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Influenced by Burckhardt and Nietzsche, Warburg promoted a radically new understanding of how the Renaissance inherited a more complex aesthetic heritage from classical antiquity. Yet in the spirit of the cultural historian Karl Lamprecht, Warburg also wished to create an interdisciplinary methodology that would permit him to analyze this process in a holistic way. The second chapter argues that Warburg’s prewar writings on Botticelli and Ghirlandaio reveals how he took certain tropes from his mercantile home city, including, most notably the merchant, the widow, and the amateur “private scholar,” to develop a new portrait of Renaissance art and its social milieu. His approach, which connected perennial problems of form and content, and genius and predefined classical tropes, with the observation of a single detail, captured in such concepts as the Nachleben der Antike and the pathosformel, would become his greatest intellectual contribution to art history.

A new school of historical scholarship emerged in Belgium in the late 1800s. Led first by Kurth and then by Pirenne, it looked to German scholarly tradition until 1914. After the German invasion of Belgium Pirenne, who spent two years imprisoned or under strict control in Germany, turned increasingly against German scholarship, not least because of the involvement of such scholars as Karl Lamprecht in using history to support the Kaiser's expansionist policies. In the years after 1918 German scholars were deliberately excluded from international gatherings, and initially this led to Austrians such as Dopsch also refusing to attend. Pirenne's final contribution to scholarship, his ‘Mahomet et Charlemagne’, effectively wrote the Germanic peoples out of the history of Europe.

This chapter looks back to an eminent predecessor of these twentieth-century antiquarians and artists, Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915). Arguably the most important historian for the twentieth century and yet one of the least known to non-specialists, Lamprecht fills the role of grandfather to the formulators of “material culture studies”—and father to the pioneers who wrote history from material sources without giving their vision a name. Today, Lamprecht is mostly recognized for the debate about his cultural history, the Lamprecht-Streit, which was as much a debate about what history should constitute as it was a debate about whether Lamprecht was a good historian. Yet Lamprecht's career goes further than that, as this chapter shows, and his academic work has left a strong influence on the twentieth-century proponents of material culture discussed in the previous chapter.

This chapter affirms that in light of the master narratives of national history and the triumph of the new ‘scientific’ Rankean history of political events and institutions, the writing of social and economic history expanded steadily in the second half of the 19th century. This chapter further stresses that the study of social and economic themes was closely intertwined with the great debates about the general orientations of historiography, such as the debate over the ‘New History’ in the United States, argument provoked by Karl Lamprecht's proposals for a new direction in historiography in Germany, and controversies about the relationship between sociology and history in France.

This chapter focuses on William Dodd's travel to Europe on June 7, 1897, especially his time in Leipzig, Germany. It looks at Dodd's activities in Leipzig, from taking German lessons and attending the lectures of the prominent historians Karl Lamprecht and Erich Marcks. It also considers Dodd's confidence that he would earn his Ph.D and how his closest American acquaintances in Leipzig, Vernon L. Kellogg and Elliott H. Goodwin, put his ideas about Jefferson Davis's democracy to the test.