Journal Article Kathryn Ciancia. On Civilization’s Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World. Get access Kathryn Ciancia. On Civilization’s Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xv, 343. Cloth $74.00. Daniel Unowsky Daniel Unowsky University of Memphis, US Email: dunowsky@memphis.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 3, September 2023, Pages 1498–1542, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad314 Published: 26 September 2023

Petro Andreas Nungovitch’s Here All Is Poland: A Pantheonic History of Wawel, 1787–2010 is a welcome contribution to the list of scholarly studies of Polish nationhood from the Partitions to the present. This book is the first English-language monograph about Kraków’s Wawel Hill and its place in Polish mythmaking. The author does not trace the expansion of the public choosing to define itself as “Polish” and deciding to act politically based on that definition, nor is the book centered on public political conflicts over defining Polishness. The book does not treat extensively Wawel Castle, medieval home of Polish kings, nor with a few exceptions does it consider in detail the royal remains buried in Wawel Cathedral. Instead, the focus is on the interment of nonroyal military, political, and cultural heroes in the Wawel Cathedral crypts. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth disappeared from the map in the late eighteenth century. Poland was reborn—in...

Over the past two decades, scholars in Central and Eastern Europe, Israel, and the U.S. have published many excellent works on Galicia, the northeastern province of the Habsburg Monarchy, which was acquired in the Partitions of Poland, was incorporated into interwar Poland, and is today divided between Poland and Ukraine. These studies of theater, art, literature, urban life, politics, peasants, nationalism, and borderlands, as well as the evolution of Galicia itself as a political and cultural idea, have provided exciting new insights into the history of this complicated region. In The Politics of Cultural Retreat: Imperial Bureaucracy in Austrian Galicia, 1772–1867, Iryna Vushko focuses on a relatively neglected period and examines the bureaucracy, one of the most important and least studied institutions of the Habsburg Monarchy. Her book is a welcome addition to this growing scholarly literature. Most of the significant works on the administrative institutions of the Habsburg Monarchy have assumed that the provincial arms of state officialdom simply carried out the Enlightenment program of the Habsburg rulers. By shifting the focus from Vienna to the provinces, Vushko offers a strikingly different understanding of the role and impact of the Habsburg bureaucracy. In each of her eight major chapters, Vushko shows how efforts to realize the vision of an enlightened and rational state in the new province often produced unintended consequences that affected both the development of Galicia and the monarchy as a whole.

"Andriy Zayarnyuk, Framing the Ukrainian peasantry in Habsburg Galicia, 1846–1914." Canadian Slavonic Papers, 57(3-4), pp. 313–314

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Journal Article Nicole M. Phelps. U.S.-Habsburg Relations from 1815 to the Paris Peace Conference: Sovereignty Transformed. Get access Nicole M. Phelps. U.S.-Habsburg Relations from 1815 to the Paris Peace Conference: Sovereignty Transformed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xi, 293. $99.00. Daniel Unowsky Daniel Unowsky University of Memphis dunowsky@memphis.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 119, Issue 5, December 2014, Pages 1655–1656, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/119.5.1655 Published: 01 December 2014

This article focuses on the anti-Jewish riots that took place in the spring and summer of 1898 in the western counties of the Habsburg province of Galicia, today divided between Poland and Ukraine. More than 5000 Polish peasants and townspeople were arrested, thousands were tried, and many received long prison sentences. An increasingly strident Catholic anti-Semitism, rumor, mass political mobilization, and actions urged and taken by the various levels of the Habsburg state — the central ministries in Vienna; the office of the Galician governor in the provincial capital of Lemberg; military and police forces on the ground; local officials in western Galicia — all affected the outbreak and course of the violence. The article argues that the riots were not simply a manifestation of rural backwardness, but rather should be understood in the context of the arrival of mass politics in the Habsburg countryside.

For almost three weeks the scenes repeated themselves: cannon fire, chiming church bells, massive crowds, peasant bands on horseback, school girls in white dresses laying flowers along the emperor's path, torchlight parades, mountaintop bonfires, city illuminations, serenades, court dinners, aristocratic balls, early morning prayers at cathedrals and synagogues. During Francis Joseph's 1880 inspection tour of Galicia,2today divided between Poland and Ukraine, millions of Galicians either saw the emperor, talked with someone who did, read about his visit in the paper, or heard abąout it at a village reading hall or gathering, or from the local priest

At least since Carl Schorske published Fin-de-siècle Vienna in 1981, the cultural explosion of Vienna 1900 has attracted the attention of scholars in many fields. Yet, the glittering imperial capital also incubated the Social Darwinian racist vision of Adolf Hitler, and Vienna's modern music, literature, and visual arts could not prevent the melting away of the Habsburg state at the close of the First World War. The five books under review explore the last years of the Habsburg Monarchy. The authors look beyond familiar topics, question basic scholarly assumptions, and provide fresh perspectives on the monarchy's final decade.