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The Sinews of Habsburg Power explores the domestic foundations of the immense growth of central European Habsburg power from the rise of a permanent standing army after the Thirty Years' War to the end of the Napoleonic wars. With a force that grew irregularly in size from around 25,000 soldiers to as many as half a million in the War of the Sixth Coalition, the Habsburg monarchy participated in shifting international constellations of rivalry from western Europe to the Near East and in some two dozen, partly overlapping armed conflicts. Raising forces of such magnitude constituted a central task of Habsburg government, one that ultimately required the cooperation of society and its elites. ...
Aristocratic Redoubt: The Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office on the Eve of the First World War is a study of the nobility who served in the foreign office prior to World War I. Following the lead of historians who are reexamining pre-industrial elites in England and Germany, Godsey deals with such facets of aristocratic life as education, wealth, religion, and ethnicity. He contends that although the pre-war aristocracy has been stereotyped as frivolous and decadent, the Austro-Hungarian nobility, and thus the monarchy, in fact had great staying power. This work is a social history of the bureaucracy of the Ballhausplatz primarily in the decade leading up to 1914, though it provides a thorough overview of the service during the entire Dualist period.
This is a study of Central European nobles in revolution. As one of Germany's richest, most insular and most autonomous nobilities, the Free Knights in Electoral Mainz represented the early modern noble ideal of pure bloodlines and cosmopolitan loyalties in the old society of orders. But this world came to an end with the outbreak of the revolutionary wars in 1792. Quite apart from the social, economic and political dislocations and loss, the era from 1789 to 1815 also meant a cultural reorientation for the nobility. William D. Godsey, Jr here explores how nobles in post-revolutionary Germany gradually abandoned their old self-understanding and assimilated with the new cultural 'nation' while aristocrats in the Habsburg Empire, which had taken in many emigres from Mainz, moved instead towards supranationalism. This is a major contribution to debates about the relationship between identity, cultural nationalism, supranationalism and religion in Germany and the Habsburg Empire.
Published to accompany the exhibition held at the Neue Galerie, New York, 17 October 2003 - 15 February 2004 and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 11 November 2004 - 13 March 2005.
The Scotch-Irish began emigrating to Northern Ireland from Scotland in the seventeenth century to form the Ulster Plantation. In the next century these Scottish Presbyterians migrated to the Western Hemisphere in search of a better life. Except for the English, the Scotch-Irish were the largest ethnic group to come to the New World during the eighteenth century. By the time of the American Revolution there were an estimated 250,000 Scotch-Irish in the colonies, about a tenth of the population. Twelve U.S. presidents can trace their lineage to the Scotch-Irish. This work discusses the life of the Scotch-Irish in Ireland, their treatment by their English overlords, the reasons for emigration to America, the settlement patterns in the New World, the movement westward across America, life on the colonial frontier, Scotch-Irish contributions to America's development, and sites of Scotch-Irish interest in the north of Ireland.
This is a thought-provoking book that deals with practical issues of the Christian faith. It illuminates a number of misconceptions based on social customs or traditions regarding grace, faith, salvation, judgment, and other basics of the Christian religion.
According to Simon Wiesenthal, nearly half of the crimes associated with the Holocaust were committed by Austrians, who comprised just 8.5 percent of the population of Hitler's Greater German Reich. Bruce Pauley's book explains this phenomenon by providin
Renders greater precision and depth to the concept of the fiscal-military state and applies it to the Habsburg Monarchy, one of early modern Europe's foremost war machines. It systematically integrates the problems of armed conflict and foreign competition into perceptions of society and government in the Monarchy ruled from Vienna.
Across the medieval and early modern eras, new rulers were celebrated with increasingly elaborate coronations and inaugurations that symbolically conferred legitimacy and political power upon them. Many historians have considered rituals like these as irrelevant to understanding modern governance—an idea that this volume challenges through illuminating case studies focused on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Habsburg lands. Taking the formal elasticity of these events as the key to their lasting relevance, the contributors explore important questions around their political, legal, social, and cultural significance and their curious persistence as a historical phenomenon over time.
Across eighteenth-century Europe, political power resided overwhelmingly with absolute monarchs, with notable exceptions including the much-studied British Parliament as well as the frequently overlooked Hungarian Diet, which placed serious constraints on royal power and broadened opportunities for political participation. Estates and Constitution provides a rich account of Hungarian politics during this period, restoring the Diet to its rightful place as one of the era’s major innovations in government. István M. Szijártó traces the religious, economic, and partisan forces that shaped the Diet, putting its historical significance in international perspective.