Answer the question: What is Enlightenment?

English translation of Kant's Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? (Königsberg in Prussia, 30 September 1784)

Natural Connections: Social Work’s Role in Mending Human and Environmental Relationships

Just as seasons shift and migration patterns modify in response to human impact, so too must social work. Along with the human contingency silenced by oppression, climate change disproportionately burdens the voiceless: the rooted, Nibi – water, Aki – Earth, winged, fourlegged, swimmers, and crawlers. Though the natural world has become part of social work’s discourse in recent decades, it is time to move beyond contemplative words and take action. This banded dissertation consists of three scholarly products that explore the past and present state of social work’s relationship with the natural environment through the frames of Indigenous knowledge and Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT) and suggests a means to return to where we (humanity and social work) started – the beginning. Product one reviews the history of disconnection between humans and the environment, applies Indigenous wisdom and RCT to define social work’s role with the natural world, and reframes environmental rights as human rights. Product two is an exploratory archival study that examines the question: what was the relationship of early social work with the natural environment. The research utilizes Indigenous methodology and RCT to analyze data from three New York City Settlement houses. Product three summarizes information from a presentation that took place on July 7, 2018, at the Joint World Conference on Social Work, Education, and Social Development in Dublin, Ireland. The presentation outlines a conceptual framework that combines Indigenous wisdom and Western knowledge into a model to heal self and the environment by listening to and honoring the body’s innate ability to repair in collaboration with the natural world. This scholarship is a call to the profession to welcome and assume its role in mending the rift between humans and the environment

Landownership concentration and the expansion of education

This paper studies the effect of landownership concentration on school enrollment for nineteenth century Prussia. Prussia is an interesting laboratory given its decentralized educational system and the presence of heterogeneous agricultural institutions. We find that landownership concentration, a proxy for the institution of serfdom, has a negative effect on schooling. This effect diminishes substantially towards the end of the century. Causality of this relationship is confirmed by introducing soil texture to identify exogenous farm-size variation. Panel estimates further rule out unobserved heterogeneity. We present several robustness checks which shed some light on possible mechanisms

Landownership Concentration and the Expansion of Education

This paper studies the effect of landownership concentration on school enrollment for nineteenth-century Prussia. Prussia is an interesting laboratory given its decentralized educational system and the presence of heterogeneous agricultural institutions. We find that landownership concentration, a proxy for the institution of serf labor, has a negative effect on schooling. This effect diminishes substantially in the second half of the century. Causality of this relationship is confirmed by introducing soil-texture to identify exogenous farm size variation. Panel estimates further rule out unobserved heterogeneity. We argue that serfdom hampered peasants’ demand for education whereas the successive emancipation triggered a demand thereof.Land concentration, Institutions, Serfdom, Education, Prussian economic history

Poverty and crime in 19th century Germany: A reassessment

Using panel data for Prussia during 1882 to 1910, we replicate Mehlum, Miguel, and Torvik’s (2006) study on the causal effect of poverty on crime in 19th century Germany. In addition, our data set allows us to make several original contributions to the literature. We confirm the robust positive effect of poverty on property crime. Employing the rye price as a proxy for poverty, we show that the effect is less pronounced for provinces with a large agricultural sector. As Mehlum et al., we also find a strong negative impact of poverty on violent crime. However, once we account for beer consumption, this effect vanishes.Crime, Poverty, rye price, beer, weather, Prussia

Political Regimes and Sovereign Credit Risk in Europe, 1750-1913

This article uses a new panel data set to perform a statistical analysis of political regimes and sovereign credit risk in Europe from 1750 to 1913. Old Regime polities typically suffered from fiscal fragmentation and absolutist rule. By the start of World War I, however, many such countries had centralized institutions and limited government. Panel regressions indicate that centralized and?or limited regimes were associated with significant improvements in credit risk relative to fragmented and absolutist ones. Structural break tests also reveal close relationships between major turning points in yield series and political transformations

Railroads and micro-regional growth in Prussia

We study the effect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques, we match triennial population data for roughly 1000 cities in nineteenth-century Prussia to georeferenced maps of the German railroad network. We find positive short- and long-term effects of having a station on urban growth for different periods during 1840-1871. Causal effects of (potentially endogenous) railroad access on city growth are identified using instrumentalvariable and xed-effects estimation techniques. Our instrument identifies exogenous variation in railroad access by constructing straight-line corridors between terminal stations. Counterfactual models using pre-railroad growth yield no evidence in support of the hypothesis that railroads appeared as a consequence of a previous growth spurt

persistent regions, rising nations

In this paper, we examine the economic and political effects of the breakup of East Prussia into what is today Poland, Russia and Lithuania. We explore the dissolution of imperial regions into the boundaries of modern states, adding new insights to the research on the imperial legacies. We expect that German imperial legacies in the form of advanced economic institutions, and specifically East Prussian legacies of nationalistic and conservative political preferences, persist in the territories of former East Prussia in Poland, Russia and Lithuania compared to neighboring regions in their respective countries. We find no pattern of persistence in former East Prussian territories of contemporary Poland, whereas East Prussian persistence appears to be robust in Lithuania. We find strong evidence for the comparative persistence of political preferences in the Kaliningrad region, whereas we observe no economic spillovers. Drawing evidence from West German electoral data in the aftermath of World War II, we find that the presence of East Prussian refugees is conducive to conservative and nationalist support in the FRG. Hence, the East Prussian legacy relates primarily to the persistence of political preferences and migrating agents

Religious Tensions in Early Modern Torun, a History of War and Peace?

The history of acute inter-confessional conflict in Poland began with Martin Luther in 1517 and the presentation of the declaration of faith by the Protestants at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530. Those events became a turning point, which introduced a period of tension and war into an apparently rationalized Europe. However, it was not only the great cultural centres of the contemporary world that were affected by this new conflict. In many cases, smaller centres of regional importance were plunged into a period of confusion and bloodshed, due to tensions between the representatives of different Christian denominations. This is what happened in Toruń, one of the major cities of Royal Prussia. In 1724, despite efforts to reconcile the faiths, the city experienced turbulent riots that had widespread repercussions not only across the Kingdom of Poland but also throughout the rest of Europe. In fact, this provoked a powerful reaction from Prussia, England and Russia, which were disturbed by that religious intolerance so contrary to Enlightenment ideals. The Polish King and Lithuanian Grand Duke, Augustus II the Strong, saw in this an opportunity to reform internal and external policy, but these were not well received internationally. The situation between Protestants and Catholics in German Toruń thus remained unresolved for a long time. The event is often dealt with by historians as isolated from the earlier history of Toruń. However, the omission of references to that earlier period gives the impression that the bloodshed was merely a local social disturbance caused by individuals. Without claiming to offer a detailed comprehensive account of the phenomenon, this study nevertheless considers important events that preceded the riots and were closely connected with it, namely the spread of Lutheranism throughout Royal Prussia, religious education in the high schools of Toruń and a failed attempt at inter-faith dialogue in 1645

Vom katholischen Deutschordensgebiet zum protestantischen Herzogtum Preußen

The secularisation of the domains of the Teutonic Order in Prussia led to the establishment of thefirst Lutheran territorial church in the world. This fact is almost forgotten today, and this is evidenteven in specialised literature on the Reformation. The article outlines the introduction of the Reformationin Prussia, considering it as an example of its smooth and successful entrenchment. In orderto show this, the late stage of the rule of the Teutonic Order is defined, showing that fundamentalreform was triggered by a multi-layered crisis characteristic of the Order’s domains in Prussia. Thearticle shows that, in coordination with Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchton, and assisted by hisbishops, after becoming the first Duke of Prussia in 1525, Albert, the Grand Master of the TeutonicOrder, implemented reforms in his domains that resembled the main problems raised by the Reformationin an almost exemplary way. But at the same time, it shows that the introduction of theReformation in Prussia was not a unidirectional process, for Duke Albert supported Andreas Osiander’sideas for some time, before he gradually entered the ranks of the confessors of Augsburg.KEY WORDS: Teutonic Order, Prussia, Reformation, Albert, Martin Luther, Andreas Osiander