Queer Places:
University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242
University of Wisconsin-Madison, 750 University Ave, Madison, WI 53706
University of Cambridge, 4 Mill Ln, Cambridge CB2 1RZ
Harvard University (Ivy League), 2 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138
Cornell University (Ivy League), 410 Thurston Ave, Ithaca, NY 14850
Forest Hill Cemetery Madison, Dane County, Wisconsin, USA, Plot Section 38, Lot 033B
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George
Lachmann Mosse (September 20, 1918 – January 22, 1999) was an emigre from Nazi
Germany first to Great Britain and then to the United States who taught
history as a professor at the University of Iowa, the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, and the Hebrew University.[1]
Best known for his studies of Nazism, he authored more than 25 books on topics
as diverse as constitutional history, Protestant theology, and the history of
masculinity. In 1966, he and Walter Laqueur founded The Journal of
Contemporary History, which they co-edited.
Mosse was born in Berlin to a prominent, well-to-do German Jewish family.
His maternal grandfather, Rudolf Mosse, founded what became Germany's largest
advertising agency, and his media empire included the respected liberal
newspaper Berliner Tageblatt. His father, Hans Lachmann-Mosse,
commissioned the architect Erich Mendelsohn to redesign the iconic Mossehaus
where the Tageblatt was published. In his autobiography, George Mosse
described himself as a mischievous child given to pranks. He was educated at
the noted Mommsen-Gymnasium in Berlin and from 1928 onwards at Schule Schloss
Salem, a famously spartan boarding school that exposed the scions of rich and
powerful families to a life devoid of privilege. The headmaster at Salem, Kurt
Hahn, was an advocate of experiential education and required all pupils to
engage in physically challenging outdoor activities. Although Mosse disliked
the school's nationalistic ethos, he conceded that its emphasis on character
building and leadership gave him "some backbone."[2]
He preferred individual sports, such as skiing, to team activities.
IIn 1933, with Hitler's rise to power, the Mosse family emigrated and
separated. His mother, Felicia (1888-1972), and his sister, Hilde (1912-1982),
relocated to Switzerland, while his father moved to France, where in 1939 he
got a divorce, married Karola Strauch (the mother of Harvard physicist Karl
Strauch), and subsequently emigrated to California. George Mosse moved to
England, where he enrolled at the Quaker Bootham School in York. It was here,
according to his autobiography, that he first became aware of his
homosexuality. A struggling student, he failed several exams, but with the
financial support of his parents he was admitted to study history at Downing
College, Cambridge, in 1937.[3]
Here he first developed an interest in historical scholarship, attending
lectures by G. M. Trevelyan and Helen Maude Cam. While he was at Cambridge,
his hostility to fascism was deepened by the Spanish Civil War (although he
later averred that he had only a superficial understanding of the conflict).
In 1939, his family relocated to the United States, and he continued his
undergraduate studies at the Quaker Haverford College, earning a B.A. in 1941.
He went on to graduate studies at Harvard University, where he benefited from
a scholarship reserved for students born in Berlin-Charlottenburg. His 1946
Ph.D. dissertation on English constitutional history of the 16th and 17th
centuries, supervised by Charles Howard McIlwain, was subsequently published
as The Struggle for Sovereignty in England (1950).
MMosse's first academic appointment as an historian was at the University of
Iowa, where he focused on religion in early modern Europe and published a
concise study of the Reformation that became a widely used textbook. In 1955,
he moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison and began to lecture on modern
history. His The Culture of Western Europe: The Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries, an Introduction (1961), which summarizes these lectures, was also widely
adopted as a textbook.
MMosse taught for more than thirty years at the University of Wisconsin,
where he was named a John C. Bascom Professor of European History and a
Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies, while concurrently holding the
Koebner Professorship of History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Beginning
in 1969, Mosse spent one semester each year teaching at the Hebrew University.
He also held appointments as a visiting professor at the University of Tel
Aviv and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After retiring from the
University of Wisconsin, he taught at Cambridge University and Cornell
University. He was named the first research historian in residence at the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum.
My published books:
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- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mosse