Prof. Dr. Mischa Honeck

Prof. Dr. Mischa Honeck researches and teaches the history of the United States of America at the intersections of global and national history. His work focuses on the diverse - often unequal - interactions of people, ideas, and goods from North America and other parts of the world. His publications span two centuries and pay particular attention to the categories of race, gender, ethnicity, childhood, youth, and empire.

Mischa Honeck is the author of two monographs. His first book, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848 (University of Georgia Press, 2011) examines the role of German revolutionary refugees of 1848 in the emergence of transnational abolitionist networks. His second book, Our Frontier Is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy (Cornell University Press, 2018) examines the global expansion of the Boy Scouts of America in the 20th century and exchange relationships of this largest U.S. boys' association with youth organizations in other world regions. He is also the co-editor of two edited volumes, Germany and the Black Diaspora and War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars.

Prof. Dr. Honeck received his PhD from the Faculty of Philosophy at Heidelberg University in June 2008 and his venia legendi for Modern and Contemporary History from the same institution in December 2016. He worked as a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC from 2011 to 2017. Upon his return from the United States, he joined the Institute of Historical Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin. From October 2018 to September 2019, he represented the Chair of Economic and Social History (Prof. Dr. Schneider) at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Mischa Honeck is currently working on a third book, supported by third-party funding from the German Research Foundation. The dissemination, appropriation, and significance of various rejuvenation techniques in the history of the United States from the late 18th century to the present are being examined. A central concern is to demonstrate historical conjunctures and connections between rejuvenation projects aimed at revitalizing individual bodies and those dedicated to the renewal of collective bodies (nations, empires, international orders).

Monographs

• Our Frontier Is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018).
• We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011).

Editorial

• "Mapping Modern Rejuvenation," Special Issue in Journal of Social History 53/4 (Summer 2020) [with Kristine Alexander and Isabel Richter].
• War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019) [with James Marten].
• "Transnational Generations: Organizing Youth in the Cold War, 1945-1980," Special Forum in Diplomatic History 38/2 (2014) [with Gabriel Rosenberg].
• Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250-1914 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013) [with Martin Klimke and Anne Kuhlmann].

Essays in journals and professional portals.

• "Summer Camps and US Empire," U. S. Studies Online: Forum for New Writing, November 10, 2020, https://usso.uk/14688-2/
• "An Uphill Battle: The U.S. Civil War in German Historiography," Civil War History 66/2 (June 2020): 161-167.
• "Mapping Modern Rejuvenation: An Introduction," Journal of Social History 53/4 (Summer 2020) [with Kristine Alexander and Isabel Richter]: 875-888.
• "Rubble and Rebirth: Postwar Rejuvenation and the Erasure of History," Journal of Social History 53/4 (Summer 2020): 889-905.
• "Youth Organizations," version 1.0, Docupedia Contemporary History,May 16, 2019, http://docupedia.de/zg/Honeck_ youth_organizations_v1_en_2019
• "Youth Organizations," version: 1.0, Docupedia Contemporary History, 2018-10-22, http://docupedia.de/zg/Honeck_ youth_organizations_v1_en_2018.
• "Playing on Uncle Sam's Team: American Childhoods during World War I," Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era 17/4 (2018): 677-690.
• "The Power of Innocence: Anglo-American Scouting and the Boyification of Empire," History and Society 42/3 (2016): 441-466.
• "Men of Principle: Gender and the German-American War for the Union," Journal of the Civil War Era 5/1 (March 2015): 38-67.
• "Transnational Generations: Organizing Youth in the Cold War," Diplomatic History 38/2 (2014): 233-239 [with Gabriel Rosenberg].
• "An Empire of Youth: American Boy Scouts in the World, 1910-1960," Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 52 (Spring 2013): 95-112.
• "Abolitionists from the Other Shore: Radical German Immigrants and the Transnational Struggle to End American Slavery," Amerikastudien/American Studies 2011 (56/2): 10-48.
• "'Freemen of all Nations, Bestir Yourselves': Felice Orsini's Transnational Afterlife and the Radicalization of America," Journal of the Early Republic 30 (Winter 2010): 587-615.
• "Free-Soilers and Forty-Eighters: The Anglo- and German-American Campaign Against Slavery in Western Texas, 1854-1856," Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association (2007): 41-51.
• "In Pursuit of 'Freedom': African-, Anglo-, and German-American Alliances in the Abolition Movement," Bulletin of the German Historical Institute38(2006): 99-117.

Essays in edited volumes

• "War and Conflict," in A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age, ed. by Kristine Alexander and Simon Sleight (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 195 - 216 [with Aaron William Moore].
• "War and Gender: Nineteenth-Century Wars of Nations and Empires - an Overview," in Oxford Handbook of Gender and War in the Western World since 1600, ed. by Karen Hagemann, Stefan Dudink, Sonya O. Rose (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 227-267 [with Karen Hagemann and Stefan Dudink].
• "Friends of the Free World: The Boy Scouts and the Juvenilization of America's Cold War Empire," in Growing Up America: Youth and Politics since 1945, edited by Susan Eckelmann, Sara Fieldston, and Paul Mokrzycki Renfro (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2019), 36-53.
• "More than Victims: Framing the History of Modern Childhood and War," in War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars, ed. by Mischa Honeck and James Marten (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 1-14.
• "The Senator and His Satirist: Carl Schurz, Thomas Nast, and the Ethnicization of Political Humor," in American Counter/Publics, ed. by Ulla Haselstein et al, (Heidelberg, Winter: 2019), 191-208.
• "Good Soldiers, All? Democracy and Discrimination in the Boy Scouts of America, 1941-1945," in War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars, ed. by Mischa Honeck and James Marten (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 128-146.
• "Why We Fight: German American Revolutionists Confront Slavery and Secession," in Congress and the People's Contest: The Conduct of the Civil War, ed. by Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon (Athens, Oh.: Ohio University Press, 2018), 163-184.
• "Garibaldi's Shirt: Fashion and Making and Unmaking of Revolutionary Bodies, 1848-1865," in Transatlantic Revolutionary Cultures, 1789-1861, ed. by Helena Toth and Charlotte Lerg (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2018), 140-169.
• "Uprooted Emancipators: Transatlantic Abolitionism and the Politics of Belonging," in The Transnational Significance of the American Civil War, ed. by Jörg Nagler, Marcus Gräser, and Don Doyle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 109-126.
• "Liberating Sojourns? African American Travelers in Mid-Nineteenth Century Germany," in Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250-1914, edited by Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 153-168.
• "Introduction," in Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250-1914,1-15 [with Martin Klimke and Anne Kuhlmann].
• "A Cheer for Free Labor Cotton: Transatlantic Antislavery Economies and Mid-Nineteenth Century Reform," in American Economies, edited by Eva Bösenberg, Reinhard Isensee, and Martin Klepper (Heidelberg: Winter, 2012), 181-198.
• "An Unexpected Alliance: August Willich, Peter H. Clark, and the Abolitionist Movement in Cincinnati," in Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange, edited by Larry A. Greene and Anke Ortlepp (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 17-36.
• "Edward P. Jones, The Known World," in Twenty-Two American Novels from the New Century: Essays in Literary Criticism for Introduction, edited by Dietmar Schloss and Heiko Jakubzik (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2009), 189-198.
• "Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved," in Twenty-two American Novels, 167-180.
• "'Towards a More Fortunate Land': Christoph Daniel Ebeling and the American Republic," in Transatlantic Negotiations, edited by Christa Buschendorf and Astrid Franke (Heidelberg: Winter, 2007), 41-59.