Assistant Professor of History
Department of Social Sciences
University of Michigan - Dearborn
CV
Research
Teaching Contact
Germany's Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century City (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020)
Abstract: In an era of transatlantic migration, Germans were fascinated by the myth of the frontier. Yet, for many, they were most likely to encounter frontier landscapes of new settlement and the taming of nature not in far-flung landscapes abroad, but on the edges of Germany's many growing cities. Germany's Urban Frontiers is the first book to examine how nineteenth-century notions of progress, community, and nature shaped the changing spaces of German urban peripheries as the walls and boundaries that had so long defined central European cities disappeared. Through a series of local case studies including Leipzig, Oldenburg, and Berlin, Kristin Poling reveals how Germans on the edge of the city confronted not only questions of planning and control, but also their own histories and futures as a community.
Some of my other work:
"A Walhalla in the Wasteland: Carl Ernest Schmidt and the Quest of One German American Businessman to Save Michigan's Forests," Michigan Historical Review 46, no. 2 (Fall 2020): 1-30.
"Berlin, Frontier City: The Lenné Triangle Incident and West Berlin's Frontier Zone in the 1980s," in The Design of Frontier Spaces: Control and Ambiguity, 31-44. Edited by Andreas Luescher and Carolyn Loeb. Ashgate, 2015.
"Shantytowns and Pioneers Beyond the City Wall: Berlin's Urban Frontier in the Nineteenth Century," Central European History 47(2014):245-274.
Current Courses at University of Michigan-Dearborn