This article explores aspects of the organization of refugee education in imperial Austria during the First World War. Authorities in charge of refugees’ control and their eventual assistance interpreted access to education in two ways. First, it was an avenue of relief through schooling, aimed to counter the effects of uprootedness and, thus, safeguard some continuity in refugee children’s lives. Second, it was a way to ensure the making of productive and loyal citizens. In this context, this article looks at various policies regarding organization of schooling for displaced children. Moreover, it analyzes the ways language entered the realm of the refugee-focused classroom. Officials used schooling in refugee students’ vernacular to relieve the effects of their displacement and to reinforce ethnonational classifications of imperial subjects. At the same time, education through refugee children’s growing exposure to German language courses became a measure of a gradual inculcation of an imperial consciousness. Furthermore, it was a civilizing dimension of displacement management and, in this way, it became an avenue to consolidate a war-feeble state.

This article focuses on the involvement of Viennese elites in wide-reaching political conflicts around 1400. Central European princes often held positions as city lords, which resulted in ambivalent relations between them and urban elites, as well as with their kin residing in the countryside. Setting aside grand categories of institutional history in favor of the interactions and relations of concrete actors, their social networks, and their involvement in shaping politics, the article follows six urban actors through a major conflict that involved the city lords, urban authorities, and individual actors and eventually resulted in the beheading of three of them. The article adopts a prosopographical approach to find out more about patterns of social costs and benefits in these conflicts. It argues that considering polyvalent and relational dimensions of belonging can help us better understand constellations of conflict and alliance and the modes and mechanisms of late medieval politics. It eventually establishes the boundaries of social network approaches when it comes to assessing individual motives and their alleged resonance in contemporary narratives of community.

While gender history has developed into a powerful branch of premodern history, we still know little about gender relations around Maximilian I. One reason is that research concentrated for a long time on the individual personality of the emperor without paying much attention to the manifold relations among men and women that in fact contributed to establishing his rule. Another reason is the specific constellations of Maximilian's relationships with his wives Mary of Burgundy and Bianca Maria Sforza, with his daughter Margaret of Austria and grand-daughter Mary of Hungary, which have been mostly discussed in the framework of their personal courts and regional politics and less in a wider comparative perspective. Against the backdrop of recent approaches to dynastic politics, role models, and agency, I will, first, discuss the gendered dimensions of Maximilian's dynastic politics in their wider geo-political and socio-cultural context. I will, second, move beyond a focus on key dynastic actors to take into account personal networks as fundamental for any type of premodern rule. Following court ladies and female servants and the social networks they were part of I will outline the interrelations between social ascent, office, and the politics of kinship and gender at court.

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.

This article examines the causes and repercussions of the flight of two-dozen Orthodox Christian merchants from Ottoman Bosnia to Habsburg Croatia in 1873. The seemingly minor event quickly escalated from an isolated border incident to a full-blown diplomatic crisis-defused only with the merchants' repatriation, the recall of a Habsburg consul, and the removal of the Ottoman provincial governor and other officials. After outlining the course of events and increasing Ottoman-Habsburg tensions, the article turns to the refugees' efforts to affect the outcome of emerging crisis. Although ultimately of little influence, the refugees' sophisticated invocation of international legal norms reflected a largely conservative trust in the international system's ability to rectify perceived violations of treaty terms-a belief that quickly vanished after the outbreak of the Eastern Crisis in 1875.

The historically documented burial samples of the Babenberg and Habsburg dynasties allow a detailed analysis of the circumstances that led to dismemberment, evisceration, disturbance, exhumation and reburial over a millennium. The results may provide deeper and more broadly applicable insights into relevant cultural formation processes of élite burials.