“Oh, home of tears, but let her bear this blazoned to the end of time: No nation rose so white and fair, none fell so pure of crime.” So reads the stanza from a poem popular in the South during the Civil War engraved on a Confederate soldier statue unveiled in 1911 on the lawn of the Cooke County courthouse in Gainesville, Texas (Figure 1). It is one of two Confederate statues long on display in the city of some 16,000 some ninety miles north of Dallas. This larger-than-life soldier, standing high upon a column, towers over an important public space. It is among many Confederate monuments that long occupied public spaces across the United States, often with little local debate, despite their often white-supremacist inscriptions.

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.

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.

Austrian chancellor Metternich's Europeanism is often disputed. It has been claimed that he strove only to strengthen Austrian power within the German Confederation and to establish Austrian hegemony in Central Europe, with European interests and the Concert of only secondary concern. The objective of this article is to analyze Metternich's opinions and acts during selected European crises and events between 1840 and 1848, arguing that his approach to resolving them or dealing with their consequences shows that during this period his primary objective was to maintain European peace. He wanted to achieve this by demonstrating the moral consensus of, ideally, all the great powers by abating tense nationalist sentiments, calling for the observance of international agreements and the respect of rights, adopting preventive measures, and warning against or drawing attention to possible negative consequences of the crises for peace in Europe. Metternich's attempt at preserving European peace at all costs was mainly a result of his personal experience of revolution and almost a quarter century of warfare with France. By the 1840s, however, Metternich's style of peace management was rejected as anachronistic, resulting in several military conflicts in subsequent years. Considering the events of the last century that led to European integration, however, his Europeanism deserves a more forgiving evaluation.

The robbery of Viennese shoe manufacturer Josef Merstallinger on 4 July 1882 led to a political trial of social radicals the following year. When Merstallinger's assailants were arrested, they admitted to the crime and professed to have carried it out to raise funds for the radical socialist movement. In response, the police arrested dozens of radical activists and eventually charged twenty-nine people with crimes including high treason. The authorities, including the chief of the Vienna police and state's attorney, characterized the robbery as part of an international anarchist conspiracy that threatened violent revolution against the basis of Austrian and European civilization. The trial was thus intended to cripple the radical organization and demonstrate the dangers socialist politics posed to the public. A counternarrative for the defendants stressed the relative harmlessness of the radical movement, general harmony of Austrian social relations, and rights of the accused to free speech and to protection from arbitrary treatment by the police. A public jury trial suggested the greater persuasiveness of the latter narrative, as the jury acquitted the defendants of all charges except those directly related to the robbery.

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.

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.

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.

Encompassing the final decades of Habsburg rule and the rise of modern culture, the cosmopolitan and Jewish Vienna of the fin de siècle was a despised locus in the Nazi historical imaginary. Vienna 1900 was a polyglot, multicultural city, a place where European Jewry had risen to unforeseen heights of economic prosperity and cultural influence; many Nazi ideologues, historians, and authors focused on the verjudet nature of late imperial Vienna. A variety of strategies were employed to distance the Nazi present from Vienna 1900; it was alternately suppressed and ignored, or deeply vilified. Yet the period was also inseparable from two figures celebrated in Nazi Vienna: Mayor Karl Lueger and artist Gustav Klimt. This article examines Nazi discourse on Vienna 1900, especially that originating from Viennese writers, ideologues, and political figures. Reflecting both scholarly and popular views, I examine academic texts, books for popular readers, films, and art exhibitions. After examining the perception and appropriation of Vienna 1900 between the years 1938 and 1945, I end by exploring its instrumentalization in a different context. In an ironic twist of history, the very period suppressed and derided in Nazi discourse would in turn be called upon, by the 1970s, to distract from the shadow of the Nazi era that still hung over the city.

Biographies of great men are often undertaken by amateurs. Professional historians prefer to focus on collective institutions that are thought to be the theater of history properly understood. Geoffrey Parker has been a key figure in developing the “military revolution” hypothesis that has guided a good deal of recent work in early modern military history; he understands the perils of a biography better than most. But, having spent years amid the stacks of paperwork left by Spanish-Habsburg rulers, he also knows that the personal decisions of a Charles V (1500–58) made a difference. Charles signed more than 100,000 state documents, many of them with annotations in a distinctive hand that (one might say) only a mother could love.

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.