WWI – The Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies

Where is America? Remaking Central Europe, the League of Nations, and the New International Order

By Peter Becker and Natasha Wheatley

In our book, Remaking Central Europe. The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands, we look at the ways in which the new political order in Central Europe after the end of the Great War was fashioned by national and international entities in close concurrence. The rationale for this edited volume was moving beyond the obvious, that is, the relevance of the Peace Treaties of Saint-German, Versailles, and Trianon for the reordering of Central Europe. The transition from a well-integrated economic space and from a probably less well-integrated political space to a coexistence of states, which defined themselves, preposterously, as nation states, was fraught with utopian expectations and, more importantly, with massive challenges.

Where is America? Remaking Central Europe, the League of Nations, and the New International Order2022-08-25T14:52:13+00:00

The Enduring Promise of Multinationalism: Hans Kohn’s Habsburg Legacies

By Adi Gordon

These are interesting times to reflect on nationalism. After more than half a century in which nationalism was considerably tamed by the memory of World War Two, by intergovernmental organizations, and through various aspects of globalization, the current decade has witnessed a clear rise of nationalism in the United States and abroad. Part of the new nationalist tide is the prevalent sense of its inevitability. It seems de rigueur nowadays to ridicule as naïve the anticipation of (even hope for) gradual transition into a post national future, in which nationalities are secondary to other allegiances. Nations, it is claimed, have always existed, and nationalism (and even ethno-nationalism) is simply part of human nature. But is it so?

The Enduring Promise of Multinationalism: Hans Kohn’s Habsburg Legacies2022-08-25T14:52:20+00:00

Transatlantic Academic Cooperation in the Interwar: James T. Shotwell and the Austrian and Hungarian Series of the Carnegie Endowment’s “Social and Economic Consequences of the Great War”

Transatlantic Academic Cooperation in the Interwar: James T. Shotwell and the Austrian and Hungarian Series of the Carnegie Endowment's "Social and Economic Consequences of the Great War"

By Tamara Scheer

Columbia University historian James T. Shotwell began his project of publishing an international series on the social and economic consequences of the Great War when he became the director of research for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1917. He proposed an alternative historiography. Shotwell’s publication plans were not the Carnegie Endowment’s first such undertaking. The Balkan Report of 1914 examined the causes of the two Balkan wars (1912/1913) by ‘concentrating on destruction and suffering of warfare, rather than martial glory,’ as historian William Mulligan has noted, and to ‘shame the belligerents and reinforce the rules of war.’ For the Great War undertaking, Shotwell sought to focus on the consequences rather than to publish a history of the war. While reports on the Balkan Wars tended to present readers with the perspectives of the non-belligerent states, Shotwell planned to engage authors from all major belligerents. Authors from victorious and defeated powers were to address the same topics, including economy, labour, governance, and public health.

Transatlantic Academic Cooperation in the Interwar: James T. Shotwell and the Austrian and Hungarian Series of the Carnegie Endowment’s “Social and Economic Consequences of the Great War”2022-08-25T15:03:30+00:00

Schwimmer vs. the United States

By Emily R. Gioielli

In 1929, the naturalization petition of famed feminist and peace activist Rosika Schwimmer was denied once and for all by the United States Supreme Court. Unwilling to swear to take up arms against the enemies of the United States on the basis of her uncompromising commitment to pacifism, Schwimmer died a “woman without a country” in 1948. How did this person of “good moral character” who was committed to “supporting and defending the constitution of the United States” (not through bearing arms) end up stateless?

Schwimmer vs. the United States2022-08-25T15:12:18+00:00

The Socialite’s War: The Last Days of the Dual Monarchy on the Society Page

By Emily R. Gioielli

On January 27, 1908, “the most discussed” international alliance in the world was made in a mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York City: the marriage of socialite and heiress Gladys Vanderbilt and Count László Széchenyi, the great-nephew of Hungary’s nineteenth-century great reformer, Count István Széchenyi and an officer in the Austro-Hungarian imperial army.

The Socialite’s War: The Last Days of the Dual Monarchy on the Society Page2022-08-25T15:12:33+00:00

VOICES

VOICES Post WWI Aid in Austria & Central Europe Symposium

By Friederike Kind-Kovács

Throughout many years of historical research in the field of humanitarian child relief in Budapest after WWI, I have attended many conferences that dealt in one way or another with humanitarian aid.

VOICES2021-12-13T21:28:52+00:00