Amateur history for (a) future historian(s)
Simulblogged at Holocaust Controversies Ryan Faulk is a guy who likes to depict himself, according to his Youtube channel “The Alternative Hypothesis, as “Anti-racist, anti-Nazi, anti-totalitarian.” That said, his race-IQ obsession would seem to undermine the first claim. And now, his foray into Holocaust denial would seem to belie the second. In a video posted …
Continue reading “Ryan Faulk Is Not a Slave to Your Funhouses”
Between the Protestant Reformation and the outbreak of World War I, the Habsburg Monarchy underwent a remarkable transformation, beginning the period as a collection of hereditary lands ruled directly by the Holy Roman Emperor and ending it as a multinational state that had undergone extraordinary processes of state formation and consolidation, liberalization, and democratization. As …
The survival tactics of the regime notwithstanding, the last five decades of the Habsburg Monarchy were remarkably stable, even as the political culture of Austria transformed. In Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918, István Deák argues that army officers played an essential role in this stability. Even as …
If the Holy Roman Empire did not survive the Napoleonic period, the Empire of Austria did, and with its chancellor, Klemens von Metternich, chairing the Congress of Vienna, which set the balance of the power for the subsequent century, Austria’s position as a great power was secured. With a new German Confederation that included Austria …
Continue reading “Crisis and Compromise in the Habsburg Monarchy: 1848-1867”
As noted, the Counter-Reformation in the Habsburg hereditary lands was ultimately quite successful if religious affiliation in the early twentieth century is any metric. Perhaps counterintuitively, the roughly 250 years between the Peace of Westphalia and World War I saw the Habsburgs controlling an increasingly diverse population, both ethnically and religiously, and the monarchy’s …
Continue reading “Habsburg Military and Political Centralization Post-Westphalia”
If there is a watershed moment in the history of Austria’s emergence as a great power over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, it is the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. The traditional historiography of this event has tended to view the end of the Empire as a foregone …
Continue reading “The End of the Holy Roman Empire and the Advent of the Empire of Austria”
Among the chief questions to be considered in examining the evolution of the Habsburg Monarchy from the Catholic standard bearer of Central Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries to a liberal multinational state by its dissolution is the role played by the central government in this evolution. In his essay “Cameralism, Josephinism, and …
Continue reading “Habsburg Reform Under Enlightened Absolutism”
Between the Protestant Reformation and the outbreak of World War I, the Habsburg Monarchy underwent a remarkable transformation, beginning the period as a collection of hereditary lands ruled directly by the Holy Roman Emperor and ending it as a multinational state that had undergone extraordinary processes of state formation and consolidation, liberalization, and democratization. …
Continue reading “Counter-Reformation in the Habsburg Monarchy”
My sixth (of eight) courses began two weeks ago, entitled Europe, 1550-1850. There is a single writing requirement in the course, which is a 20-page review paper of a reading list that the student prepares him-/herself. Therefore, what I’ll be doing here this semester is writing 500 words on each of the following works as …
On December 19, Chileans will elect a new president, choosing between the two candidates with the most votes in the first round of voting held on November 21. At stake is the future in Chile of neoliberalism – the economic system introduced under the military regime of Augusto Pinochet. The candidate of the left is …
Continue reading “Historiographic Essay: Neoliberalism in Chile”
Inevitable Historicity