It has been a busy year at the Center for Austrian Studies and a period of significant change for the Austrian History Yearbook. Over the past twelve months we have said goodbye to some of the most influential individuals who have served in leadership positions for the AHY. Our longtime executive editor, Gary Cohen, has now officially retired, while the editor of the Yearbook, Pieter Judson, has stepped down after a decade of service. Our book review editor, Mo Healy, has passed on the baton to Britta McEwen. We have a new assistant editor with Elizabeth Dillenburg, and, at Cambridge University Press, we are working with a first-time serials editor, Hal Moore. We have also welcomed a new group of colleagues as board members and correspondents. The 2017 version of the Austrian History Yearbook, then, is the first full edition produced by our new editor, Daniel Unowsky. This inaugural edition of the AHY speaks well both to Dan's vision and as testimony to the vibrancy and vitality of the field. As Dan, Britta, Elizabeth, and myself assume our new roles as stewards of the Yearbook, we recognize to what extent this transition is a collaborative effort. As such, it is appropriate that apart from book reviews this volume contains the work of almost twenty scholars, the most we have ever featured in a single volume of the AHY.
It is also appropriate that we feature as our first contribution the Robert A. Kann Memorial Lecture by Pieter Judson whose oversight was critical in shaping the current form of the AHY. Judson's work has of course been instrumental in helping us rethink the latter years of the Habsburg monarchy and empire. The Kann essay sketches out ways to evaluate and assess the end of the Habsburg monarchy. Judson challenges us to reconsider the significance of 1918, to look for continuities and survivals, to identify imperial modes of thinking that withstood the shock of 1918 and informed Central European politicians through the 1920s and 30s. The Yearbook also features two fora devoted to critical questions central to the study of the Habsburgs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first examines Enlightenment culture in a fascinating collection of articles that brings together the contributions of both senior scholars and a younger generation of promising new historians. Here we find discussions tracking the activities of enlightened Serbs and Cyrillic printers or following the travels of wandering Austrian botanists abroad in North America. Hungary's Anglophiles, Austria's bureaucrats, and Bohemia's aristocratic writers and philosophers all contributed to a distinctive form of Enlightenment culture. Franz Szabo and Franz Fillafer offer thoughtful assessments of this new scholarship and its implications for our understanding of Central Europe's long eighteenth century.
Our second forum reflects on the work and career of another former editor of the Austrian History Yearbook, Charles Ingrao. Here we have a collection of essays that mirrors Ingrao's own intellectual interests, especially in political and diplomatic history. Geographically, the essays deal with borders and boundaries across the wide expanse of the Habsburg domains. We explore the southern frontier as the Habsburgs attempted to construct an orderly society in the Banat of Temesvár. We journey to Galicia and investigate what was one of Austria-Hungary's largest military installations in the fortress town of Przemyśl. We head north and west and examine gender and kinship patterns with the Wittelsbach, Hohenzollern, and Habsburg families. Finally, we move to the east and cross a scholarly divide with a comparative assessment of Habsburg and Ottoman historiography. If the Ingrao forum highlights the vast geographic range of the Habsburg lands, our four articles feature the rich disciplinary and methodological diversity of the field today. A historian examines sibling relationships of three of the mightiest Habsburgs in the sixteenth century. A literary scholar considers the early and underappreciated journalistic efforts of a young Joseph Roth in Vienna. An economic historian explores a well-intentioned foundation but short-lived Bohemian institution originally intended for the education of poor noble children, and a professor of music discusses the competing Austrian and Hungarian legacies of the Jewish composer Carl/Károly Goldmark. As the new editorial team of the AHY looks back at this first issue, we are heartened by the range of these contributions across so many disciplines, a reminder of the richness of the field and a promising sign for the future.
