The history of family and households has been the subject of intensive research for over a generation. In the 1970s Peter Laslett and others set the agenda with a strong emphasis on geographical differences between northern and southern, eastern and western Europe. Others have challenged this view, pioneering different approaches. This volume takes stock of the field, focussing particularly on family history in South-East Europe in comparison with the rest of Europe. The authors consider what European families have in common, their regional and local differences and changes over time, using...

Laszlo Peter, whose fourteen carefully selected essays are edited in this posthumous collection, was an indefatigable seeker of the most appropriate terminological modelling and narrative reconstruction of Hungary's late nineteenth and early twentieth century progress from an essentially feudal entity into a modern European state. The articles examine thorny subjects, such as the growing tensions between the nationalities living within the multi-ethnic kingdom; language rights; autocracy, democracy and civil rights in Hungary perceived in a wider European context; the concept of the 'Holy...

After the epochal turn of 1989 a new wave of movies dealing with the complex entanglement of religious and national identity has emerged in the eastern part of Europe. There has been plenty of evidence for a return of nationalism, while the predicated "return of religion(s)" is envisaged on a larger scale as a global phenomenon. The book suggests that in the wake of the historical turns of 1989, an "iconic turn" has taken place in Eastern Europe - in the form of a renewed cinematic commitment to make sense of the world in religious and/or national terms. "Iconic Turns" combines theoretical...

The Republic of Latvia is a fascinating mirror of the development of European democratic culture and reflects both the rise of democracy in Eastern Europe after the end of World War I and its deterioration into authoritarianism in the early 1930s. The regime, which lasted for only six years (1934-1940), was shaped by the controversial figure of Prime Minister and Leader of the People (Vadonis) Karlis Ulmanis. This new, archive-based study illustrates the development of authoritarianism in the region, shows controversies and similarities and places the regime's leader in the international...

This book traces the intellectual origins of race theory in the pro-Nazi Ustasha Independent State of Croatia, 1941-1945. This race theory was not, as historians of the Ustasha state have hitherto argued, a product of a practical accommodation to the dominant Nazi racial ideology. Contrary to the general historiographical view, which has either downplayed or ignored the important place of race, not only in Ustasha ideology and politics, but more generally in modern Croatian and Yugoslav nationalism, this work stresses the significant role that theories of ethnolinguistic origin and racial...

From the late 18th century in the multi-ethnic Kingdom of Hungary, new language-based national identities came to dominate over those that had previously been constructed on legal, territorial, or historical basis. While the Hungarian language struggled to emancipate itself, the roles and functions of Latin (the official language until 1844) were changing dramatically. Latin held a different significance for varying segments of society, from being the essential part of an individual identity to representing an obstacle to "national survival"; from guaranteeing harmony between the different...

Hungarian Jews, the last major Jewish community in the Nazi sphere of influence by 1944, constituted the single largest group of victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide Ferenc Laczo draws on hundreds of scholarly articles, historical monographs, witness accounts as well as published memoirs to offer a pioneering exploration of how this prolific Jewish community responded to its exceptional drama and unprecedented tragedy. Analysing identity options, political discourses, historical narratives and cultural agendas during the local age of persecution as...

In Symbolic Traces of Communist Legacy in Post-socialist Hungary, Lisa Pope Fischer shows how personal practices symbolically refurbish elements from the Communist era to fit present-day challenges. A generation who lived through the socialist period adapt to post-socialist Hungary in a global context. Life histories weave together case studies of gift giving, procurement strategies, harvest ritual, healthcare, and socialist kitsch to illustrate turns towards mysticism, neo-traditionalism, nostalgia, nationalism, and shifts in time-place. People's unrequited past longing for future...