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"The hundred years between the revolutions of 1848 and the population transfers of the mid-twentieth century saw the nationalization of culturally complex societies in East Central Europe. This fact has variously been explained in terms of modernization, state building, and nation-building theories, each of which treats the process of nationalization as something inexorable, a necessary component of modernity. Although more recently social scientists gesture to the contingencies that may shape these larger developments, this structural approach makes scholars far less attentive to the "hard work" (ideological, political, social) undertaken by individuals and groups at every level of society ...
A EuropeNow Editor’s Pick A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year “Pieter M. Judson’s book informs and stimulates. If his account of Habsburg achievements, especially in the 18th century, is rather starry-eyed, it is a welcome corrective to the black legend usually presented. Lucid, elegant, full of surprising and illuminating details, it can be warmly recommended to anyone with an interest in modern European history.” —Tim Blanning, Wall Street Journal “This is an engaging reappraisal of the empire whose legacy, a century after its collapse in 1918, still resonates across the nation-states that replaced it in central Europe. Judson rejects conventional depictions of the ...
This intellectual biography of Hans Kohn (1891-1971) looks at theories of nationalism in the twentieth century as articulated through the life and work of its leading scholar and activist. Hans Kohn was born in late nineteenth-century Prague, but his peripatetic life took him from the Revolutionary-era Russia to interwar-era Palestine under the British Empire to the United States during the Cold War. Bearing witness to dramatic reconfigurations of national and political identities, he spearheaded an intellectual revolution that fundamentally challenged assumptions about the "naturalness" and the immutability of nationalism. Reconstructing Kohn's long and fascinating career, Gordon uncovers t...
A recent surge of interest in Jewish patronage during the golden years of Vienna has led to the question, Would modernism in Vienna have developed in the same fashion had Jewish patrons not been involved? This book uniquely treats Jewish identification within Viennese modernism as a matter of Jews active fashioning of a new language to convey their aims of emancipation along with their claims of cultural authority. In this provocative reexamination of the roots of Viennese modernism, Elana Shapira analyzes the central role of Jewish businessmen, professionals, and writers in the evolution of the city's architecture and design from the 1860s to the 1910s. According to Shapira, these patrons n...
The Centers for Austrian Studies - founded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Science and Research - play an important role for the international scientific community. Their tasks are to promote studies on Austria and Central Europe, and to give Austrian students the opportunity to conduct research abroad and make contact with local scientific communities. This book contains reports on the activities of these institutions during the 2010/2011 academic year, as well as the working papers developed by some of their most promising PhD students. The research presented in this book covers various aspects of Central European history in modern times, ranging from the 17th century to the present. (Series: Europa Orientalis - Vol. 12)
Exploring expressions of antisemitism in Germany today
In Priest, Politician, Collaborator, James Mace Ward offers the first comprehensive and scholarly English-language biography of the Catholic priest and Slovak nationalist Jozef Tiso (1887-1947). The first president of an independent Slovakia, established as a satellite of Nazi Germany, Tiso was ultimately hanged for treason and (in effect) crimes against humanity by a postwar reunified Czechoslovakia. Drawing on extensive archival research, Ward portrays Tiso as a devoutly religious man who came to privilege the maintenance of a Slovak state over all other concerns, helping thus to condemn Slovak Jewry to destruction. Ward, however, refuses to reduce Tiso to a mere opportunist, portraying hi...
This comparative attempt, intended for postgraduates and scholars of Eastern-Central Europe, investigates the political, economic, and cultural landscape of Habsburg Galicia and the Romanian Kingdom in the second half of the 19th century. Often, in historiography and in the public sphere alike, the two cases under study have been separately regarded as contexts that provided atypical answers to modernity, and parts of a region that has been regarded as atypical in itself. Recently, efforts have been made to integrate each of the cases in a post-imperial paradigm, identifying the complex interactions between their socio-political modernisation and historical memory. This book continues this t...
From the Baltic to the Black Sea, four major empires with ethnically and religiously diverse populations encountered each other along often changing and contested borders. Examining this geographically vast, multicultural region through a variety of methodological lenses, this volume offers informed and dispassionate analyses of how the many populations of these borderlands managed to coexist in a previous era and why the areas eventually descended into violence. An understanding of this region will help readers grasp the preconditions of interethnic coexistence and the causes of ethnic violence and war in many of the world's other borderlands both past and present.
A new history of Christian-Muslim relations in the Carolingian period that provides a fresh account of events by drawing on Arabic as well as western sources In the year 802, an elephant arrived at the court of the Emperor Charlemagne in Aachen, sent as a gift by the ʿAbbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid. This extraordinary moment was part of a much wider set of diplomatic relations between the Carolingian dynasty and the Islamic world, including not only the Caliphate in the east but also Umayyad al-Andalus, North Africa, the Muslim lords of Italy and a varied cast of warlords, pirates and renegades. The Emperor and the Elephant offers a new account of these relations. By drawing on Arabic sour...