Programmübersicht Kolloquium

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In the decades around 1900, people from the landed empires of Europe and Eurasia immigrated to the United States by the millions. When these immigrants from central and eastern Europe arrived in the United States they were apprehended, administratively and popularly, within a hierarchical, racialized ethnic classification. The creation of this ethnic tableau—its delimitation into distinct groups—was a historical process of the nineteenth century. In Austria-Hungary, it began as a nationalist project of self-codification for the attainment of political and cultural rights within the Habsburg imperial state. This project provided one of the founding contexts for the field of ethnography—independently of travel to exotic, faraway overseas lands.

This talk examines the connected history of ethnic, linguistic, and racial classification between two multi-ethnic states (Austria-Hungary and the United States) at a time when the issues of nationality and minority rights came to the forefront of global politics. I ask how the human sciences in later 19th century flowed into the administrative and legal classifications made by these two multi-ethnic states and debated in international diplomacy and civil society.