East Central Europe in the Modern World


Book Description

A study of East Central Europe and its place in the modern world. Combining narrative with analysis, it presents the past and present of East Central Europe in the larger context of the political and economic history of the continent.




Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe


Book Description

The hundred years between the revolutions of 1848 and the population transfers of the mid-twentieth century saw the nationalization of culturally complex societies in East Central Europe. This fact has variously been explained in terms of modernization, state building and nation-building theories, each of which treats the process of nationalization as something inexorable, a necessary component of modernity. Although more recently social scientists gesture to the contingencies that may shape these larger developments, this structural approach makes scholars far less attentive to the "hard work" (ideological, political, social) undertaken by individuals and groups at every level of society who tried themselves to build "national" societies. The essays in this volume make us aware of how complex, multi-dimensional and often contradictory this nationalization process in East Central Europe actually was. The authors document attempts and failures by nationalist politicians, organizations, activists and regimes from 1848 through 1948 to give East-Central Europeans a strong sense of national self-identification. They remind us that only the use of dictatorial powers in the 20th century could actually transform the fantasy of nationalization into a reality, albeit a brutal one. Pieter M. Judson is Associate Professor and Chair of the History Department at Swarthmore College. His book Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience and National Identity 1848-1914 (Michigan, 1996) won the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American historical Association in 1997 and the Austrian Cultural institute's book prize in 1998. Marsha L. Rozenblit is the Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Jewish History at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity (State University of New York Press, 1983) and Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (Oxford University Press, 2001).




East Central Europe in the Middle Ages, 1000-1500


Book Description

Although the Middle Ages saw brilliant achievements in the diverse nations of East Central Europe, this period has been almost totally neglected in Western historical scholarship. East Central Europe in the Middle Ages provides a much-needed overview of the history of the region from the time when the present nationalities established their state structures and adopted Christianity up to the Ottoman conquest. Jean Sedlar’s excellent synthesis clarifies what was going on in Europe between the Elbe and the Ukraine during the Middle Ages, making available for the first time in a single volume information necessary to a fuller understanding of the early history of present-day Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and the former Yugoslavia. Sedlar writes clearly and fluently, drawing upon publications in numerous languages to craft a masterful study that is accessible and valuable to the general reader and the expert alike. The book is organized thematically; within this framework Sedlar has sought to integrate nationalities and to draw comparisons. Topics covered include early migrations, state formation, monarchies, classes (nobles, landholders, peasants, herders, serfs, and slaves), towns, religion, war, governments, laws and justice, commerce and money, foreign affairs, ethnicity and nationalism, languages and literature, and education and literacy. After the Middle Ages these nations were subsumed by the Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian, and Prussian-German empires. This loss of independence means that their history prior to foreign conquest has acquired exceptional importance in today’s national consciousness, and the medieval period remains a major point of reference and a source of national pride and ethnic identity. This book is a substantial and timely contribution to our knowledge of the history of East Central Europe.




Identities In-Between in East-Central Europe


Book Description

This volume addresses the question of ‘identity’ in East-Central Europe. It engages with a specific definition of ‘sub-cultures’ over the period from c. 1900 to the present and proposes novel ways in which the term can be used with the purpose of understanding identities that do not conform to the fixed, standard categories imposed from the top down, such as ‘ethnic group’, ‘majority’ or ‘minority’. Instead, a ‘sub-culture’ is an identity that sits between these categories. It may blend languages, e.g. dialect forms, cultural practices, ethnic and social identifications, or religious affiliations as well as concepts of race and biology that, similarly, sit outside national projects.




Transregional Connections in the History of East-Central Europe


Book Description

Transregional connections play a fundamental role in the history of East-Central Europe. This volume explores this connectivity by showing how people from eastern and central parts of Europe have positioned themselves within global processes while, in turn, also shaping them. The contributions examine different fields of action such as economy, arts, international regulations and law, development aid, and migration, focusing on the period between the middle of the nineteenth century and the end of the Cold War. The authors uncover spaces of interaction and emphasize that internal and external entanglements have established East-Central Europe as a distinct region. Understanding the connectedness of this subregion is stimulating for the historiography of East-Central Europe as it is for the field of global history.




History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe


Book Description

National literary histories based on internally homogeneous native traditions have significantly contributed to the construction of national identities, especially in multicultural East-Central Europe, the region between the German and Russian hegemonic cultural powers stretching from the Baltic states to the Balkans. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, which covers the last two hundred years, reconceptualizes these literary traditions by de-emphasizing the national myths and by highlighting analogies and points of contact, as well as hybrid and marginal phenomena that traditional national histories have ignored or deliberately suppressed. The four volumes of the History configure the literatures from five angles: (1) key political events, (2) literary periods and genres, (3) cities and regions, (4) literary institutions, and (5) real and imaginary figures. The first volume, which includes the first two of these dimensions, is a collaborative effort of more than fifty contributors from Eastern and Western Europe, the US, and Canada.The four volumes of the History comprise the first volume in the new subseries on Literary Cultures.




The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe


Book Description

"In addition to the huge list of written sources from samizdat works to recent essays, Falk's sources include interviews with many personalities of those events as well as videos and films."--Jacket.




East Central European Migrations During the Cold War


Book Description

"An extremely useful and much needed survey. Over eleven chapters, authors from eight countries cover the complex history of migration from the perspective of Central and Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1993. Following in the footsteps of Klaus Bade’s Encyclopedia of European Migrations, the authors make extensive use of sources in national languages, while providing an extensive overview of population movements in the region between the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic Seas. The individual chapters shed light on phenomena overlooked in other volumes, including individual state reactions to various migratory phenomenon, and the political, economic, and ideological consequences of human movement. The chapters of this volume are uniform not only in their informative nature, but also in suggesting new pathways for in-depth research." Adam Walaszek, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland "Eastern Europe is an emblematic space of mobility and its Cold War history cannot be told without considering migration from and into the countries of the region. This volume comes at a timely moment and provides a uniquely comprehensive account, full with useful information for further research. It will be a must-read both for migration studies scholars and for area specialists." Ulf Brunnbauer, Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg, Germany "The Handbook is a gift to students of migration on three counts. It gathers the expertise of scholars fluent in the languages – and familiar with the archives – of Eastern and Central Europe. Thus it brings the multi-layered and complex histories of movement beyond the flat descriptor of "Soviet bloc" or Eastern European migrations. The Handbook is both rich and lucid, presenting in-depth materials on the European twentieth-century, on one hand, and organizing each chapter in a similar way, offering the reader transparently comparable histories. From Estonia south to Albania, and from the USSR west to the GDR, each chapter elucidates a complex migration history distinguished by national politics, ethnic composition, and economics – moving from the cataclysmic impacts of World War II to the international migrations and politics of Cold War movement, as well as the politics of Cold War emigrants themselves. Each chapter ends with an epilogue on post-1989 international migrations and a valuable addendum on published and archival sources. Finally, the Handbook models the kind of high quality work produced by international scholarly cooperation at its best." Leslie Page Moch, Michigan State University Table of contents Introduction (Anna Mazurkiewicz) Albania (Agata Domachowska) Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (Pauli Heikkilä) Bulgaria (Detelina Dineva) Czechoslovakia (Michael Cude and Ellen Paul) Germany (Bethany Hicks) Hungary (Katalin Kádár Lynn) Poland (Sławomir Łukasiewicz) Romania (Beatrice Scutaru) Ukraine (Anna Fiń) USSR (Alexey Antoshin) Yugoslavia (Brigitte Le Normand)







East Central Europe between the Two World Wars


Book Description

East Central Europe Between The Two World Wars is a sophisticated political history of East Central Europe in the interwar years. Written by an eminent scholar in the field, it is an original contribution to the literature on the political cultures of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and the Baltic states.