Prevention of public violence is a primary task of an ordered state. If rioting occurs, it is usually a serious setback for the government in power, a sign of weakness or even forthcoming collapse, an injury to the citizens' commitment. During a riot, governmental leaders are often taxed to the ultimate because they may lose control of the society in the uncharted waters of the mob; their policy-decisions can sink while awaiting enforcement. The rioters who participate in collective public violence lose their restraint, their individuality that previously caused them to respect authority, and turn to irresponsible acts they would not normally commit. For these reasons established political leaders place a high priority on preventing violence. Should it break out, their automatic inclination is to contain it. Some revolutionaries, on the other hand, see creativity in violence, are even willing to stimulate it, hoping that it will sweep traditional institutions away.

In his classic analysis of state building by the Austrian Habsburgs in early modern Central Europe, R. J. W. Evans argues that the dynasty's eventual success in asserting its will over a conglomerate of separate, coherent territories with time-honored claims to political liberties followed the sometimes troubled trajectory of crown-aristocratic relations. The cultural impetus for political centralization was the mix of reform within the Catholic Church and counterreform measures taken against powerful Protestant subjects among the nobles and civic elites. By the 1650s the ability of Habsburg officials in Vienna to govern effectively the dynasty's various holdings rested firmly on a dyarchy of the ruling house and regional nobles who shared a common baroque Catholic faith and an investment in a system of court patronage that fostered collaboration rather than resistance in the far-flung empire.

It is difficult for the historian to imagine how the scraps of paper encountered in the archive, filled with printed words and images, served as the first newspapers that were created, distributed, and read throughout early modern Europe. Taking an empathetic approach to history, the process could look something like this: In a village outside of Augsburg in late spring of 1595, a small crowd gathers around a well-worn tavern table, staring intently at a sheet of paper. Some focus their eyes on the brightly colored image filling the top half of the page: a bird's-eye view of a citadel in a heavily fortified countryside with throngs of armored figures mercilessly slaying their turbaned enemies. Others let their eyes wander through the two columns of text below, perhaps quietly sounding out the letters they recognize as they search for familiar words and phrases. One man, possibly the local notary, darts his eyes more rapidly across the lines, reading portions out loud to those still waiting to digest the contents of the sheet of paper. Everyone present knows the key points from the headline running along the top, having heard it called out by the street vendor who sold it in the square, a raspy voice crying: “The City and Fortress of Simbalt in Moldavia on the Danube, and other locations”; “2000 Turks slain with poleaxes”; “The army spared no one, men or women, young or old”; and “Lots of booty.” The peddler, who carried the sheet along with a variety of small wares as he moved around the countryside, had picked it up earlier that week from the courtyard establishment of Leonard Schweiger, in the Augsburg suburb of St. James. That morning, it had arrived in a stack of 100 to 500 identical sheets in the hands of the entrepreneuring publisher and Briefmaler, Georg Kress. Earlier, Kress had hurriedly added the finishing touches of paint to the image, the last of the white pigment still drying as he ran his latest batch of newssheets over to the shop. Time was of the essence. Kress needed to get his print out before his rival, Bartholomäus Käppler, overheard his source boasting about the events and created his own newssheet. This fresh news, of Christian forces defeating the Muslim Turks, sold quickly. Kress was ready to provide it, just in time for our hawker to pick up a stack of copies, one of which would eventually make its way into the hands of the villagers sitting around the tavern table.

When the last Allied soldier left Austria in the fall of 1955, Austrians could look back on ten years of profound change. Austria had been reborn in the spring of 1945 with the provisional government's declaration of independence, but from the beginning, Austria was faced with a material crisis and a crisis of identity. In those lean years following the war Austrians drank Blümchenkaffee, coffee so weak that one could see through it to the floral designs on the bottom of coffee cups. By 1955, the physical rebuilding of Austria, greatly assisted by Marshall Plan aid, was largely complete and the shortages of food and fuel were mostly a memory.1 Simultaneously, Austrian political leaders and educators had laid the groundwork for a new Austrian identity based on a mixture of tradition, Austrian uniqueness vis-à-vis Germany, democratic values, and the myth of “Austria-as-victim.” The time of Blümchenkaffee was coming to an end. Austrian coffee was now richly brewed, and more and more Austrians could afford to drink Wiener Melange—strong coffee mixed with steamed milk and often served with sugar and a small glass of water on the side.

In many ways, the habsburg roma, or Gypsies, are a “people without history.”1 Given their nomadic existence, they left little or no imprint on the political, economic, and cultural institutions of the various dominions through which they passed. Even such staples of social historians as birth, death, and census records, land and tax registers, court transcripts, and popular newspapers bear little witness to their presence and impact. Not surprisingly, successive regimes in Vienna and other centers of power had little interest in a people who dwelled permanently only on the lower rungs of society. The Roma also had no corporate or national agenda. Although some did participate on the edges of various nineteenth-century national movements, they did so only marginally and often as Hungarians, Romanians, or Slovaks, rather than as representatives of the Roma community. Much of what we know comes not from the people themselves, but from the observations of non-Roma or gadžé (singular, gadžo; plural, gadžé or gadjé), whose accounts were often riddled with the kinds of cultural overlays and stereotypes that have haunted the Roma for centuries.

For almost a century now, Tomáš Masaryk has been one of the most famous Czechs in world history. He was nominated at least twice for a Nobel Prize and lionized by noteworthies across the globe. However, that esteem paled when compared to the adoration expressed for him at home. During and after his lifetime, Masaryk was presented as the embodiment of moral rectitude, cosmopolitan erudition, and democratic egalitarianism. By the end of the 1930s, Masaryk's association with the state he had helped found was impressively total. But it was not accidental. Many different groups and factors collaborated to position Masaryk as the only man capable of superseding Czechoslovakia's ethnic and political divisions, a devoted democrat to lead Europe's self-styled ideal new democracy.

I should like to begin by recalling my own occasional points of contact with Robert Kann. When his first book, the great two-volume work on the nationality problem in the Habsburg Empire, was published, I was a student about to embark on research on eighteenth-century Austria, and took little notice of any large works not on my research period. Later, teaching nineteenth-century European history, I came to appreciate its wide range and deep insights. By the time his highly original Study in Austrian Intellectual History was published in 1960, my career as a historian had prospered sufficiently for me to be offered this book for review by a leading British historical periodical. I commented very positively on his analysis of Abraham a Sancta Clara. Turning to the chapters on Joseph von Sonnenfels, however, I took the opportunity of presenting some results of my own research on Sonnenfels, which had only just been published and which I thought called some of his judgments into question. Unlike many Central European academics of his generation, Robert Kann did not resent criticism by a younger colleague; hence I have memories of some pleasant and stimulating meetings with him in Vienna during the time he held an honorary professorship there.

If scholarly articles could have intricate subtitles, as did treatises published long ago, the heading of this essay would be much longer. The larger scheme of things into which the career of Václav Eusebius z Lobkovic, head of the Habsburg government from 1669 to 1674, fits is armed service and nobility. Assuming that the latter was synonymous with what Marc Bloch called the “seignorial” class—i. e., Central Europe's dominant or ruling social group prior to the industrial epoch—one may argue that for more than a millennium, from Merovingian times onward, a symbiotic, if fluid and complex, relationship existed between the waging of war and the establishment of that control over land which constituted the tangible foundation for noble power and authority.

This article deals with the goals, practices, and transformations of collaborative research that emerged between and within bureaucratic and bourgeois models of science organization in the late Habsburg monarchy. It offers novel insights into the political, social, and epistemic dimensions of public engagement in research, and evaluates the frameworks, profit expectations, and challenges involved. As will be exemplified by joint undertakings in the High Alps, the “Orient,” and the Adriatic Sea, private-public partnerships in the form of scientific societies or institutional alliances assumed vital functions. Their stakeholders volunteered for large-scale research projects, coordinated and funded infrastructure such as field stations, research vessels, or collecting expeditions, and became driving forces in establishing new forms of intra-imperial and cross-border collaboration. As such, scientific societies are useful indicators for understanding science-related developments and for illuminating the tensions between imperialism, (inter)national aspirations, and civil-society building. Based on sources from the archives of the k.k. Meteorological Society, the Natural Scientific Oriental Society, and the Adriatic Society, this article will analyze scientific collaboration as a purposeful and power-related interaction process, oriented toward mutual benefits, that took place on three levels: between state-owned research facilities and private societies, between bureaucrats and bourgeois, and between scientists and “non-professionals.”

This article reframes the formation of the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier after 1699 in social historical terms. By going beyond diplomatic and military factors, it identifies how the contraction of Ottoman borders affected taxation, landholding, and Muslim-Christian relations in Bosnia. The article argues that peasants in Ottoman Bosnia experienced the mounting pressures of increasing taxation, manipulation over landownership, and religiously inflected hostility, often driven by those Muslim noblemen who tried to capitalize on the destabilizing wake of several wars that the Ottoman Empire fought with the Habsburg, Venetian, and Russian states in the eighteenth century. Through these processes, by the end of the century the meaning of the reaya or raya—an Ottoman term for taxpaying “subjects” that theoretically applied to all denominations, including Muslims—had become synonymous with “Christians,” acquiring a new political significance.

The conflicts between episcopal and Habsburg provincial authorities in late sixteenth-century Upper and Lower Austria can be seen in some ways as a continuation of the investiture controversies of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The long roots of these later conflicts have been pointed out by local historians of Upper Austria like Karl Eder and Rudolf Zinnhobler. The early modern connections help to explain the particular course of religious reform in the Habsburg Hereditary Lands.

Before 1848 not merely democrats and liberals criticized the post-Napoleonic order for their growing mistrust of its ability to protect the sovereignty of smaller countries and preserve the general peace. The predominantly conservative ruling elite, namely rulers, statesmen, and diplomats, raised the same criticism when the law-breaking and abuse of power made them similarly mistrustful of the state of European politics during the 1830s and 1840s. This became true even for some of the order's authors like Austrian chancellor Metternich who serves as a prominent example of this mistrust with his project of a league to preserve peace in Europe in August 1840. Metternich, who helped to create this order in 1815, found it defective and in need of improvement only a quarter of a century later. He certainly did not want to create a completely new international order and law of nations as some liberals and democrats desired at that time, but his idea was still, in a certain sense, revolutionary since its realization would have fundamentally modified the pillars on which the order had been founded at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

This article discusses discourses of Czech tourism on the Eastern Adriatic coast between the turn of the twentieth century and the 1930s using the Czech resorts in Baška on Krk Island and Kupari near Dubrovnik as case studies. The author argues that the ideological foundation of this type of tourism was a narrative of proximity between the Czechs and their fellow Slav Croatians. At the same time, the practice of Czech tourism was characterized by a pattern of cultural paternalism and economic exploitation toward the local population. It thus became a pseudo-colonial enterprise that distorted the Czech national myth of democracy, rationalism, and cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, tourism still contributed to cultural mediation between Czechs and South Slavs. This article illustrates that point by highlighting the commemoration of the Yugoslav playwright Ivo Vojnović by Czech tourists in the 1930s.

On 19 June 1911, dozens of Jews and Ukrainians were killed by the Austrian militia in Drohobycz at the command of the Jewish leader of the city, Jacob Feuerstein, to ensure the victory of the Jewish assimilationist candidate, aligned with the Polish elite, over the Zionist candidate. While dominating news at the time, reaching front pages around the globe, this event remains relatively unknown today even among specialists. This study for the first time explicates the history of this remarkable event while challenging the nationalist narratives that successfully shaped Jewish, Ukrainian, and Polish collective memory in its aftermath. It questions the extent of the role nationalism plays in violent political conflict, even in a seemingly hypernationalized environment, and demonstrates how nationalist rhetoric masks other motivations of actors. This microhistory builds on recent efforts to locate national indifference in the modern period, in the eye of the nationalist storm. At the same time, the success of nationalists to reframe this event in nationalist terms demonstrates how nationalism could shape historical memory and successfully push back against this indifference. The massacre demonstrates that nationalization was a gradual process, during which other identities persisted and other factors guided political events, while exposing how nationalist leaders paradoxically used such moments to obfuscate this reality and advance their own agendas.