Articles by Benjamin Goossen
Journal of Global History, 2020
Security concerns during the early Cold War prompted United States strategists to solicit worldwi... more Security concerns during the early Cold War prompted United States strategists to solicit worldwide assistance in studying Earth’s physical environment. Comprehensive geophysical knowledge required cooperation between researchers on every part of the planet, leading practitioners to tout transnational earth science – despite direct military applications in an age of submarines and ballistic missiles – as a non-political form of peaceful universalism. This article examines the 1957–58 International Geophysical Year as a powerful fulcrum in the transfer of ideas about Earth’s global environment from Western security establishments to conservationists worldwide. For eighteen months, tens of thousands of researchers across every continent pooled resources for data collection to create a scientific benchmark for future comparisons. Illuminating Earth as dynamic and interconnected, participants robustly conceptualized humanity’s emergence as a geophysical force, capable of ‘artificially’ modifying the natural world. Studies of anthropogenic geophysics, including satellites, nuclear fallout, and climate change, conditioned the global rise of environmentalism.
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Contemporary European History , 2022
Understanding Europe’s final frontier requires attention to the frontiers that came before. Bring... more Understanding Europe’s final frontier requires attention to the frontiers that came before. Bringing the legacies of colonial violence into the history of space holds urgency in light of close linkages between spaceflight, militarism and global capitalism, as well as the ties between outer space and environmental thought. The continued wealth of Europe in this era of growing inequality and ecological crisis, moreover, should call attention to the ways European power has been sustained after empire. Space programs have played a substantial role in preserving Europe’s worldwide influence, rendering them among the many necessary areas to target within ongoing efforts to alleviate the intertwined problems of global inequality and climate crisis. This article explores these themes through a review of recent literature.
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German Studies Review, 2021
The Christian Mennonite denomination maintained a privileged position within National Socialist t... more The Christian Mennonite denomination maintained a privileged position within National Socialist thought and policy through its conceptual and legal association with an evolving series of racial categories. Nearly all the world’s half-million Mennonites lived outside German borders between the World Wars. This allowed a small number of church leaders and sympathetic scholars to shape their image within Germany, especially as Hitler’s wartime expansionism brought a fourth of the denomination’s members under Nazi rule. Casting Mennonitism as part of one or more subgroups within a larger Germanic whole benefitted most adherents in regions administered by the Third Reich while simultaneously enabling their enrollment in propaganda and empire building.
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Antisemitism Studies , 2021
The novelist Ingrid Rimland became a prominent Holocaust denier in North America during the 1990s... more The novelist Ingrid Rimland became a prominent Holocaust denier in North America during the 1990s. Before embracing neo-Nazism, Rimland won acclaim within the Mennonite church-the Christian denomination in which she was raised-for her writings about women's hardships in the Soviet Union. Her debut novel, The Wanderers: The Saga of Three Women Who Survived (1977), reflected widespread efforts to position feminized Mennonite suffering as comparable to Jewish persecution under Nazism, coupled with silence about the role individual Mennonites played in the Holocaust. The church's male-dominated elite offered Rimland limited structural support as a female writer, however, and she struggled to sustain her literary career while raising a son with disabilities. Patriarchal constraints alongside Mennonite leaders' failure to address historic antisemitism helped allow her drift into white supremacy.
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Kansas History, 2011
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Books by Benjamin Goossen
Princeton University Press, 2017
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the global Mennonite church developed an uneasy re... more During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the global Mennonite church developed an uneasy relationship with Germany. Despite the religion’s origins in the Swiss and Dutch Reformation, as well as its longstanding pacifism, tens of thousands of members embraced militarist German nationalism. Chosen Nation tells the sweeping history of this encounter and the debates it sparked among parliaments, dictatorships, and congregations across Eurasia and the Americas.
Offering a multifaceted perspective on nationalism’s emergence in Europe and around the world, Benjamin Goossen demonstrates how Mennonites’ nationalization reflected and reshaped their faith convictions. While some church leaders modified German identity along Mennonite lines, others appropriated nationalism wholesale, advocating a specifically Mennonite version of nationhood. Examining sources from Poland to Paraguay, Goossen shows how patriotic loyalties faded in and out with religious affiliation. Individuals might claim to be German at one moment but Mennonite the next. Some external parties encouraged separatism, as when the Weimar Republic helped establish an autonomous “Mennonite State” in Latin America. Still others treated Mennonites as quintessentially German—under Hitler’s Third Reich, entire colonies benefited from racial warfare and genocide in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Whether choosing Germany as a national homeland or identifying as a chosen people, called and elected by God, Mennonites’ commitments to collective action were intricate, fluid, and always surprising.
The first book to place Christianity and diaspora at the heart of nationality studies, Chosen Nation illuminates the rising religious nationalism of our own age.
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Princeton University Press, 2017
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Articles by Benjamin Goossen
Books by Benjamin Goossen
Offering a multifaceted perspective on nationalism’s emergence in Europe and around the world, Benjamin Goossen demonstrates how Mennonites’ nationalization reflected and reshaped their faith convictions. While some church leaders modified German identity along Mennonite lines, others appropriated nationalism wholesale, advocating a specifically Mennonite version of nationhood. Examining sources from Poland to Paraguay, Goossen shows how patriotic loyalties faded in and out with religious affiliation. Individuals might claim to be German at one moment but Mennonite the next. Some external parties encouraged separatism, as when the Weimar Republic helped establish an autonomous “Mennonite State” in Latin America. Still others treated Mennonites as quintessentially German—under Hitler’s Third Reich, entire colonies benefited from racial warfare and genocide in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Whether choosing Germany as a national homeland or identifying as a chosen people, called and elected by God, Mennonites’ commitments to collective action were intricate, fluid, and always surprising.
The first book to place Christianity and diaspora at the heart of nationality studies, Chosen Nation illuminates the rising religious nationalism of our own age.
Offering a multifaceted perspective on nationalism’s emergence in Europe and around the world, Benjamin Goossen demonstrates how Mennonites’ nationalization reflected and reshaped their faith convictions. While some church leaders modified German identity along Mennonite lines, others appropriated nationalism wholesale, advocating a specifically Mennonite version of nationhood. Examining sources from Poland to Paraguay, Goossen shows how patriotic loyalties faded in and out with religious affiliation. Individuals might claim to be German at one moment but Mennonite the next. Some external parties encouraged separatism, as when the Weimar Republic helped establish an autonomous “Mennonite State” in Latin America. Still others treated Mennonites as quintessentially German—under Hitler’s Third Reich, entire colonies benefited from racial warfare and genocide in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Whether choosing Germany as a national homeland or identifying as a chosen people, called and elected by God, Mennonites’ commitments to collective action were intricate, fluid, and always surprising.
The first book to place Christianity and diaspora at the heart of nationality studies, Chosen Nation illuminates the rising religious nationalism of our own age.