During the 1950s, a team of Göttingen sociologists led by Helmut Plessner undertook a systematic survey of all faculty who taught at German university-level institutions during one or more of eleven selected sample years between 1864 and 1953. Drawing upon university catalogues (Vorlesungsverzeichnisse), scholarly handbooks (Minerva, Kürschners, Poggendorfs), and a variety of encyclopedias, members of the Göttingen group collected biographical and career data for almost twenty-four thousand individuals, which they entered by hand (though much of it in code) on manuscript sheets that were preserved at the Max Planck Institut für Bildungsforschung in Berlin.

On 12 November 1745, the ad hoc militias of two peasant factions collided near Schmitzingen, a small village in the Black Forest country of Hauenstein, which constituted the southeastern quarter of the Habsburg province of Outer Austria. Several days before, the larger of the two forces had laid siege to Waldshut, the administrative seat of Hauenstein. The smaller band of peasants, recruited from cantons in the north of Hauenstein, had marched through the night to relieve the town. As it approached Waldshut, this relief force was ambushed, encircled, and routed. Two peasants died from wounds suffered in the melee, and many more were severely wounded.

On 19 June 1844, two weeks after the Silesian weavers' uprising, the Vossische Zeitung ran an article on Langenbielau's (one of the centers of the uprising) leading textile manufacturer and the remains of his once stately mansion. “No windows, only the debris of the window pane, mullions and transoms of window crosses are broken or pulled out, where windows were barred, the bars are smashed, here and there doors are crashed or broken up, wrecked equipment is piled up in front of houses, walls are strewn with distinct signs of stone throws … We walk on rubble wherever our foot turns … Furniture, hardly recognizable in the small pieces into which it has been smashed, torn papers and torn wall papers everywhere, beds are cut open, stoves broken apart.”