. Originally designed to make voters susceptible to manipulation by the authorities, the suffrage's unintended consequence was to…
Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880–1945
1The George Washington University Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880–1945 Richard F.Wetzell Chapel HillUniversity of North Carolina Press 2000348$39.95
A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers
IN 1900, BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, the founder and principal of Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, sent three Tuskegee graduates under the leadership of a faculty member to establish an experimental cotton farm in German Togo. One of those graduates, John W. Robinson, founded a cotton school in the German colony in 1904 that trained hundreds of students, recruited from every region of the country, to grow cotton for the European market. German …
Decolonizing Weber
Max Weber was an imperialist, a racist, and a Social Darwinistic nationalist, and these political positions fundamentally shaped his social scientific work. Weber did not merely absorb the imperial...
What Do You Really Want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?' Counterinsurgency and the Science Effect in Colonial Tanzania
What do you really want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?' was a question asked of the anthropologist Karl Weule by more than a few of his fellow passengers on board a ship bound for the German colony that is today Tanzania, in 1906. At least this was what Weule himself recalled after he returned from a journey during which he was caught up, and participated in, the counterinsurgency operations that followed one of the greatest anti-colonial…
Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich
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The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa
Three Logics of Race: Theory and Exception in the Transnational History of Empire
Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South
In 1901, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, sent an expedition to the German colony of Togo in West Africa, with the purpose of transforming the region into a cotton economy similar to that of the post-Reconstruction American South. Alabama in Africa explores the politics of labor, sexuality, and race behind this endeavor, and the economic, political, and intellectual links connecting Germany, Africa, and the southern United…
Primitive Art, Primitive Accumulation, and the Origin of the Work of Art in German New Guinea
Research Article| April 01 2011 Primitive Art, Primitive Accumulation, and the Origin of the Work of Art in German New Guinea Andrew Zimmerman Andrew Zimmerman Andrew Zimmerman is associate professor of history at the George Washington University. He is the author of Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago, 2001) and Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, 2…
Max Weber in America
Kolonialismus und ethnographische Sammlungen in Deutschland
‘What Do You Really Want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?’ Counterinsurgency and the Science Effect in Colonial Tanzania
‘What do you really want in German East Africa, Herr Professor ?’ was a question asked of the anthropologist Karl Weule by more than a few of his fellow passengers on board a ship bound for the German colony that is today Tanzania, in 1906. At least this was what Weule himself recalled after he returned from a journey during which he was caught up, and participated in, the counterinsurgency operations that followed one of the greatest anti-coloni…
Measuring Skulls: The Social Role of the Antihumanist
Skulls were paradigmatic objects for German anthropologists both because they were perfect examples of the kind of data that they sought in all their studies and because their study required precise standardization. In reaching agreements about apparently mundane issues such as how to measure and how to draw a picture of a skull, anthropologists achieved consensus both about major theoretical issues and about their own social and epistemological …
Colonialism and the Limits of the Human: The Failure of Fieldwork
The first well-organized German anthropological field expedition, and one of the earliest such undertakings ever, was mounted in 1907–9 by the Royal Museum of Ethnology in cooperation with the German navy. Contrary to the armchair-to-field narratives ubiquitous in histories of anthropology, the development of fieldwork had little to do with a desire for the kind of empathetic participant observation associated with anthropology today. As long as …
The Secret of Primitive Accumulation: The Political Economy of Anthropological Objects
The exchanges that made up colonialism—exchanges of gifts, exchanges of commodities, and even exchanges of fire—both supplied anthropologists with objects and began the process of stripping those objects of their history. Perhaps like all exchanges they introduced a moment of instability that was particularly threatening for colonists and anthropologists. Even in the face of the overwhelming power exercised by colonists, the colonized often—inten…
German Sociology and Empire: From Internal Colonization to Overseas Colonization and Back Again
German Sociology and Empire: From Internal Colonization to Overseas Colonization and Back Again
Africa in Imperial and Transnational History: Multi-Sited Historiography and the Necessity of Theory
A multi-sited, but nonetheless locally grounded, transnational history breaks with older modes of imperial history that treated Africa as little more than a setting for the history of colonizers. More recently, critical approaches to imperial history have pointed to, but not adequately pursued, the treatment of colonizer and colonized as coeval subjects of history and objects of analysis. Historians of Africa and the diaspora, however, moved beyo…
Culture, Psyche and State Power
The discipline of anthropology has perhaps always been especially close to the exercise of state power, but, in the last two-thirds of the twentieth century, the nature of both anthropology and state power changed dramatically. This was a period when many anthropologists distanced themselves from earlier evolutionist accounts that traced a generalized human development from “primitive” to “civilized.” This evolutionist anthropology, as many schol…
Sociology (26 works) · History (24 works) · Political science (21 works) · History (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Archaeology (14 works) · German (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Philosophy (8 works)