Jonathan Sperber

Curator's Professor and Department Chair
Ph.D., University of Chicago
area: modern European history
office: 107 Read Hall
phone: 573-882-2068
email: sperberj@missouri.edu
office hours: Fall 2009: Mondays, 2:30 – 4:00; Wednesdays, 3:00 – 4:30
C.V. (in Word)

I was an undergraduate at Cornell University and went to graduate school at the University of Chicago, where I studied with Leonard Krieger, a once famous historian and now a completely forgotten figure. I received my Ph.D. from Chicago in 1980 and have been at MU since 1984, since 2003 as Curators’ Professor of History. In August 2005, I began a term as chair of the history department.

My scholarship is best described as social history, although there is plenty of political and religious history in it as well. My research and writing have dealt with nineteenth century Europe, and primarily Germany, although I have made occasional forays into the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and to other parts of the continent. One important focus of my work has been the history of religion. My first book, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth Century Germany (1984), was about popular religion, its social context, and its political ramifications. The essay “Kirchengeschichte or the Social and Cultural History of Religion?” Neue Politische Literature 43 (1998): 13-35, sums up my more recent thoughts on the topic.

Another central element of my scholarship has been the study of popular politics. One strand of this work involves the mathematical analysis of elections, the chief results of which, a study of general elections in Germany from 1871 to the First World War, was published as The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany (1997). Less forbidding and more extensive has been my work on the revolution of 1848. This began with a history of that revolution in western Germany: Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848-1849 (1991). I followed this up with a history of the 1848 revolutions in all of Europe, The European Revolutions, 1848-1851 (1994). A second, revised edition of this book appeared in 2005. A further follow up was a general history of Europe in the age of the French Revolution, Revolutionary Europe: 1780-1850 (2000). Most recently, I applied the insights from the study of the 1848 revolution to consider a twentieth century German revolution, the East German uprising of 1953. See the recent works list below.

From the mid-1990s onwards, I have been investigating another, somewhat different, social history topic, the interrelationship of property, family and the law in the everyday life of southwestern Germany during the nineteenth century. The chief source for this scholarship has been civil court records. When people sue each other, they reveal a lot of things they might have preferred to remain private, and provide historians with lots of interesting information unavailable elsewhere. Most of the results of this study appeared in 2005, Property and Civil Society in South-Western Germany, 1820-1914, published by Oxford University Press.

My latest book is a sequel to Revolutionary Europe 1780-1850, entitled Europe 1850-1914: Progress, Participation and Apprehension, that appeared with Pearson/Longman at the beginning of 2009. This general history of Europe, covering political economic, social, cultural, artistic and scientific developments, emphasizes, as the subtitle indicates, the economic, scientific and technological progress of the era, the enormous and dynamic growth in social and political participation, and the apprehension that such changes incurred. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914, with which the book ends, and its enormously destructive effects on Europe, introducing an age of Total War and totalitarian governments, shows that such apprehensions were not unjustified.

I am currently working in a scholarly genre new to me, namely biography, writing a life of Karl Marx. The idea for such a project grew out of my previous works on the revolution of 1848 (in which Marx participated) and on the nature of property in the nineteenth century, both of which led me to the conclusion that many of the standard ideas about Marx suffer from an overdose of contemporaneousness. One of the major points of the work will be to portray the communist revolutionary not as our contemporary but as a figure of the nineteenth century, an era quite different from ours. The book is under contract with W.W. Norton publishers.

Recent Works

Europe 1850-1914: Progress, Participation and Apprehension. Harlow and New York: Longman/Pearson Publishers, 2009.

Property and Civil Society in South-Western Germany, 1820-1914, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Edited, Germany 1800-1870. “Short Oxford History of Germany.” Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

“17 June 1953: Revisiting a German Revolution.” German History 22 (2004): 619-43.

“Reforms, Movements for Reform, and Possibilities of Reform: Comparing Britain and Continental Europe,” in Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (eds.), Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780-1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 312-30.

Teaching

Among the courses I teach regularly are History 2520, Europe in the Nineteenth Century, History 4670, Modern Germany, 1750-1918 and History 4680, Germany in the Twentieth Century. On occasion, I also teach History 1510, the History of Modern Europe since the French Revolution, History 4470, Quantitative Methods in Historical Study, and History 8570, Graduate Readings in Modern European History, and History 4971, the undergraduate seminar in modern European history. The topic for History 4971 in the spring semester 2010 will be “Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life.”

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Jonathan Sperber
Professor Sperber

book jacket
Revolutionary Europe: 1780-1850

The European Revolutions,
1848-1851

Property and Civil Society in South-Western Germany, 1820-1914

Europe 1850-1914: Progress, Participation and Apprehension