The Austrian school reforms of the 1850s and 1860s, inspired by the mindset of the democratic and civic revolutions of 1848, turned a predominantly feudal and religious school system into a modern one and brought basic education to the masses. In the following decades, literacy increased, basic knowledge spread, and the overwhelming influence of the Catholic church in school matters diminished. Yet, as an “unintended consequence,” these reforms also had great implications for the process of building what turned out to be “the Slovene nation.” This article aims to illustrate that the formation of Slovene national identity—based on the use of the Slovene language as the main marker of Slovene ethnicity—was implemented to a large extent with the help of the Austrian school system and its efforts at centralization, systematization, and modernization. Measures like the creation of a school subject for the Slovene language, Slovene reading materials in school textbooks, and statistical categorization within school administrations played a crucial role in that process.

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.

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.

This article considers the figure of Habsburg Emperor Charles V in relation to Italy, first as perceived by Italians in his own time, the sixteenth century, but then especially as evaluated by Italians of the Risorgimento—and notably by Verdi in his operatic work. The article emphasizes opera as a crucial cultural medium of Habsburg engagement with the Italian peninsula and of Italian culture within the Habsburg monarchy. Contemporary Italian evaluations of Charles's role in the domination of Italy were both regretful of his military interventions (including the sack of Rome in 1527) and respectful of his political skills. During the Risorgimento, the conventional Mazzinian perspective was deeply hostile to the Habsburgs and conditioned the wars of Italian unification against the Habsburg monarchy. Italian opera, however, especially Rossini's Guillaume Tell (1829), Verdi's Ernani (1844), and Verdi's Don Carlos (1867) indicate a complex operatic perspective on the Habsburgs in Risorgimento culture. While the Austrian Habsburg representative Gessler is the villain in Rossini's Guillaume Tell, Verdi's Ernani actually places Charles V on stage in a major baritone role with beautiful music and an ambivalent presence. In Don Carlos, the ghost of Charles V hovers over and haunts the whole opera.

This article examines how and why mass tourism on the Adriatic coast in the 1980s became such a dominating factor in local societies and environments. As economic crises led to decreased living standards, local municipalities became more dependent on foreign tourism. Also, previous environmental management policies ensured that tourism became entangled with the Adriatic environment, which was heavily transformed by the rapid expansion of tourism.

This is a tribute to István Deák, a prominent historian of Habsburg history. The tribute covers his early life in Budapest, the son of a middle-class family of Jewish origins who suffered as a Jew in 1944. Deák left Hungary in 1944, spent several years in France and Germany, and then came to the United States in 1956. Much of the commemoration covers his career as a professor of history at Columbia University and his very significant scholarly contributions.

This article analyzes an 1869 law from Cisleithania that defined all running waters as public goods. Economic and political actors debated the issue of water rights over several decades in the mid-nineteenth century, as is shown in contemporary publications, proceedings of assemblies, and administrative archives. The legal solution that was ultimately adopted established the management of water rights and uses according to a particular form of property which was intentionally preferred over a system of private appropriation. Looking in detail at what “public good” meant for the actors, this article argues that settling the legal status of rivers served to both consolidate the imperial state's power over society and to make water resources available to a productivist economic system. The new relationships to the environment that emerged during this time were inseparable from contemporary political and economic developments, and legislating was one way to bind these aspects together. Moreover, the case of water rights in the Habsburg Empire adds nuance to binary oppositions between private property and commons that dominate the study of property regimes and environment today. It invites us to consider how the establishment of a productivist economic system rested on a combination of different forms of property and strong state intervention.

This short piece comments on the articles presented in the forum on Adriatic tourism and their analyses of competing historical claims to “our Adriatic.” The comment focuses on questions raised about ownership of the sea and the Adriatic's borders of belonging. While sovereignty over areas of the Adriatic has proven an enduring diplomatic issue in both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the forum authors instead consider claims by different types of actors: tourists (particularly Czech tourists who claimed a special relationship between Czechs and their South Slav “brothers”); investors in hotels and related infrastructure; socialist Yugoslav tourism planners; and environmentalists concerned with issues of pollution. In tracing out tensions in the agendas of hosts and visitors, as well as planners and scientists, the forum's essays measure and map the socio-ecological metabolism of the modern eastern Adriatic.

At the turn of the sixteenth century, the Habsburgs formulated a distinct dynastic identity that centered around their claims of ancient ancestry. They promoted this identity through an elaborate symbolic apparatus that extensively evoked historical and mythological figures from antiquity. This article identifies one such strand in the Habsburgs’ symbolic repertoires that centered upon their identification with Scipio Africanus (236/235–183 BC), the famous Roman general celebrated for his campaigns against Carthage. By tracing the Habsburgs’ uses of Scipio, this article offers a reassessment of the dynasty's relationship with these images. Traditionally, the Habsburgs’ shared symbolic repertoires have been understood to be a source of strength, providing a degree of unity and uniformity to the dynasty scattered across early modern Europe. This article argues that this dynastic uniformity ought not to be taken for granted. While the Habsburgs shared an attachment to Scipio, their interpretations of this Roman hero differed from each other in ways that were revealing of their individual needs, ambitions, and struggles as well as rivalries and animosities within the dynasty. The Habsburgs’ different—ultimately competing—uses of Scipio demonstrate that while their reliance on shared symbolic repertoires presented a significant advantage, it also rendered them uniquely vulnerable.

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.

During the era following the Enlightenment, the police became the main institution to oversee the maintenance of public order in many European cities. Their activities also shaped the idea of public order and public morality. The police were important in the context of political change and perceived “threat of revolution” but also in other areas, including the control of movement and residence. From the end of the eighteenth century, criminal codes were changing, and in the Habsburg monarchy, these changes included the definition of a new category of less grave “police delicts.” This study compares police norms and practice in the period of 1790–1830. Using several concrete examples, the author investigates whether the approach of the police and the authorities to moral offenses changed in connection with social and political developments (reaction to revolutions, restoration, changes in the influence of the Church). The aim of the study is to analyze whether the Habsburg police, in an era of more liberal legislation, played a similar restrictive role in the area of moral offenses as they did in controlling political activities.

Toyen (1902–80, born Marie Čermínová), a Czech avant-garde artist who spent most of her life and career in France, associated with a multitude of art groups that were dominated by the ideas of surrealism. She was a seeker and traveler who enjoyed collaboration with friends of any gender, nationality, or identity as a vehicle for her individual creativity. Toyen's fascinating and extensive body of work in a variety of media, ranging from painting to printing and design; her profound and lasting associations with more commonly known and often male artists, such as André Breton, Paul Éluard, or Benjamin Péret; as well as her charismatic, sexually ambivalent personality have increasingly become the focus of study. This no doubt has and will attract a growing number of sophisticated and high-quality research projects by scholars from different backgrounds working in a variety of languages. Two examples of such recent works are briefly examined in this review: Karla Huebner's monograph Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic and the international exhibition Toyen: The Dreaming Rebel and its accompanying catalog.

From the mid-1890s, Habsburg Austria began to follow European trends and experienced a gradual democratization of voting rights, which involved not only an expansion of the electorate but also an innovation of procedures that attempted to modernize elections. In this context, the article calls for a more systematic study of voting practices and attempts to point at some issues that have thus far received insufficient analysis. These include not only the occasional massive violent conflicts at elections that could accompany democratization until World War I but also the presence of women as voters at local and diet elections and the gradual introduction of polling booths. Measures such as allowing single women to cast their vote personally in a few crownlands or attempting to guard the secrecy of the vote suggest the level of experimentation in this period. The state's objective of orderly, “modern” elections is particularly called into question when we consider the extent to which government agents, including policemen and the army, were involved in election conflicts that resulted in fraud and sometimes bloodshed.

Following the Habsburg occupation of Bosnia, the newly built administration integrated much of the existing plural Ottoman legal system into its own. The ensuing transformation of Sharia courts saw them given “special jurisdiction” in the areas of Muslim marriage and divorce, which, in turn, fueled several legal challenges, such as how (if at all) they could prosecute “runaway” wives und unlawful marriages. This article analyzes how such legal challenges were endemic to the “translation” and transposing of Ottoman concepts of law, marriage, and morality within the new administrative setting on the basis of Sharia court records. In examining these debates, contested on the one side by Bosnian qadis and on the other by Habsburg officials, it becomes clear that Islamic and Ottoman legal understandings were reinterpreted strategically to support different views as to how an Islamic judiciary could be best integrated into the (predominantly Christian) Habsburg monarchy.

This article examines the lived experience of the Habsburg's military institutions in the lead-up to the Austro-Franco war of 1809, a period in which military service was positioned as the most loyal act a dutiful male subject of the emperor Francis I (II) could undertake. It does this by paying particular attention to a shameful and embarrassing public military display and the resulting near-violent dispute between company officers of the Jordis infantry regiment, as recorded and reflected upon by a young junior officer in 1808. This account allows for the examination of the ways in which honor created narrative frameworks and communities that persuaded diverse individuals to place their experiences within the context of the monarchy's war with France.

The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest between the Germanic Cherusci chieftain Arminius, or Hermann, and the Roman armies under Varus (9 AD) had served as an analogy for German–French hereditary enmity since the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). This analogy was particularly popular during the Napoleonic Wars as it symbolized the unity, independence, and identity of German lands that were previously united during the Holy Roman Empire (dissolved 1806). Little is known about the reception of the Hermann narrative in the Austrian Hereditary Lands (more or less present-day Austria) of the Habsburg Empire during the Napoleonic Wars. In Austria, Hermann also served as a symbol of the Austrian lands belonging to the German nation and as an expression of Habsburg hegemony over German lands. This article examines this specific narrative by analyzing its reception in Austrian newspapers, belles lettres, and paintings.

Reading these articles in our AHY Forum brought back a flood of memories to my last days as a university undergraduate at Emory University when I first encountered Emperor Rudolf II and Renaissance Prague in a course taught by the late James Allen Vann. What captivates us about the past? What prompts naive undergraduates to take that fateful step and pursue a PhD in history? For me, it was simply Rudolf. I was not alone. The quizzical emperor ensconced in his castle high above the city has intrigued the imaginations of many. There is certainly irony in this, for Rudolf as an emperor was no success. He ended his reign an ineffective ruler browbeaten by his own brother to abdicate as king of Bohemia. But if he failed politically, there were lasting triumphs elsewhere. Rudolf's contemporary, the Flemish painter and theoretician Karel van Mander, famously pointed to Prague and the emperor as the “greatest art patron in the world.” And what emperor can boast that his most acclaimed “likeness” was a collage of fruits and vegetables, a portrait executed by a student of Leonardo da Vinci?

This article analyzes a collection of narratives concerning the Russian occupation of Lviv (Lwów, Lemberg), the capital of the Austrian Crownland Galicia, between September 1914 and June 1915 in the initial phase of World War I. These narratives were produced and published in Polish and German between 1915, when Lviv was still occupied, and 1935, sixteen years after it had been included in a reborn Poland. One might assume that the relatively uneventful occupation constituted a negligible experience in the context of the dramatic developments of this period: the Great War and the subsequent Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Soviet wars. And yet, memories of the Russian occupation were tenaciously perpetuated and cultivated. In this article I attempt to answer the multipronged question: Why did the occupation attract so much attention, and from whom, and what made its memories survive the subsequent dramatic conflicts and changes of political regimes relatively intact? Hence, my analysis regards the formation of collective memories at the intersection of individual experiences, group and national identities, and strategies of accommodating the unpredictably changing political realities.

In 1577, a petty pawnbroker named Ester lost a clasp belonging to a Prague noblewoman, Lady Juliana the Fifth. Having been traded repeatedly between anonymous pawnbrokers, the clasp was eventually tracked down in the Polish city of Poznań, by which time Ester had already fled Prague and taken refuge in Cracow. In this essay, I use the subsequent criminal court case to explore this illuminating episode in the history of the city's Jewish Quarter. Taking place in the late Renaissance, during what has often been referred to as the Jewish “Golden Age,” I argue that this dramatic event provides access to the realities of an era often characterized as harmonious. I position pawnbroking as an industry that invited intimate and regular cross-confessional contact, and one that therefore offers up new opportunities to consider the nature of coexistence. By following the movement of both Ester and the pawned clasp from Prague to Poland, I also show how attention to pawnbroking can illuminate a constellation of transregional connections that stretched from Bohemia to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to its east, revealing the otherwise unrecorded ways in which Prague's Jews were connected to the Ashkenazi diaspora.

The histories of early modern religion and trade have both benefited from the global turn in recent years. This article brings the two fields together through the study of religious objects in Prague in the seventeenth century and shows ways in which religion and religious practice were entangled with new commercial and artistic ventures that crossed regional and international borders. Among the possessions of seventeenth-century Prague burghers were religious objects that had come from exotic lands, such as a “coconut” rosary and a ruby and diamond “pelican in her piety” jewel. These objects were made in multiple locations and traded to satisfy a new demand for items that could aid and display devotion as well as act as markers of wealth and confessional identity. Through this study of religious objects, Central Europe is revealed to be an important locale to the global history of the early modern period.