Based on a professional lifetime of research, teaching and passionate scholarly debates, the author reassesses some of the key events, turning points, concepts, personalities, categories, institutions and legal framework on which Hungary’s constitutional and social progress rested from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century.
Another Hungary tells the stories of eight remarkable individuals: an aristocrat, merchant, engineer, teacher, journalist, rabbi, tobacconist, and writer. All eight came from the same woebegone corner of prewar Hungary. Their biographies illuminate how the region's residents made sense of economic underdevelopment, ethnic diversity, and relations between Christians and Jews. Taken together, their stories create a unique picture of the troubled history of Eastern Europe, viewed not from the capital cities, but from the small towns and villages. Through these eight lives, Another Hungary investigates the wider processes that remade Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. It asks: How did people make sense of the dramatic changes, from the advent of the railroad to the outbreak of the First World War? How did they respond to the army of political ideologies that marched through this region: liberalism, socialism, nationalism, antisemitism, and Zionism? To what extent did people in the provinces not just react to, but influence what was happening in the centers of political power? This collective biography confirms that nineteenth-century Hungary was no earthly paradise. But it also shows that the provinces produced men and women with bold ideas on how to change their world.
"Focusing on institutions in Vienna, Cracow, Prague, Zagreb, and Budapest, The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary traces the evolution of museum culture over the long nineteenth century, from the 1784 installation of imperial art collections in the Belvedere Palace (as a gallery open to the public) to the dissolution of Austria-Hungary after the First World War. Drawing on source materials from across the empire, the authors reveal how the rise of museums and display was connected to growing tensions between the efforts of Viennese authorities to promote a cosmopolitan and multinational social, political, and cultural identity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rights of national groups and cultures to self-expression. They demonstrate the ways in which museum collecting policies, practices of display, and architecture engaged with these political agendas and how museums reflected and enabled shifting forms of civic identity, emerging forms of professional practice, the production of knowledge, and the changing composition of the public sphere."--
Historian Iván Berend turns his attention to Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th century, a turbulent period. Extending up to World War I, the period contained the seeds of developments and crises that continue to haunt the region today.
This book explores European soldiers’ encounters with their continent’s exotic frontiers from the French Revolution to the First World War. In numerous military expeditions to Italy, Spain, Russia, Greece and the ‘Levant’ they found wild landscapes and strange societies inhabited by peoples who needed to be ‘civilized.’ Yet often they also discovered founding sites of Europe’s own ‘civilization’ (Rome, Jerusalem) or decaying reminders of ancient grandeur. The resulting encounters proved seminal in forging a military version of the ‘civilizing mission’ that shaped Europe’s image of itself as well as its relations with its own periphery during the long nineteenth century.
To all thoughtful people World War I has brought to intention the importance of a knowledge of 19th Century European history. For without such knowledge no one can understand, or begin to understand, the significance of the forces that have made it, the vastness of the issues involved, the nature of what is indisputably one of the gravest crises in the history of mankind. No citizen of a free country who takes his citizenship seriously, who considers himself responsible, to the full extent of his personal influence, for the character and conduct of his government, can, without the crudest self-stultification, admit that he knows nothing and cares nothing about the history of Europe. Contents: The Old Regime in Europe The Old Regime in France Beginnings of the Revolution The Making of the Constitution The Legislative Assembly The Convention The Directory The Consulate The Early Years of the Empire The Empire at Its Height The Decline and Fall of Napoleon The Congresses France Under the Restoration Revolutions Beyond France The Reign of Louis Philippe Central Europe in Revolt The Second French Republic and the Founding of the Second Empire The Making of the Kingdom of Italy The Unification of Germany The Second Empire and the Franco-Prussian War The German Empire France Under the Third Republic The Kingdom of Italy Since 1870 Austria-Hungary Since 1848 England From 1815 to 1868 England Since 1868 The British Empire The Partition of Africa Spain and Portugal Holland and Belgium Since 1830 Switzerland The Scandinavian States The Disruption of the Ottoman Empire and the Rise of the Balkan States Russia to the War With Japan The Far East Russia Since the 1905 War With Japan The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 The European War Making the Peace
The driving force of the dynamic development of world legal history in the past few centuries, with the dominance of the West, was clearly the demands of modernisation – transforming existing reality into what is seen as modern. The need for modernisation, determining the development of modern law, however, clashed with the need to preserve cultural identity rooted in national traditions. With selected examples of different legal institutions, countries and periods, the authors of the essays in the two volumes Modernisation, National Identity and Legal Instrumentalism: Studies in Comparative Legal History, vol. I: Private Law and Modernisation, National Identity and Legal Instrumentalism: Studies in Comparative Legal History, vol. II: Public Law seek to explain the nature of this problem. Contributors are Judit Beke-Martos, Jiří Brňovják, Marjorie Carvalho de Souza, Michał Gałędek, Imre Képessy, Ivan Kosnica, Simon Lavis, Maja Maciejewska-Szałas, Tadeusz Maciejewski, Thomas Mohr, Balázs Pálvölgyi, and Marek Starý.
From the late 18th century in the multi-ethnic Kingdom of Hungary, new language-based national identities came to dominate over those that had previously been constructed on legal, territorial, or historical basis. While the Hungarian language struggled to emancipate itself, the roles and functions of Latin (the official language until 1844) were changing dramatically. Latin held a different significance for varying segments of society, from being the essential part of an individual identity to representing an obstacle to “national survival”; from guaranteeing harmony between the different linguistic communities to hindering change, social and political justice. This pioneering volume aims to highlight the ways language debates about Latin and Hungarian contributed to the creation of new identities and ideologies in Central Europe. Contributors include Gábor Almási, Per Pippin Aspaas, Piroska Balogh, Henrik Hönich, László Kontler, István Margócsy, Alexander Maxwell, Ambrus Miskolczy, Levente Nagy, Nenad Ristović, Andrea Seidler, Teodora Shek Brnardić, Zvjezdana Sikirić Assouline, and Lav Šubarić
67 texts, including hymns, manifestos, articles or extracts from lengthy studies exemplify the relation between Romanticism and the national movements in the cultural space ranging from Poland to the Ottoman Empire. Each text is accompanied by a presentation of the author, and by an analysis of the context in which the respective work was born.The end of the 18th century and first decades of the 19th were in many respects a watershed period in European history. The ideas of the Enlightenment and the dramatic convulsions of the French Revolution had shattered the old bonds and cast doubt upon the established moral and social norms of the old corporate society. In culture a new trend, Romanticism, was successfully asserting itself against Classicism and provided a new key for a growing number of activists to 're-imagine' their national community, reaching beyond the traditional frameworks of identification (such as the 'political nation', regional patriotism, or Christian universalism). The collection focuses on the interplay of Romantic cultural discourses and the shaping of national ideology throughout the 19th century, tracing the patterns of cultural transfer with Western Europe as well as the mimetic competition of national ideologies within the region.