This article contributes to the studies of living human exhibitions in Eastern Europe or, more precisely, in Polish territory in the late partition period. The article intends to demonstrate the strategies of presenting Black African women in Warsaw, Cracow, and Poznań. The idea of construing the view has been used as a key concept to look into the processes of the sexualization and racialization of

The article juxtaposes two perspectives guiding the perception of ethnographic shows, namely, a contemporary and an earlier one. The article uses the example of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, staged in 1906 in the Polish territories under Austrian rule. Deriving from present criticisms of ethnographic shows and their interpretation through the prism of colonial studies, the author examines the types

The article serves as the introduction to the special issue focusing on ethnographic shows and the production of knowledge regarding Others in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It aims at presenting the characteristics and conditions of research in Central and Eastern Europe, which may be considered an extension of Western Europe in terms of geography, communication, economy, technology

The modernization efforts of the early Republic of Turkey were a recurrent theme of books and newspaper articles written by interwar Yugoslav travelers in Turkey. Their views on Turkish modernity were based on a dichotomy between the “old,” “traditional,” and “backward” Ottoman Empire and the “new,” “modern,” and “revolutionary” Turkish Republic. Their comments reveal the Yugoslav public’s self-perception:

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Latvians, like several other non-dominant nations that were part of large European empires, actively argued for their status as a nation and fought for the right to be equal partners in economy and politics and for the recognition of their culture. The process of constructing an ethnic identity involves not only inclusion, but also the formation of boundaries

This article inquires into the meaning and valence of late nineteenth-century exotic displays in Budapest, a location without the colonial stakes that apparently determined the course of the “human zoo” in most Western European contexts. It explores the reporting on ethnic shows in the metropolitan press, points out stereotypical and more idiosyncratic representations, and examines these against the

Between 1895 and 1911, three groups of Samoans traveled to Germany to take part in ethnic shows. There were titled and high-ranking persons in each of the groups. This article explores the recruiting, organizing, and reception of the shows, contextualizing the European and Samoan perspectives, which differed significantly. In addition to written, visual, and material sources in Samoan, New Zealand

The focus of this article is on the ethnic shows organized in Poznań, a middle-sized European city that was part of the network of German Völkerschauen between 1879 and 1914. The author places the ethnic shows in the context of modern urban experience, where the establishment of zoological garden space enabled direct interactions between actors, animals, and the audience, thus creating a distinct sensory

This article summarizes new research on the custom of distributing the spoils of war amongst active military participants in the Holy Land. A letter of guarantee records an agreement between John of Brienne, king of Jerusalem, and the Teutonic Knights right after the capture of Damietta (1219) during the Fifth Crusade. This document is compared with contemporary sources reporting on military actions

Louis of Hungary recognized the danger of the Ottomans and actively participated in the preparation of a crusade devoted to erasing the enemies of Christ from the Balkans. To achieve this he, along with Pope Urban v, the emperor Charles iv, and Charles v, designed a plan to send the most feared soldiers of their time, the “Magna Socieatas,” against the “Saracens,” the “proud disciples of Lucifer.”

After the Teutonic Knights successfully broke through Gdańsk’s defenses on 12/13 November 1308, they set about massacring not only those knights who supported the rule of the margraves and Brandenburg, but also Gdańsk’s burghers. In 1310, Pope Clement v set up a special commission to investigate whether it was true that the Teutonic Knights had killed more than ten thousand people in Gdańsk. The Teutonic

Sigismund of Luxemburg, King of Hungary spent much time journeying abroad. His “itinerant” court visited diverse places from Istria to Wallachia. The members of his entourage, mainly a new generation of homo novus lords, escorted him from the Aachen (1414) to the Rome (1433) coronations and were active in foreign service. This article reconstructs the itinerant entourage mostly during the Council of

A dozen limestone reliefs with the coats of arms of a bishop and a bishopric have survived from the churches and castles of late medieval Livonia (a historical region roughly corresponding to present-day Estonia and Latvia). This article discusses a selection of those reliefs in western Estonia, in the two centers—Haapsalu and Kuressaare—of the former Saare-Lääne Bishopric. In earlier scholarship,

It is a basic feature of human existence that we engage in acts of mobility and hospitality and thereby seek to infuse liminal moments marked by ambiguity or disorientation with symbolic meaning. Considerable instances from pre-modern history can be found in the communal acts of the Teutonic Order. The current article seeks to show how the dual social identity of the Teutonic Knights, that is, their

The political history of the small territory of Dobrzyń Land became much more complex at the beginning of Władysław Jagiełło’s rule (1386–1434). Władysław of Opole pledged part of Dobrzyń Land (the castle of Złotoria, 1391) to the Teutonic Knights. Then in 1392, after a short war against the king of Poland, Władysław of Opole pawned the entirety of Dobrzyń Land to the Teutonic knights. Neither King

Since its publication, Pieter M. Judson’s history of the Habsburg Empire: A New History has sparked discussion and debate as a result of its novel reframing of the relationship between nationalism and empire in the Central European polity. Judson offers a new narrative of a vibrant and adaptive state that had the ability to balance empire and nationality, and thus was not doomed to fail, as has been

The main aim of the research project, that also includes this paper, is the investigation of the social history of Hungarian factory workers from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century in the case of Ózd, a small industrial city in northeast Hungary. For the purpose of this research the author uses not only the traditional historical and statistical sources and methods, but

The 1905 Revolution was often considered by workers writing memoirs as the most important event in their lives. This paper examines biographical reminiscences of the political participation of working-class militants in the 1905 Revolution. I scrutinize four tropes used by working-class writers to describe their life stories narrated around their political identity. These are: (1) overcoming misery

The coal miners’ strikes of 1989 and 1991 in the ussr have received significant attention from scholars in the country and abroad that peaked in the 1990s. Drawing on the existing scholarship, I argue that our understanding of the strikes remains incomplete unless we consider these events in their proper discursive contexts, which were different for the two waves of strikes. I explore the All-Union

The article focuses on the role of religion among working-class inhabitants of two industrial towns in the Czech lands, Ostrava and Kladno, during the first half of twentieth century. It analyses the enormous conversion movement, the position of new actors of religious life, and the religious behavior of workers. Looking at the history of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century

This study is a part of the RE-WORK research project at the Centre for Social Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and it contributes to the initiative to create a social history overview of Hungarian industrial labor since the last decades of the nineteenth century. Women workers in Hungary have been part of the labor force ever since the beginning of industrialization, and yet they have mostly

The world of labor and the discourse about it has changed again and again in modern East Central Europe. Since the given framework of the introduction to the thematic issue does not allow me to provide a complete overview of the literature of contemporary East Central European labor history (see, for example, van der Linden 2008; Zimmerman 2017), here I am going to focus on answering the following

Population dynamics became a key variable of the developmentalist rhetoric during the postwar era. The World Population Conference (wpc) in Bucharest (1974) was marked by open disagreements regarding the interpretation of the relationship between the ‘Third World’s’ underdevelopment and its overpopulation. The main outcome of the wpc 1974, the World Population Plan of Action (wppa) was the product

The article begins by reconstructing the theory of uneven and combined development from Trotsky’s own writings in relation to Russia. It then looks more closely at the notion of the “modern” which in Trotsky’s account combines with the “archaic” or “backward,” before arguing that role of modernity suggests that uneven and combined development has been a far more widespread process than solely in the

Since the 1990s there has been an upsurge of academic interest in Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development, but relatively little attention has been paid to its intellectual antecedents. This first of two articles will reconstruct the sources and components of uneven and combined development, in particular the strategy of permanent revolution, the conditions for which it was intended as

This article examines the potentials of world-systems analysis ( WSA ) and uneven and combined development ( UCD ) for the history of nineteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy by critically engaging with Andrea Komlosy’s account of the Monarchy, written from the perspective of WSA . It argues that Komlosy does not provide a consistent WSA interpretation of the Monarchy’s history by trying to analyze the

One of the most obvious features of the post-Cold War world was that western states and western dominated international organizations pursued a more expansionist and interventionist set of foreign policies and practices. In attempting to explain as well as assess this period, scholars from across the theoretical and political spectrum have identified “liberalism” or “liberal” ideas, arguments and concepts

This article aims to show that concepts originating in the vocabulary of international relations were crucial to the rhetoric of nation-building in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. A close examination of the Romanian context elucidates in a more general way historical actors’ reflections and critiques of this conceptual vocabulary as well as the permeable nature of the (inter)national in the given historical

This essay examines the state of the art in Hungarian Holocaust research by way of three studies that appeared recently: Budapest Building Managers and the Holocaust in Hungary , by Istvan Pal Adam; The Holocaust in Hungary: Seventy Years Later , edited by Randolph L. Braham and Andras Kovacs; and Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide: An Intellectual History, 1929–1948 , by Ferenc Laczo (all in 2016)

The study examines Hungarian historiography since the Hungarian democratic transformation. Its main question is how Hungarian history writing was able to reformulate itself during the short period after 1989. In academic and public discourse one can observe parallel processes of de-ideologization and re-ideologization towards a one-sided commitment to the national(istic) viewpoint. The study starts

1 The participants of the workshop in Budapest at ceu, 6–7 September 2016, were as follows: Anders Blomquist, Béla Bodó, Steven Jobbit, György Kövér, György Lengyel, György Péteri, Vera Szabari, Zsuzsanna Varga and Eric Weaver. Thanks to all of them for their active involvement in our discussions. József Litkei and János M. Rainer have been our project’s “corresponding” members. Thanks also to Mónika

Starting in the late 1840s, the Habsburg monarchy engaged in the making of modern historical scholarship by introducing standardized training and creating an institutional framework of research. During the 1850s, the Viennese government laid down the foundations of a pan-Austrian academic space. However, this space started to split already in the early 1860s, and at the turn of the twentieth century

This article investigates on the basis of letters to Radio Free Europe how the ersatz coupling of sensory data streams impacted the political imagination before and after 1989. While reconstructing the medial configuration of a clandestine information flow and reflecting on the micro-powers involved, the article follows the case through its own archival visibility, thus capturing the very tension between

The concept of security and the security culture of the state are always social constructs reflecting the outcome of interactions between state and society. Key categories of security, like dangerous social groups and activities are usually negotiated through these interactions. Politicians, secret agents, gendarms, denunciators, journalists, or the indicted, all shape the broader social meaning in

As the Slovenian art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst appropriates artefacts from different sources, the following paper attempts to clarify the significance of appropriation in relation to Russia. Three different artistic moments from different decades are chosen as starting points and key moments in order to examine NSK ’s artistic approach .

The article offers a comparison between the representations of the former USSR in contemporary Ukrainian literature from Galicia and from the eastern part of Ukraine. In the main it focuses on the writers Yuri Andrukhovych, Serhiy Zhadan, and Lyubko Deresh. In Andrukhovych’s novels and essays, the former Habsburg monarchy is represented as a positive, liberal counterpart to Soviet collectivism and

This overview of academic ethnography in the last decades of the Habsburg Empire is given through the example of Vienna as the Empire’s capital. Ethnography is scrutinized in its main dimensions through the four decades from the 1870s till after the end of World War I . Main trends, crucial phases, and key actors are identified and characterized to assess the roles of notions of race and racism. The

The emergence of social modernity in the Romanian principalities can be traced to the founding of quarantinist outposts against the last waves of plague and the first waves of cholera. The crisis of this sanitary arrangement opened the way for a series of failed but productive projects of modernization. The collective political body was imagined and created through the nationalization of the medical

The article examines the involvement of Yugoslav geographers in the multifaceted process of constructing the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes between the final stage of the First World War and the mid-1920s, when Yugoslavia’s external boundaries and internal arrangement were temporarily settled. Researchers have recognized Jovan Cvijic as the leading scientist behind the political-geographical

This article traces the emergence of the discipline of physical anthropology in the Czech lands and its first public presentation at the Czechoslavic Ethnographic Exhibition held in 1895 in Prague. The search for the physical characteristics of Czechs involved a large-scale anthropometric survey in Czech schools and among the adult population from 1893 to 1895, which was subsequently presented at this

The Polish Eugenics Society, founded in 1915, wielded considerable influence in the founding years of the Polish Second Republic. Leading medical experts in the Society placed issues of venereal contamination and the expansion of public sex at the forefront of their concerns. Unlike similar movements in Western Europe and North America, however, Polish eugenicists rarely attacked ethnic or religious

The article tells the story of racial psychiatry in the Russian Empire. The context in which it has developed is analyzed in epistemological as well as political terms, and the discussion of such scholarly categories as “savagery,” “atavism”, or “survivals” and the language of race in ethnography, race science, and psychiatry is complemented with the discussion of rising mass politics. These two threads