European History For Some: The exhibition, then, is about personal recollection, the collective historical consciousness and the history of the European history for some city.
During the 1920's, Hansen explored American and European history for some archives, using previously untouched sources of statistics and ethnic history. His two major works, The Atlantic Migration, 1607-1860 (1940) and The Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples (1940), were published posthumously. These and The Immigrant in American History (1940) remain landmarks of historical and stylistic lucidity. Attributing to foreign settlers the same virtue of individualistic enterprise that Turner ascribed to native pioneers, Hansen "ventured successfully," as the historian Carl Wittke said, "into what he called 'that dim continent of knowledge called social history.'
Of the latter, the most important component, to Ranke, was the state. Propelled by moral energies, the states, in his view, were the conveyers of historical change. His interest thus centered on the history of the European history for some states and their relations with each other. He was convinced of the overriding importance of foreign policy (Primat der Aussenpolitik), to which all domestic needs and aspirations must be subordinated. His studies and personal experience had taught him, moreover, that the prime need of the state was power, and his books thus are limited largely to political history at the expense of economic and cultural developments.
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Photography
