"A history of the making of public culture in imperial Germany, Provincial Modernity challenges traditional accounts of the rise and fall of German liberalism and the meaning given to the cultural work of the German middle classes.

With an interdisciplinary approach that ranges from political history to modernist art and architecture, Jennifer Jenkins explores the roles that local tradition, memory, history, culture, and environment played in nineteenth-century conceptions of citizenship and community in Hamburg.".

"Drawing on a wide range of sources, Jenkins focuses on the city's cultural institutions, particularly the Hamburg Art Museum and its director Alfred Lichtwark, who inspired a city-wide movement of political and cultural reform. Lichtward, who became one of imperial Germany's most important cultural politicians, worked with the city's elites and its civic associations, both middle and working class. Together, they promoted aesthetic education in the interest of forging a liberal society."--BOOK JACKET.