In this project on Russian-German lives, the presented lives were first reconstructed in museums and digital forms of presentation. Then, student podcasts about Russian-German history were created on this basis.

A Modern History practice class in the winter semester 2022/23 was designed as a follow-up and aimed to create a small virtual exhibition on the history of Russian-German biographies in the Rhine-Main area. However, despite some findings, the exhibition could not be realized in the end.

Political maps with large areas of the same color suggest that the respective territories were uniformly affiliated with a specific state – an idea that is not an accurate portrayal of the pre-modern era. In this project, students worked with employees from the DigiKAR research project to create modern and more appropriate virtual maps of the Holy Roman Empire. The focus was on the mobility of the Electorate of Mainz elites and their influence on spatial territories.

In the project seminar “Transnational Mainz of the 1960s/70s”, the Department of History topic “Migration and Mobility” was examined on a local level. The starting points were image sources from the Mainz City Archive (including the new collection of the former AZ photographer Karin Eckert, which has hardly been evaluated to date). These were professionally evaluated, contextualized, and linked to overarching questions. The project aimed to develop a practice-oriented presentation of selected findings in the form of an internet-based interactive exhibition.

Immigration represents a particular challenge for societies with a claim to historical-cultural self-understanding. In this advanced seminar, students first reconstructed the difficulties of establishing an immigration museum or even a corresponding collection in the Federal Republic of Germany, then examined immigration museums in other countries. The course ended with a field trip to Israel to trace the museumization of the German-Jewish immigration of the “Jeckes”. Impressions and findings were recorded in student podcasts.

Photographs from around 1900 on the structural situation and life in Mainz are rare. The Mainz City Archive recently acquired photographs from the late 19th and early 20th century, expanding the photographic material available for this historical period marked by development and upheaval. In the practice class, the photographic material was professionally evaluated, and the students shot a film presenting the material to the public. The project was also mentioned in the cultural committee of Mainz.

In this practice class, students created the first Digital Mainz Women’s Calendar in the tradition of the existing Mainz Women’s Calendar. In this context, they also gave a face and a life story to pre-modern Mainz women for the first time.

This multi-era project marks the start of the third season of the podcast series “Clio auf die Ohren”, which focuses on environmental and climate history stories.

In this seminar, the diversity of the late Russian Empire was reconstructed in the first color photographs shortly after 1900 and depicted in a virtual exhibition with the help of these very photographs.

In this advanced seminar, questions of conflict and peacemaking in the late Middle Ages in a regional context were reconstructed and visually processed.

The end of an empire is traditionally given great macro-historical significance. It is often regarded as an epochal boundary and turning point. Far less attention is paid to the micro-historical side of these changes of rule, i.e., what such an event meant for people who lived there. In two related advanced seminars, questions related to this topic were examined using the example of Mainz for the two epochal periods of upheaval in 1797/98 and 1918/19.

Coats of arms were omnipresent in the Middle Ages – they could be seen on castles, at town gates, in churches, town halls and inns, on silverware, wine barrels, on and in books as well as on shields, tabards, pennants, and banners. As part of this practice class project, the coats of arms of the “Oppenheim Ratsrose” were reconstructed from a historical perspective. A digital publication is currently being prepared.

Pregnancy and birth are among the topics to which women’s history turned its attention early and intensively. In this project-based practice class, a digital edition on midwifery in the city of Mainz was developed.

How does historiography respond to challenges that are not part of our fields of work in forms of media that we have not learned from scratch? In this project, short climate history videos were created for Instagram, Tiktok and YouTube Shorts for all eras.

In this project-based advanced seminar co-opted into Modell-M, selected war memorials from the First and Second World Wars in Mainz were examined. A digital publication is in progress.

This Ancient History practice class on material sources from antiquity, which is firmly anchored in the bachelor’s curriculum, was the first to use media in this way and was financially supported by the GLK. Audio clips were produced that can be integrated into virtual city tours through the Mainz of antiquity.