Aspects

The Habsburg Monarchy, which spread over geographically diverse areas with a variety of cultures and ethnicities, was based on a social order which was strictly hierarchical. The result was that there were frequent ...

Consumption is always embedded in social and cultural contexts. The consumer society is a relatively new phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When a person buys something, the social environment, ...

For people today knowledge is above all the product of science. The idea that knowledge is something which must be proved empirically is a relatively new one. In former times people had different concepts of knowledge; ...

Today’s society still has the rich and the poor, those with possessions and those who have none. However, earlier societies were not based on equal rights for all people: having possessions, especially in the form of ...

For many centuries what a person believed was not a private matter: religion shaped society much more strongly than it does today. Faith became a duty for a ruler’s subjects and it was subject to the control of both ...

Over the centuries improvements in hygiene, medicine and food supply led to increases in population and life expectancy. However, many people died an unnatural death: wars waged by the Habsburgs cost innumerable lives. ...

For a long time the distance that people could move was determined by the muscle power of their legs or the tractive force of animals, and it could also be restricted by the authorities. Nevertheless, even in the Middle ...

As emperors, kings, archdukes and dukes the Habsburgs played a decisive role in shaping the history of Central Europe for more than six centuries. Nevertheless, there were times when Habsburg rule was disputed. Who ...

To differentiate means to divide into categories. People were assessed according to many different critieria: by sex, class, religion, property or ethnicity. The levels of significance attributed to the various ...

People like to see history as a development which always leads to improvement, as a series of steps bringing innovations and progress in technology and society. What were the reforms that shaped the Habsburg Monarchy? ...

A look behind the scenes: What is life like as an empress? What does an emperor eat? What does he wear? Where does he live and where does he sleep? How does he pay? The balance between private and public spheres changed ...

Labour and work do not mean the same thing at all times. This is also true of the fruits of labour. Hence questions arise such as: Who works for whom? Who must work and who not? How did the status of work change over ...

In the strictly hierarchical societies of past centuries every class had its own ways of expressing itself, whether it was a matter of consumption, manners, in everyday life or on special occasions, with the culture of ...

The traditional view of Habsburg history as the history of a dynasty is based on the story of specific events and personalities. Everything else tended to be regarded as not worth being remembered and was consigned to ...

Human beings are social animals: they meet in private and in public, they have more or less close contacts with one another, and they enter into love relationships. As far as these are concerned it is often not a case ...