In few Austrians were preoccupations with post-empire culture and politics stronger than in Hans Eibl, Richard von Kralik's most enthusiastic disciple. Like may young Austrians who had wintnessed the crumbling of the Habsburg empire, Eibl longed for vanished glories, for an all-encompassing Germanic community, and for a leader who combined regenerative religious qualities with political greatness. Though Eibl himself tried to fill these needs with a synthesis of religion and politics, he fell victim to his own endeavors. Given his personality and professional specialization, as well as him mentors, plus the instability of the First Republic, it perhaps could not have been otherwise.

The fundamental fact in the nationality issue in Croatia in the nineteenth century is that by 1914 the majority of the most influential political leaders of the Croats assumed that the indefinite survival of an independent united Croatia, based on the national principle alone, was a political and international impossibility. Once having accepted this premise, which was based on careful consideration of the conditions of their historical past and their position in Europe, the Croatian leaders were compelled to seek a solution to their political future which was in conflict with the major trend of the nineteenth century, namely, the political unification of ethnically homogeneous people into a sovereign state. Although there was a strong nationalist movement in Croatia, which aimed at the creation of an independent state, it could not deal with the realities of the Croatian position. Practical considerations thus left the Croatians with two alternatives: they could either remain within the framework of the Habsburg empire, in union with Vienna or Budapest or both; or they could join with the Serbs and Slovenes in a federal South Slav state. The story of nineteenth-century nationalism in Croatia centers on the vacillation between these two possibilities. The aim at all times was to find the combination which would best protect the Croatian national individuality, since Croatia alone did not have the necessary prerequisites for a completely independent national existence.2

The historian of the seventeenth century who bewails the absence of a creditable biography of Louis XIV or of William III underlines a significant development of historical writing in the twentieth century. Overpowered by those who deny that biography can be history and convinced that the masses have never secured their due share of attention in early modern times, the scholar uneasily plots an investigation of underground discontent in the gilds of Colbert's day or resolutely pens an essay that destroys once and for all the idea that the workers of France admired Napoleon. Meanwhile, in classes which race from Petrarch to Waterloo, the scholar turned teacher admits that there actually were an age of absolutism and an age of enlightened despotism, for the royal touch is inescapable.

Recent surveys on post-soviet Eastern Europe reveal that ethnicity and ethnic differentiation are gradually losing their salience among local citizens, while social identification (for example, identities of workers or businesspeople) has become increasingly important as a way for people to perceive both themselves and ongoing political and economic changes. This tendency purports to herald the emergence of a society in which citizens compete for rewards and opportunities on the basis of merit rather than ethnic heritage. In Lithuania and Western Ukraine, however, this is not the case. National identification axes are the most important, and a strong national identity promotes democracy and opposition to communism.

In consolidating his hold over the Austrian, Hungarian, and Bohemian territories which he acquired between 1521 and 1526, Ferdinand I (1521–1564) enjoyed one especially notable success: the suppression in 1547 of a Bohemian uprising during Emperor Charles V's (1519–1556) campaign against the Protestant Schmalkaldic League in Germany. Relying on the promise of the Schmalkaldian leader Elector John Frederick of Saxony to protect them, the Bohemian estates formed a league in 1547 which challenged, among other things, Ferdinand's rights to summon the diet, to have his son crowned during his lifetime, and to oversee the administration of his treasury.

By abolishing feudalism, the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 helped to create the economic preconditions and the legal-political framework necessary for capitalistic development. This made it possible for Hungary to adapt her economy to the market possibilities offered by the Industrial Revolution in western and central Europe and to share in the agrarian boom of the period between 1850 and 1873. The previously existing division of labor between western and eastern Europe and between the western and eastern parts of the Habsburg monarchy continued on a scale larger than before, with the significant difference, however, that this practice now speeded up rather than retarded the development of preconditions for capitalism. During the first half of the nineteenth century the preconditions for capitalism had come into existence in the Cisleithanian provinces at considerable expense to the Hungarian economy.

Film was a relatively new commercial-entertainment medium in the summer of 1930, and newerstill were the “talkies.” Unforeseen cultural difficulties accompanied the advent of sound films, to which spoken language gave an intrinsic national character. Language accentuated national differences in feeling and thought, and since audiences could no longer “naturalize” films, they could not adopt the imaginative content of sound films as their own “cultural territory.” American audiences mocked the nasal English accents in British films, while the British hissed American accents and Parisians greeted the first American ”talkie” with cries of “Speak French!” In Czechoslovakia, historical circumstances complicated popular reaction to sound films. With the founding of the state in 1918, Czechs had rejected their Austrian legacy and attempted to enforce a Czech character in all aspects of public life.

Amid the preparations for the abortive Russo-Ottoman peace talks at Fokschan in April 1772, Anton Wenzel Kaunitz instructed the Austrian Internuntius in Istanbul, Franz Maria Thugut, to elect a colleague to accompany him to the congress. Kaunitz, eager to maintain Austria's unique relationship with both belligerent parties, suggested two young orientalists, Bernhard von Jenisch and the Hungarian noble Karl Reviczky as suitable companions. In character with many thirty-somethings in the Habsburg bureaucracy in the 1770s, Thugut, Jenisch, and Reviczky were fluent in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish and possessed an exceptional knowledge of Ottoman affairs. As members of the Austrian embassy to the Ottoman Porte, they had each spent long sojourns in Istanbul. The recruitment and education of such men had been one of Kaunitz's priorities since the 1750s. Thugut knew both candidates well, especially Jenisch, an old chum since their student days at the Oriental Academy in Vienna. Despite Reviczky's recent successes as a translator of an Ottoman treatise on government and some ghazals by the Persian poet Hafez, Thugut did not share Kaunitz's esteem for the young noble, explaining that Reviczky “is as ingenious as he is faint-hearted; he turns pale at the mere mention of plague and would take objection to travel over the channel with sharp winds.”

Beginning with the profound geopolitical changes created by the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the creation of the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav states, this article examines how medical knowledge about maritime climate and sea-based therapies was mobilized in Czech popular touristic writing about Yugoslavia's Adriatic coast in the 1920s. The analysis of archival documents as well as non-specialist medical publications of Czech or Prague-trained doctors show that Czech tourists and curists (travelers in search of health treatments) were offered a freeform, all-encompassing therapeutic environmental approach. Inspired by Neo-Hippocratic principles, doctors stressed the importance of factors such as salt water, clean air, temperature variation, sunshine, flora, and modern facilities for disease prevention or the restoration of one's health. These doctors’ relative success in promoting the therapeutic virtues of the Adriatic Sea is explained in large part, this article argues, by a broad nexus of intertwined interests (such as the growth of tourism, concerns about public health, and the influence of Neo-Slavism) embedded in the project of transforming the Adriatic Sea into a therapeutic site.

I well remember as a child in Bucharest being taught by a reputable high school teacher that to speak kindly of Romanian-Magyar sympathizers was tantamount to asking for a failing grade. From elementary school on I can recall only the most disparaging remarks by my teachers about my Hungarian neighbors, and I challenge my friend Istvan Deak to say that sympathizers of the Romanians were ever more kindly treated in the lyceums of Budapest or Debrecen. Fortunately, we are sufficiently sophisticated today to realize that the writing of history is a matter of dates. I am, nevertheless, bewildered by the thought that the same Romanian schoolboy studying the revolutions of 1848 in classrooms of 1940, 1952, and 1976 has been and is being taught that the villains of yesterday are the heroes of today.

Thereis something in a historian that loves wreckage. I am confident that scientists will one day identify a gene on our chromosomes that predisposes us to destruction. As a young graduate student, I listened in rapt attention as Lawrence Stone mesmerized our seminar describing the one opportunity he had in wartime to “sack a house.” Most of us, however, sublimate these illicit desires, and the urge to destroy only becomes evident in our scholarship. Following Gibbon and Huizinga, we relish the study of decay and decline. Humor aside, R. J. W. Evans was well aware of this instinct as he began The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy with a simple but profound observation, “Many historians, in a dozen languages, have sought to explain why the Habsburg Monarchy declined and fell; none has ever seriously investigated the causes of its rise.”