A nuanced scholarly reappraisal of a significant European empire.
A fresh look at this sprawling empire that rejects its previous characterization as “backward” and asserts an overall administrative enlightenment the citizenry found engaging.
At the heart of this subtly argued work of deep scholarship, Judson (19th and 20th Century History/European Univ. Institute; Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria, 2007, etc.) provides a careful examination of the imperial institutions, administrative policies, and cultural practices that reached far and wide into the vast Hapsburg Empire. As he moves chronologically, the author argues that from the “accidental” reign of Maria Theresa in the 17th century onward, the empire that had steadily grown in size with some brilliant dynastic marriages since the 15th century became a “model of common imperial citizenship,” which emancipated the peasants and considerably extended education and literacy. Maria Theresa inaugurated a strong centralized authority, extending from Transylvania in the east to Innsbruck in the west, from Prague to Trieste, with a rooted sense that individuals had “common legal rights and obligations anchored in their unmediated relationship to a central state.” The subsequent reigns of her sons, Joseph II and Leopold II, and nephew Francis—the last Holy Roman Emperor until its dissolution in 1804, when he became Francis I, Emperor of Austria—consolidated and furthered her reforms. On the one hand, Judson argues, the empire of “enlightened despots” represented a full-fledged rule of law, with a burgeoning bureaucracy; on the other hand, it was anxious about its people’s increasingly social and political activism, especially in Hungary. The industriousness and civic-mindedness in the citizenry (“engagement in public life”) propelled society when the central authority broke down. Morover, where previous historians have characterized Chancellor Klemens Metternich’s rule as a police state, Judson sees an emerging liberalism. The empire’s need to navigate concepts of nationhood based on diverse languages did not sink the empire after World War I so much as the corrosive effects of wartime misery, famine, and harsh military treatment.
A nuanced scholarly reappraisal of a significant European empire.Pub Date: April 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-674-04776-1
Page Count: 562
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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