scholarly journals The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Singerton
2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Singerton

Jonathan Singerton’s is the first work to analyze the impact of the American Revolution in the Habsburg lands in full. He narrates how the Habsburg dynasty first received struggled with the news of the American Revolution and then how they sought to utilize their connections with a sovereign United States of America. Overall, Singerton recasts scholarly conceptions of the Atlantic World and also presents a more globalized view of the eighteenth-century Habsburg world, highlighting how the American call to liberty was answered in the remotest parts of central and eastern Europe but also showing how the United States failed to sway one of the largest, most powerful states in Europe onto its side in the War for American Independence.


Author(s):  
Grace Lee Boggs ◽  
Scott Kurashige
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer

The forces of aristocracy, which in some countries in the 1780s prevailed over democratic movements, prevailed in others over monarchy itself. This chapter takes up a thread left hanging at the close of Chapter IV. It was shown there that, by the middle 1770s, or just before the American Revolution, the kings of France and of Sweden, and the Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, had asserted royal authority and put the constituted bodies of their several realms under restraint. The following fifteen years made clear the limits beyond which enlightened despotism could not go. However held down, the constituted bodies—estates, diets, parlements, and the like—had strong powers of survival and resurgence. This chapter deals mainly with the Hapsburg monarchy under Joseph II and Leopold II, with observations, since not everything can be told, on Prussia, Sweden, and Russia.


Author(s):  
Olga V. Khavanova ◽  

The second half of the eighteenth century in the lands under the sceptre of the House of Austria was a period of development of a language policy addressing the ethno-linguistic diversity of the monarchy’s subjects. On the one hand, the sphere of use of the German language was becoming wider, embracing more and more segments of administration, education, and culture. On the other hand, the authorities were perfectly aware of the fact that communication in the languages and vernaculars of the nationalities living in the Austrian Monarchy was one of the principal instruments of spreading decrees and announcements from the central and local authorities to the less-educated strata of the population. Consequently, a large-scale reform of primary education was launched, aimed at making the whole population literate, regardless of social status, nationality (mother tongue), or confession. In parallel with the centrally coordinated state policy of education and language-use, subjects-both language experts and amateur polyglots-joined the process of writing grammar books, which were intended to ease communication between the different nationalities of the Habsburg lands. This article considers some examples of such editions with primary attention given to the correlation between private initiative and governmental policies, mechanisms of verifying the textbooks to be published, their content, and their potential readers. This paper demonstrates that for grammar-book authors, it was very important to be integrated into the patronage networks at the court and in administrative bodies and stresses that the Vienna court controlled the process of selection and financing of grammar books to be published depending on their quality and ability to satisfy the aims and goals of state policy.


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