This article offers an alternative focus for the study of the Ruthenian (Ukrainian) nation-building in early Austrian Galicia. It portrays elite Greek Catholic churchmen who made political claims about a self-standing Ruthenian nation already in the first decade of the nineteenth century. It argues that their political innovations were enabled by the ambitious state-building projects implemented in the second half of the eighteenth century by the Austrian government, most importantly new seminaries that cultivated an ethos of state service among Catholic clergymen. The early Ruthenian nationalism espoused by Greek Catholic prelates neither aspired to mobilize masses nor ascribed much importance to language rights, the kernel of nationalist struggles in later periods. It was rather a polemical device deployed to legitimize their rejection of the Polish national allegiance, associated with dynamically evolving republican traditions. By locating the Galician Ruthenian case in a regional comparative perspective, the article outlines the broader significance of this interpretation, interrogating some received wisdoms about the so-called non-historical nationalisms of Central and Eastern Europe.

The Habsburg Monarchy has often been called a “Europe en miniature.” A diversity of political territories and spaces, nations and nationalities, languages, denominations, and churches was typical throughout the 19th century. This article addresses the complexity with a fresh approach. Drawing on the new history of emotion, it combines new perspectives of territories, spaces, and loyalties in order to shed fresh light on nation building processes within the empire.

On 19 June 1911, dozens of Jews and Ukrainians were killed by the Austrian militia in Drohobycz at the command of the Jewish leader of the city, Jacob Feuerstein, to ensure the victory of the Jewish assimilationist candidate, aligned with the Polish elite, over the Zionist candidate. While dominating news at the time, reaching front pages around the globe, this event remains relatively unknown today even among specialists. This study for the first time explicates the history of this remarkable event while challenging the nationalist narratives that successfully shaped Jewish, Ukrainian, and Polish collective memory in its aftermath. It questions the extent of the role nationalism plays in violent political conflict, even in a seemingly hypernationalized environment, and demonstrates how nationalist rhetoric masks other motivations of actors. This microhistory builds on recent efforts to locate national indifference in the modern period, in the eye of the nationalist storm. At the same time, the success of nationalists to reframe this event in nationalist terms demonstrates how nationalism could shape historical memory and successfully push back against this indifference. The massacre demonstrates that nationalization was a gradual process, during which other identities persisted and other factors guided political events, while exposing how nationalist leaders paradoxically used such moments to obfuscate this reality and advance their own agendas.

Recent scholarship on modern Jewish thought has sought to overcome the field’s Germanocentrism by recovering diverse visions of Jewish life across eastern and western Europe. While studies typically emphasize either striking differences or surprising affinities between these settings, I use the neglected eastern European philosopher Nachman Krochmal to highlight a strategy of creative appropriation and redirection—an eastern European strategy of breaking with German-Jewish philosophy precisely by deploying that tradition’s own resources. One of modern Jewish philosophy’s early episodes, I argue, is a politically charged engagement with biblical exegesis involving Krochmal and the German-Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn. Implicitly drawing on yet revising the treatment of biblical interpretation in Mendelssohn’s Hebrew writings, Krochmal seeks to retrieve what he sees as a vital element of Jewish politics: possessing neither a shared land nor military strength, he insists, Jews have long sustained their diasporic collective through hermeneutical endeavors such as rabbinic midrash, and they should continue to do so by launching a transnational project of historically sensitive exegesis. The resulting image of a transnational Jewish collective whose fate is separate from that of non-Jewish polities breaks with Mendelssohn’s political vision, pointing to an east-west dynamic of creative repurposing—an instance of an eastern European thinker drawing on a German-Jewish predecessor to develop a sharply contrasting philosophical vision.

While important work has been done on what it meant to become newly “Soviet” after 1917, or during the era of “High Stalinism,” it is less clear what it meant to become Soviet for the first time after World War II. For the residents of the new Soviet Baltics, each prewar state received its own republic. In the case of the existing Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, territories that had not experienced Soviet power or the war on the same timeline were put into existing republics and thus existing Soviet structures. How did this process work? For Western Ukraine, one event in this process was the formation of the 1946 Initiative Committee, a joint project of the Central Committee and the newly formed Plenipotentiary for the Matters of the Russian Orthodox Church that presided over a forced conversion of Uniates to the Russian Orthodox Church. This paper examines how the mass religious conversion of Uniates was part of the process of making Galicians into Soviet Ukrainians, a postwar renewal of Soviet nationalities policy. Yet this decision, much like 1917 or 1939, was imagined as only the beginning. Turning “disloyal” Galicians into Soviet Ukrainians was a project of both re-writing the separate histories of Galicia and Soviet Ukrainians to emphasize their unity and teaching Galicians to imagine themselves as Ukrainian in the Soviet sense. In contrast to a new Soviet order with an emphasis on the secular, Western Ukraine's Sovietization was brought about through religious terms and an emphasis on Russian Orthodoxy.

In Galicia in 1848, petitions as to whether the province should be divided in two with a Polish and a Ruthenian region moved thousands of people to action. Although the petitions were among the largest in the history of the Habsburg monarchy, the petition lists have never been researched in detail. Whereas the initiators of the petition for the partition were anxious to present a narrative of national and confessional unity for a “Ruthenian” Eastern Galicia suppressed by “Poles,” the counter-petitionists disputed the very existence of a Ruthenian nationality and chose a narrative of peaceful, conflict-free living together. A close reading of the petition lists reveals both conflict and co-existence. The lists with a checkered contrast of Cyrillic, Latin, and Hebrew scripts bear witness to what was a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional society. More than that, these sources prove impressively that the three large religious and ethnic communities – Poles, Ruthenians, and Jews – were in continuous day-to-day contact with each other. While the history of emerging nationalism has so far been in the foreground in historiography of the revolutionary events in Galicia in 1848, the petitions' sources tell another story of everyday social interaction and of practices of social ambiguity in the Galician village and market communities.

Electron probe microanalyses of zoisites from high-grade metamorphic rocks in Galicia, NW Spain have been obtained. The elements Na, Mg, P, K, Ti, and Mn were not detected above the 0.1 wt. % level. Assuming all Fe is present as Fe3+, a clear relation is obtained between the Fe content and the optic axial angle. Zoisite with 1.6 wt. % Fe2O3 proves to be uniaxial at 589 nm; uniaxiality in blue light (470 nm) lies at 1.5 wt. % Fe2O3. A change of the optic sign, from positive to negative, is obtained at 2.9 wt. % Fe2O3. The presence of minor elements greatly affects this relation, as is indicated by analyses of sector-zoned Sr-bearing zoisites of a muscovite-zoisite pegmatite from the same region. Under retrograde conditions Fe-rich α-zoisite reacts to form less Fe-rich α-zoisite or β-zoisite and clinozoisite.

The church of Santa Comba de Bande in north-west Spain has long been considered a model for regional Late Antique and early medieval architecture. Controversy, however, has recently emerged concerning its construction date. Is it a ‘Visigothic’ (seventh century) or ‘Mozarabic’ (ninth to tenth centuries) church? The combination of stratigraphic data with absolute dating methods has now provided a date of AD 751–789 for construction of the church. This result has historical and architectural implications: Santa Comba de Bande represents an extremely early example of Mozarabic architecture, and demonstrates the dynamic circulation of influences between the Islamic south and Christian north in eighth-century Iberia.

The caprellid amphipod, Caprella mutica, is a well-known invasive species, originating in the Sea of Japan, which has been rapidly expanding along the coasts of North America, Europe and Oceania for the last forty years. Caprella mutica is frequently associated with man-made structures, especially those dedicated to aquaculture activities, where it can reach high densities of up to 300,000 ind./m2. A well-established population of C. mutica was recently found by SCUBA-divers in Galician waters (north-west Spain) at 6 different man-made floating structures along Ría de Arousa. The record of this species in this location implies a new southernmost limit of distribution, extending the known distribution range in Atlantic European waters and confirming the continuity of the colonization southwards.

Exposed sandy beaches are widespread coastal habitats with temporal and spatial variability. O Rostro beach (Galicia, north-west Spain) was the most severely affected beach in the ‘Prestige’ oil spill (November 2002). Monitoring sampling was conducted to study macroinfaunal composition and structure after the oil spill episode. The purpose of this survey was to characterize macroinfaunal variations on the beach over a yearly scale (2003–2007) and determine the recovery period. These data are compared with the only available data collected before the spill (1995). Two zones where identified with different recovery trends: (1) supralittoral, occupied either by talitrid amphipods, oniscoidean isopods and insects; and (2) intertidal, where marine crustaceans prevailed. Beach morphodynamics partially buried the oil, which gradually reappeared and was dragged to the coast. Negative ecological effects were observed in the short term (six months after the 2002 spill) but macroinfauna apparently recovered in the following years (2004–2007), showing that macroinfaunal assemblages of this beach are resilient enough to recover after severe stress.

Savalia savaglia (Anthozoa: Zoantharia) is an uncommon, large, arborescent, modular species best known from the western basin of the Mediterranean Sea, and recorded recently from the Canary Islands. During dives in the Ría de Arousa (Galicia, north-western Spain, north-eastern Atlantic), four colonies were seen at a depth of 26–29 m, and identified by morphological study, including the cnidome, and DNA sequencing. These new records extend considerably the distribution of the species. Given that S. savaglia lives in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula, overlooked old records from the literature further north from the Bay of Biscay may be reliable.

73 species and subspecies are reported from the North West of the Iberian Peninsula, including 10 new taxa described in the last four years. 14 species are new for the Cantabrian Cordillera, 1 for Galicia, 9 for the Sierra de la Demanda and 2 for the Sierra del Moncayo. The systematic status of some species is modified: Protonemura pyrenaica pyrenaica and P. pyrenaica asturica are restored to specific level; Leuctra lusitanica is considered as a subspecies of L. lamellosa; Nemoura cinerea umbrosa is a valid subspecies of N. cinerea cinerea. The stonefly faunistic lists of the Cantabrian Cordillera, Galicia, Demanda and Moncayo are updated. Species distribution patterns and faunistic relations with the neighbouring regions are analyzed. Classification and ordination analyses based on species presence, enable identification of bioclimatic and biogeographical patterns of Plecoptera distribution in the North of the Iberian Peninsula.