The many friends, colleagues, and students of Prof. May were genuinely shocked when they learned of his untimely death on June 17, 1968. Certainly nobody who saw the commanding figure of this man preside with customary charm, wit, and vigor over a panel on Austrian history at the American Historical Association convention in Toronto in December, 1967, would have expected this tragic news.

This article shows empirical and conceptual possibilities of exploring the transcultural roles and economic situations of French migrant women who served as governesses in the noble circles of the Habsburg monarchy. It combines various research methods, employing narrative textual analysis, socioeconomic and material culture approaches, and cultural exchange perspectives. The author uses printed librettos and comparative insights to reveal broader social anxieties connected with governesses who crossed multiple borders in terms of geography, culture, language, class, and the gender order. She also draws attention to inheritance tax–related sources as evidence of these women's economic conditions. Finally, the author outlines the major shifts in attitudes toward the French language and French immigrants and shows how these affected the governesses’ labor market.

It is generally acknowledged that museums were an essential part of the national project in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe—and some retain this function even today. Classic works in nationalism studies, such as Eric Hobsbawm's, have highlighted the role they played in the birth of modern nations. Subsequent studies that focused on specific national contexts help us better understand the mechanisms by which museums contributed to the invention of national traditions as well as to the formation of historical consciousness, historical memory, and the functioning of modern states. As these and other scholars of museum history also demonstrate, museum founders, directors, curators, and the broader public were driven by agendas and aspirations other than nation-building within these larger processes. Analyzing how these agendas mixed with the aims of the national project in a specific locality in the making of museums can generate new insights into the formation of modern subjectivities in this period.

On 8 March 1849, Upper Austria's first liberal governor, Alois Fischer, stood on the balcony of the Rathaus in Linz's market square and proclaimed the closing of the democratically elected Austrian Reichstag in Kremsier. The newly crowned emperor, Francis Joseph, had written in the proclamation that Fischer now read to the crowd that the Reichstag delegates took too long in their deliberations, wasting time on “dangerous theoretical discussions.” Their labors had become redundant, and the emperor would decree his own constitution. After reciting the imperial proclamation, Fischer retired to the side and let his assistant read out the new constitution. Named after its principal architect, Minister of the Interior Franz Stadion, the new “Stadion” constitution was mildly liberal, although, unlike its unfinished predecessor, it was wholly unambiguous when it came to the monarch: his powers were immense and—the document made sure to point out—derived from God, not from the people. In practice, the constitution was mostly ignored. Fittingly perhaps, those assembled in front of the Rathaus that day could barely make out what was being said. As one participant described the scene, the wind was so strong “that our neighbors disappeared in the dust.” The return of absolutist government thus came to Linz unintelligibly, wrapped in a dense cloud of dust.

During the years 1765–1767, there was serious peasant unrest in Transdanubian Hungary, a region where large estates owned by a few prominent families such as the Esterházy, Batthány, and Festetics were prevalent. Especially in Vas, Zala, and Somogy counties, located in western Hungary across the border from Styria, peasant inhabitants protested the growing demands for services and other payments placed upon them by landlords eager to increase the income produced by their lands. No uniform standards existed; both the size of peasant land holdings and the obligations attached to these holdings varied markedly, determined by various contracts or, more often, by custom.

Nowadays employment in the civil service is often considered a well-nurtured, relatively well-paid position and a “safe” way to earn a living that is not overly stressful. In addition, a lucrative civil servant's pension is seen to ensure a leisurely retirement with medical insurance. However, this widespread assumption is based on misconceptions and obscures the reality of its conditions and circumstances. This article analyzes how the Habsburg state in the first half of the eighteenth century implemented modern concepts and ideas of social security and health in connection with public welfare and to support imperial officials. It focuses in particular on office-bearers employed in the Habsburg province Banat of Temeswar and their close relatives.

The Ottoman conquest of Szigetvar and Gyula (1566) exposed the weakness of the Habsburg monarchy. Unable to mount a military response, Maximilian II depended on his diplomats to ward off the imposition of a conqueror's peace along the Hungarian border. But an official register, the Book of Halil Beg, put forward the sultan's claims to a wide swath of towns and villages, including many still held by Habsburg loyalists. Moreover, the Ottomans said, His Majesty had best accept a settlement on these terms; victorious Turkish captains wanted more and were restrained only by Selim II's orders. This essay describes the efforts of Maximilian's ambassadors to forestall additional losses in peacetime. After years of tough negotiation, they managed to obtain minor revision of the relevant treaty text. Although the Book of Halil Beg would indeed be the basis for any border settlement, as the Porte insisted, the Ottomans acknowledged that Vienna disputed certain of its provisions. This mere protest may have been enough to assure loyalist magnates in Hungary that the dynasty had not abandoned them, or their hereditary lands. Hence the paradox of Habsburg-Ottoman diplomacy. The 1576 treaty of peace, formally ending hostilities, was at the same time a charter for Kleinkrieg.

Spanish bullfights have been organized twice in Hungary: in 1904 and 1924. Unlike in 1904, when the bullfights arrived in Budapest from Paris and were held with the city's urban tourism promotion interests in mind, the 1924 corrida was connected to the internationalization of Spanish bullfights through their support by fascist Italy, causing a domestic political imbroglio in Hungary due to competing political and business interests at home. At the same time, the bullfights represented another novelty in the field of transnational popular entertainment, whose different waves had continuously reached Budapest since the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the 1924 event, the article argues that the bullfights organized in Budapest that year need to be understood from the perspective of interactions between postwar European authoritarian cultural politics, the domestic political scene in Hungary, and Spanish attempts to turn the bullfights into a transnational spectacle rivaling the popularity of British football. Although the bullfights did not take root in Hungary, their organization in Budapest represents an important chapter in the global advance of twentieth-century popular culture, a historically informed understanding of the formation of which requires consideration not just of successful but also failed processes of cultural transfer.

James Robert (Bob) Wegs died, after a long struggle with lymphoma, on 14 July 2010. He was too much a scholar of modern Europe for it not to be mentioned that this was Bastille Day. A passionate and dedicated historian of Austria, Wegs served throughout the 1990s on the editorial board of the Austrian History Yearbook and the Executive Committee of the Society for Austrian and Habsburg History. His career reflects a certain chapter of U.S. history even as it forms part of the dynamic historiography of Central Europe.

On 6 January 1584, the provost of Zwettl in the archduchy of Austria below the Enns recounted events two days earlier that had greatly alarmed him. Present in the town of Zwettl on administrative business, Ulrich Hackel had been very surprised to see the town church unlocked and packed with peasants and townspeople. An additional 600 peasants, according to his reckoning, were gathered outside the church. All were dressed in their best and all were celebrating Christmas. Yet, as far as Hackel had been concerned, Christmas had already been celebrated ten days earlier. He halted worship in the church, telling the congregation that Christmas was now past and had been duly marked. He then sought out the local magistrate to ensure that the church would be kept locked and that trade would be resumed in the town. His actions had, however, aroused very great opposition. An angry crowd surrounded Hackel, accusing him of being a papist and a rogue and demanding to know why he was depriving them of Christmas. He believed that had he uttered one more word in favor of the earlier celebration of Christmas, he would have been killed on the spot. Hackel had escaped their fury only by being escorted by the town magistrate out of the local parish house in which he had taken refuge and beyond the walls of the town.

In February 1919, Theresia Prokop submitted an application for German citizenship to the Bautzen administrative district in Saxony. The application showed that Prokop was originally from northern Bohemia, had lived in Saxony since 1901, and was a “Bohemian” citizen of “German-Austrian” nationality. Further, it noted: “It is her dearest wish to become German.”

Although galician jewry constituted one of the largest Jewish communities in the world before World War I, it has attracted too little scholarship. Galician Jews sat on the frontier between East and West. Religiously and economically, they were similar to Russian and Romanian Jewry, but since their emancipation in 1867 they enjoyed wideranging civil and political rights akin to those of their Western brethren. Historians focusing either on the numerically more significant Russian Jewry, or the politically and financially more important Western Jewry, have tended to avoid Galicia, even though the region was home to almost a million Jews by the turn of the century. Most Zionist historiography has also underemphasized the importance of this community, particularly in the pre-Herzlian period, by which time Galician Zionists could already boast a considerable degree of organizational infrastructure. This neglect is partly a reflection of the general historiographical trend within modern Jewish history. It also reflects, however, the unusual nature of Galician “Zionism,” which was largely Diaspora-oriented—directed toward national cultural work in the Diaspora as well as political activities designed to secure national minority rights—long before Zionists in either Russia or the West had begun to engage in such activities.

On the surface, there would appear to be little cause to explore the connections between Jews and the bureaucracy of the Austro-Hungarian foreign office in the last decade before the outbreak of World War I. During the tenures of foreign ministers Count Alois Aehrenthal (1906–12) and Count Leopold Berchtold (1912–15), no Jew belonged to the diplomatic corps, and only one functionary from the central office in Vienna is known to have entered the service professing Judaism. The situation within the Ballhausplatz certainly did not reflect that found in the other mainstay of the unified Dual Monarchy, the Habsburg armed forces, which contained an extraordinarily high percentage of Jewish officers, particularly in the reserves. Our knowledge of the experience of Jews in Central Europe's other major foreign office, the Wilhelmstraβe in Berlin, merely reinforces the view that few formal ties existed between Jews and diplomacy.

Because of the various factors in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy which retarded the development of Slovak culture and science, Slovak historians have, on the whole, only during the past few decades begun to examine historical problems from a broad perspective. Consequently, it is by no mere accident that the problem to which part of the attention of this conference is being devoted—the Slovak political movement as a disintegrating force in the Habsburg monarchy—is relatively new to Slovak historiography. Until now it has not been examined from a broad perspective, if only because of the many different historical, political, social, and economic ingredients which were involved in turning nationalism into a significant disintegrating force. Slovak writers have, however, made various studies of the nationality problem—a problem which has ever since the eighteenth century been the most sensitive issue in Slovak history. Certain of these studies have thrown light on both the integrating and disintegrating: forces of the monarchy—two forces which are realy interdependent.

The typical dictator of the interwar period was, like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, already a convinced fascist or authoritarian when he first came to power. This was not the case in Austria, where Engelbert Dollfuß, the semifascist dictator of 1934, was seemingly a genuine democrat when he was appointed chancellor in May 1932. Even his appointment was accidental. Had the Social Democrats accepted Ignaz Seipel's and Karl Buresch's overtures in 1931 to join the Christian Socials in a coalition government, Dollfuß might never have become chancellor. And had they not rejected a second effort by Buresch in April 1932 and demanded new elections, democratic government in Austria would have been strengthened rather than weakened.