Since World War II Hungarian historians have expressed great interest in the period between the revolution of 1848 and 1918. In studying this period, however, they have not been able to take advantage of an extensive heritage or of solid earlier works. Earlier Hungarian historians paid scarcely any attention at all to this era. Believing that the writing of contemporary history was a job for journalists and not for scholars, they kept away from it in most instances. Moreover, at that time it was ticklish for historians to touch upon the problems of the monarchy. As a consequence, they devoted their attention mostly to medieval history, which provided richer material for Hungarian nationalism.

Until the end of the second World War the statue of Ban Jelačič, his sword pointing towards Budapest, stood on the main square of Agram as a symbol, not only of Croatian national pride, but also as a reminder of the country's proverbial attachment to the Habsburg dynasty. The “man who saved Austria” and the prowess of the Croatian Military Border became the most cherished historical legends of the old Austro-Hungarian empire and have attracted the attention of many historians. It is not my purpose to restate the case for or against Jelačič or to give yet another account of the complicated relationships between Agram, Pest, and Vienna but to disentangle legends which have been all too widely accepted and which have obscured important aspects of the role played by the Military Border in the revolution of 1848. In general, writers have concentrated on the picturesque appearance of the frontier troops and on their ferocity and their allegedly unshakable loyalty to the imperial cause and have neglected the military and political considerations which must be taken into account if one wishes to make a more accurate evaluation of the Croatian intervention in the revolution and its failure and ultimate repercussions.

Some aspects of the relationship between the Polish aristocracy and the Ukrainian peasantry in Eastern Galicia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century have been treated by many scholars over the years. This relationship has been seen primarily as one of class and then national conflict, played out in the economic and political spheres of Galician life. The traditional picture has been one of discrimination against and exploitation of the peasants by the numerically small class of Polish magnates and gentry. The emphasis has been on forced peasant labor, on inequities in the size of landholdings, on the brutality of the landlords and oppression by their stewards, on beatings, on the illegal annexation of peasant lands, and on the expected and automatic obedience and subservience of the peasant to the manorial lord. All of these elements were certainly part of the relationship in pre-1848 Galicia, though even in this respect one may ask questions about the growing number of Ukrainian village schools, and so on.

On April 14, 1918, Charles I, the last ruler of the Austro-Hungarian empire, dismissed his foreign minister Count Ottokar Czernin. The immediate circumstances of Czernin's fall from power have been known for many years, and the recently opened documentary collections in the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna add little of substance to what is already known. Since neither the Czernin nor the Habsburg families have opened their private papers to the scrutiny of scholars, our information is still based on contemporary accounts of high government and court officials. From the evidence at hand we know little more than that Czernin had often treated Charles in a high-handed manner and that the foreign minister's refusal to assume full blame for the Sixtus Affair so angered the emperor that he accepted his minister's resignation. Thus, according to the consensus of his contemporaries, the reasons for Czernin's dismissal were emotional: the wounded pride and momentary anger of Emperor Charles. Certainly few would contend that these factors were unimportant; the emperor had often rendered similar imprudent judgments earlier in his brief reign. Still, one should be cautious about accepting this reason as the only one without searching for other more complex causes.

Under The Influence of Enlightenment ideals of rational administration and cameralist notions of increasing the productivity and welfare of the populace, Joseph II and his ministers embarked on an aggressive program of reform for the Habsburg monarchy in the late eighteenth century. Their view as to what needed change was wide-ranging, but among their chief concerns was the desire to restructure the relationship between the Catholic church and Austrian society. As the largest and most powerful religious denomination in the Habsburg monarchy, the Catholic church possessed immense human and material resources, which could possibly be exploited to benefit the Austrian people and state. For Joseph II, the process whereby Catholicism could best be put to use in Austrian society necessarily involved seizing partial administrative control over the Catholic church. The Catholic church, he believed, did not distribute material and moral benefit to the Austrian people evenly, and changing this situation required the active intervention of the Austrian government.

From 1950—when Robert Kann first revisited Vienna twelve years after having been driven away from Austria—to the time of his death in Vienna on August 30, 1981, Kann was a man of two countries. For three decades his work spanned America and Austria; he taught, lectured and published on two continents. Kann's influence on historical scholarship both in America and Austria (and beyond) is evidenced by the fact that more of Kann's books were publised both in English and in German translations than those of any other scholar in the field. Let us recall these titles: The Multinational Empire (1950), The Habsburg Empire (1957), A Study in Austrian Intellectual History (1960), The Problem of Restoration (1968), and A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (1974). All of them subsequently appeared in German translation in Austria; thus their impact was doubled.

As Richard L. Rudolph correctly observes at the beginning of his article, Austrian economic history has not been adequately examined in international, comparative studies of the problems of economic growth. Undoubtedly this is attributable both to the traditional orientation of Austrian historians toward national and regional studies and to the interest of so many historians in various aspects of the preindustrial age. Macroeconomic approaches have, therefore, been deemphasized, even though they have led to significant new conclusions in regard to the nature of preindustrial economy and society, partly because of the difficulty in applying this methodology to an analysis of the increasingly complex affairs of a modern industrial society.

Wrote Miklós Zrínyi (Nikola Zrinski) in the mid seventeenth century about those who died fighting against the Ottomans. The poet, who himself was engaged in both politics and war, defined Hungarian identity as Christian and premised on warfare unto death against Muslims.