Hungerstrike. The History of a Form of Protest in the United States, 1880 to World War II

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Since the end of the nineteenth century, hunger strikes have been used as a means of radical protest that effectively attracts publicity. From a transnational perspective, the project focuses on the adoption, application, and reception of hunger strikes in the United States. The study covers the period from the late nineteenth century to the end of the 1960s, thus ensuring that a close look can be taken of the first media coverage of hunger strikes by American actors in the late nineteenth century, the established use of this form of protest by political prisoners starting in 1914, and the hunger strikes in the social movements of the 1960s. The central question is: In which contexts were the refusal to eat effectively used and perceived as a form of protest and how did hunger strikes become established as a new instrument of political protest? From this, four general questions arise. First, to which social environment were those involved in hunger strikes linked and which public did they address? Second, can hunger strikes be understood as a form of protest specific to states of emergency? Third, what does the practice of refusing food mean for the actors themselves, especially when such protest can end in the self-sacrifice of their own lives? And fourth, in which political debates did actors resort to hunger strikes and how were these strikes perceived and interpreted both in the media and in scholarly work? In addition, the project aims to open up the social and cultural history of the United States to a pointedly transnational perspective in order to reconstruct the importance of how political (fasting) practices from Russia, Great Britain, and India were received.