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.

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.”

The question that sparked this forum was to what extent we can see Prague as an important stage for Renaissance and Reformation exchange and as an internationally connected city. It is striking, though not unexpected, that all the authors have been drawn to some extent to sources and subjects in Rudolfine Prague. It must be stressed, however, that the emphasis of each of these studies is somewhat different to an older field of “Rudolfine studies.” The researchers here do not focus on the emperor's court but use it as context. It is tangential to their main focal points—on Jewish communities, religious change, and the exchange of scientific and musical knowledge—and these are first and foremost historians not of Prague but of social and cultural history, music, art, material culture, and religion. This indicates a marked shift from the historiography. For this generation of scholars, Prague is not only a city that is home to a fascinating and intriguing art historical moment but is also a city of early modern international connections. It provides a unique context for understanding communities, everyday experiences, religion, and culture in early modern Europe—a multilingual, multiconfessional, and multicultural mixing pot whose composition changed dramatically across the early modern period. Rudolf's court was certainly a catalyst for these crossings and encounters, but they did not fade away after his death in 1612, nor were they limited to the confines of the castle above the city.

This article explores the consequences of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's end through the tumultuous biography of a philanthropic entrepreneur and quasi-consul community leader known today for assisting thousands of Jewish refugees during World War II. Focusing on Paul Komor (1886–1973) and the migrant community of Shanghai Hungarians, the article contends that postimperial diasporas preserved a piece of empire in their commitment to Jewish emancipation, imperialist nationalism, multiple loyalties, and political nostalgia. It also argues that diasporic networks and charitable actions communicated political and national loyalties while creating and defining the boundaries of the community. Presenting original research involving sources in multiple languages from China, Hungary, the U.S., the U.K., and the Netherlands, the article traces the fortunes of a Jewish Hungarian family in colonial Shanghai, shows the limits of its son's charity-rooted advancement in community leadership, sheds light on the seemingly contradictory political ideas of a postimperial expatriate to explain his complicated relationship with his kinstate, and analyzes the institutionalization of communal charity and the competing prerequisite definitions of postimperial national belonging.

Hungary has a long, rich history of wine production. Historians have emphasized wine's importance to the development of both the Hungarian economy and Hungarian nationalism. This article ties together these historiographical threads through a case study of a small village in one of Hungary's most famous wine regions. Tracing the village's history from the 1860s to World War I, the article makes three main claims. First, it demonstrates that from the start, this remote village belonged to wider networks of trade and exchange that stretched across the surrounding region, state, and continent. Second, it shows that even as Magyar elites celebrated the folk culture and peasant smallholders of this region, they also cheered the introduction of what they saw as scientific, rational agriculture. This leads to the last argument: wine achieved its place in the pantheon of Hungarian culture at a moment when the local communities that had grown up around its production and stirred the national imagination were undergoing dramatic and irreversible change.

This article analyzes the role of urban civic militias (burgher corps) in Habsburg Austria from the end of the nineteenth century to the aftermath of World War I. Far from a remnant of the early modern past, by the turn of the twentieth century these militias were thriving local institutions. They fostered dynastic patriotism and participated in the growing promotion of shooting among the population in the lead-up to the conflict. But they also played a major role in upholding the bourgeois ideals of protection of social hierarchies and property. In the context of the rise of the workers' movement and social unrest, the militias saw themselves as bulwarks of social order and bastions of bourgeois virtue. They reflected an exclusive conception of armed citizenship opposed to the egalitarian notion of the citizen-soldier that survived into the twentieth century. The sensory experience of burgher corps parades during the patriotic or church celebrations was supposed to convey stability and express hierarchies in the urban space. This article also links the practices of armed civilians before the war to the paramilitary groups that emerged in 1918 and emphasizes the legacy of local conceptions of armed defense of property and of notions of “good” citizenship in the aftermath of the war.

This essay assesses the role of regionalism in interwar Austrian painting with a focus on the Tyrolean painter and architect Alfons Walde (1891–1958). At a time when painting was seen to be in crisis, eclipsed by the deaths of prominent Viennese artists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, regionalism offered an alternative engagement with modern art. As the representative of a wider regionalist movement, Walde paved the way for a clearly identifiable image of rural Austria without foregoing the modernization process that took place in the Alps at the time. Filtering essential elements of local culture and synthesizing them with both a modern formal language and “modern” topics, most significantly ski tourism, he created a regionalism that reverberated beyond the narrow confines of his home province and caught particular momentum during the rise of the Austrian Ständestaat in the 1930s. Moving in between regional and national significance, Walde's work underlines the essential position of the region in Austria after 1918 and conveys that an engaged regionalism that responded to the rapid cultural and political changes taking place became a significant aspect of interwar Austrian painting.

The Habsburg monarchy seems doubly confounding. Its historians call it an empire, but it actually never called itself that. For a fraction of its existence (1804–67), the monarchy counted as a Kaisertum, a word meant to burnish the fading glory of a lost imperial title (of the Holy Roman Empire). But its rulers never evinced the self-confident imperial aggressiveness or the desire to exploit distant territories that characterized British or Russian counterparts, and students of global empires often do not think the Habsburgs fit the category. But after calling the double monarchy an empire, Central European specialists lose the critical edge historians apply to other empires, and celebrate the Habsburgs for holding back nationalism, the force that made the twentieth century so deadly. The monarchy was not only an empire but a virtuous empire. This Kann Memorial Lecture examines a range of theoretical and practical reasons for calling the Habsburg state an empire—as its subjects often did. But if we do, we should recognize that like other empires it abhorred democracy. Perhaps more than a dam holding back the twentieth century and all its evils, the Habsburg Empire was more a conduit.

As one of the original partitioning powers of the eighteenth century, Austria shared equally with Russia and Prussia in the responsibility for destroying the independent Polish kingdom. Maria Theresa may have felt troubled by this violation of sovereignty, but, to paraphrase Frederick the Great, she (and her successors) still took. The fact that conscience did not prevail over reason of state, even in the case of such a pious empress, set the pattern for the future relations between Habsburg Austria and its Polish subjects. As they had in 1772, Austrian interests took precedence over Polish ones and, until 1866, the demarcation between ruler and ruled was clear.

Rabinbach has made a valuable contribution to the study of the Jewish migration within the Habsburg monarchy, the most noteworthy phenomenon of which was the wholesale mass movement of Galician Jews to Vienna during the second half of the nineteenth century. The author, relying mainly on contemporary statistical records for source material, ably documents the increase in Jewish inhabitants in Vienna from one to ten percent of the total population during this period.

In 1848–49 Austria could have introduced reforms which conceivably might have insured her continued existence for many generations and possibly might have finally made a true state out of the Habsburg domains. … [In] the course of the two [subsequent] generations until 1918 there never appeared an equally promising opportunity for the empire to carry out reform without risking its disintegration. This is not to say that Austria should not have taken this risk, which was smaller at the time of the compromise in 1867 than it was in 1905 and smaller in 1905 at the height of the Hungarian crisis than it was in 1917, when Engels' ominous prediction finally came true that with the victory of the Russian Revolution Austria would disintegrate.

The purpose of this article is to clarify the relative roles of Austria and Prussia during the Wars of Liberation of 1813 and 1814. It uses the very latest research concerning the military strategy adopted and emphasizes the input of Radetzky, using his handwritten account of the campaign, a document previously ignored by historians, despite the general's position as chief of staff of the allied coalition. The fact is that Anglo-American historians have failed to investigate the politics of the military alliance of 1813–1814 that constituted the Fourth Coalition. Myself apart, the only historian to examine that alliance with any regard to the Austrian viewpoint has been Gordon A. Craig in a brief but excellent analysis published as long ago as 1966. German historians have done little better. They simply neglect the Austrian archives.

The War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714), one of the major international conflicts of the eighteenth century, sought to resolve the greatest diplomatic issue of the day: the partition of the Spanish empire. This essay focuses on the Austrian emperor Leopold I's diplomatic efforts in the courts of the Maritime Powers to obtain the Spanish inheritance during the first years of that conflict. The early years of the war (between 1701 and 1705) were a formative period in the development of Habsburg foreign policy. The problems that plagued the Maritime Powers after Leopold's death in 1705, such as the disputes over the deployment of troops, the differences of opinion over precisely how the Spanish empire should be divided and the policy to be followed in dealing with the Hungarian rebels and the elector of Bavaria, and the questions that arose over the alliances with Portugal and Savoy were all either existing or anticipated during the latter years of his reign.

The expositions staged by Hungarian liberals in the nineteenth century—the modest Pest industrial fairs of the 1840s; the agricultural hibitions of the counterrevolutionary 1850s; the Pest agricultural exhibition in 1865; the three provincial industrial exhibitions of the 1870s in Kecskemét, Szeged, and Székesfehérvár; the successful national exhibition in Budapest in 1885; and the lavish Millennium Exhibition of 1896—conformed to the wider European and American pattern of expositions. Between 1876 and 1916 some one hundred million Americans attended expositions; over 20 percent of the U.S. population attended Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition of 1876. Over forty-eight million people passed through the turnstiles of the Paris Exposition of 1900. The three million who attended the 1896 Hungarian Millennium Exhibition were well aware that they were participating in a distinct rite of industrial civilization. Although the Hungarian numbers were far smaller, it is wrong to assume that the Hungarian nationl fairs were copycat undertakings.