Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915), the most prominent cultural historian in late-nineteenth-century Germany, has not figured in the annals of art history. Remembered principally as the author of the Deutsche Geschichte (1891–1909) and three-volume Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter (1885–86), Lamprecht and his scholarly writings have been studied exclusively by historians. In his own day, however, Lamprecht made considerable forays into art history while constructing the theoretical scaffolding for his cultural historical program. He undertook these art historical studies during the 1880s—remarkably, the very years in which art history was first being shaped as a discipline at German universities. Though Lamprecht scholars have long acknowledged the art historical component in his Kulturgeschichte, they have not considered that Lamprecht's art historical endeavors may have affected the professional development of art history. Art historians, on the other hand, have forgotten Lamprecht's art historical work, associating cultural history in the second half of the nineteenth century almost exclusively with the towering figure of Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97). Yet close study of Lamprecht's art historical publications and of related archival materials suggests that Lamprecht's vision, in the 1880s, of an interactive dynamics between art and culture had a formative impact on art history comparable to that of his older contemporary Burckhardt. In certain respects it may have been more directly relevant for art history's later development.

Although Franz Schnabel described the nineteenth century as the “century of the formal Rechtsstaat,” most political and social historians of the German Kaiserreich have paid surprisingly little attention to the legal aspect of the development of society and polity. Textbooks in German history contain only brief mention of the enactment of legal reforms, either naming them without comment or subsuming them under administrative initiatives of the National Liberal party. More importantly, even standard works on the history of liberalism give precious little space to the important legislative reforms that are the focus of this essay; James J. Sheehan devotes only a paragraph to the adoption of the Imperial Justice Laws of 1877–79, and Dieter Langewiesche stresses the importance of legal unity and these reforms to liberals, but also in only one paragraph. In general, historians of German liberalism have left efforts to examine the development and unification of the German legal system after 1848 to legal historians, who are housed in Germany in the separate legal faculties and focus their work primarily on the history of legal doctrine. By failing to examine law as a historical artifact, however, political and social historians have also overlooked the Weberian message that law is a crucial analytical entry point into any understanding of modem society. Contemporary legal scholars stress that legal and social systems are inextricably intertwined, and that neither can be understood without a grasp of the other. Understanding legal discourse helps historians understand broader social discourse.

The late Detlev Peukert noted that historians of the Weimar Republic have tended to devote their attention to the republic's first and last years. They have much to say about the Weimar Republic up to the end of the inflation in 1923 and 1924. However, they tend to jump from Weimar's troubled early years to its catastrophic disintegration between 1929 and 1933. Skirting the middle years, historians have generally overlooked the problem of recovery in Germany during the 1920s. In doing so, they have ignored a topic of central concern to Germans during the twenties.