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This collection of essays addresses the challenge of modern nationalism to the tsarist Russian Empire. First appearing on the empire’s western periphery this challenge, was most prevalent in twelve provinces extending from Ukrainian lands in the south to the Baltic provinces in the north, as well as to the Kingdom of Poland.
At issue is whether the late Russian Empire entered World War I as a multiethnic state with many of its age-old mechanisms run by a multiethnic elite, or as a Russian state predominantly managed by ethnic Russians. The tsarist vision of prioritizing loyalty among all subjects over privileging ethnic Russians and discriminating against non-Russians faced a fundamental problem: as soon as the opportunity presented itself, non-Russians would increase their demands and become increasingly separatist.
The authors found that although the imperial government did not really identify with popular Russian nationalism, it sometimes ended up implementing policies promoted by Russian nationalist proponents. Matters addressed include native language education, interconfessional rivalry, the “Jewish question,” the origins of mass tourism in the western provinces, as well as the emergence of Russian nationalist attitudes in the aftermath of the first Russian revolution.

When cruelty is sanctified, betrayal is rewarded as virtue, and the innocent must hide their true identities to survive, seventeen-year-old Isaaque Zarco struggles to preserve the principles he lives by and protect the people he loves in this luminous and deeply moving conclusion to The Vanished Souls duology.

As Isaaque attempts to put his life back together, mysteries and conflicts continue to haunt him, most prominently his father’s inexplicable rejection and the knowledge that his survival depends on concealing his identity and faith.

His world is shaken by a letter saying his grandmother, Flor, has been arrested. Unable to abandon the woman who guided him throughout his childhood, Isaaque crosses into Spain, entering a society ruled by fear and deception, where anonymous accusations carry the force of law and compassion itself has become an act of defiance. Flor has been transferred to a prison in Madrid. She has been physically broken by imprisonment. Isaaque learns that, under torture, she revealed the names of two of his oldest friends as secret Jews. Racing back to his home village, he embarks on a desperate attempt to help them escape before the Inquisition comes for them.

The Upside-Down Forest portrays a society in which slander is revered as truth, mercy is condemned as weakness, and persecution masquerades as justice. Giving voice to victims whose suffering has too often been erased from history, Richard Zimler explores how systems of fear corrupt not only institutions but also the bonds between family, friends, and neighbors. Ultimately, it asks what remains of our humanity when the moral order itself has been turned upside down—and whether a life shaped by love, loyalty, and compassion can still endure when survival itself demands treachery and betrayal.

    Vampires are the most fearsome and fascinating of all creatures of folklore. For the first time, detailed accounts of the vampire and how its tradition developed in different cultures are gathered in one volume by eminent folklorist Alan Dundes. Eleven leading scholars from the fields of Slavic studies, history, anthropology, and psychiatry unearth the true nature of the vampire from its birth in graveyard lore to the modern-day psychiatric patient with a penchant for drinking blood.
    The Vampire: A Casebook takes this legend out of the realm of literature and film and back to its dark beginnings in folk traditions. The essays examine the history of the word “vampire;” Romanian vampires; Greek vampires; Serbian vampires; the physical attributes of vampires; the killing of vampires; and the possible psychoanalytic underpinnings of vampires. Much more than simply a scary creature of the human imagination, the vampire has been and continues to haunt the lives of all those who encounter it—in reality or in fiction.

When Antonio María Bucareli took up his duties in 1771 as the forty-sixth viceroy of New Spain, he assumed command of a magnificent complexity of land areas, large and small, whose people constituted a cultural and social entity ranging from the traditional Apache to the European gentleman of the Enlightenment.

He governed a key area at a significant time. Shortly before Bucareli's arrival in Mexico, José de Gálvez had completed an intensive inspection of the country, had instituted many reforms, and was ready to present the new viceroy with progressive policies for administrative reorganization.

How Bucareli, a loyal, indefatigable Spanish aristocrat, reacted to the new order is the particular concern of this book. It examines the actions and reflections of this cautious and conservative man as they relate to certain major problems of his administration: defense, the colonization of the Californias, mining, the Roman Catholic Church, the interior provinces, and—above all—filling Spanish coffers with Mexican pesos as resurgent Spain strove to regain her former position in world affairs.

The period of Bucareli's viceregency is seen as a transitional one, during which the seeds of the Enlightenment, of change, even of rebellion, were sown but had not yet begun to sprout. Bucareli, conservative by nature and training, continued to administer New Spain on the basis of a well-established and traditional system, although he supported changes of mere modification or those offering greater efficiency. Evidence of his dual success is the fact that revenues climbed steadily during his tenure and that Charles III was exceptionally pleased with his performance, while at the same time he won from people of all stations a degree of respect and affection far beyond that usually accorded to a viceroy.

Prior to the publication of Bucareli, only two other full-scale studies of Spanish viceroys existed, and both of them were concerned with sixteenth-century officials. The appearance of this book, providing at once a study of an important figure and of the system of viceregal administration as it had developed by the latter part of the eighteenth century, filled a long-existing gap in Latin American literature.

The heart of this study comes from the prodigious correspondence that passed between the Viceroy and Madrid. Authority for most statements was found in the thousands of documents that the author perused in the Archivo General de Indies in Seville and in the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City.

Liberalism, in the nineteenth-century sense of the term, came to Austria much later than it came to western Europe, for it was not until the 1840s that the industrial revolution reached the Hapsburg Empire, bringing in its train miserable working conditions and economic upheaval, which created bitter resentment among the working classes and a longing for a Utopia that would cure the ills of mankind.

This new-found liberalism, largely self-contained and uninfluenced by liberal movements outside the empire, centered mainly in the idea of individual freedom and constitutional monarchism. In the end, the revolution failed because the moderates proved too weak to control the radical excesses, and the radicals in growing desperation tried to turn the rebel idea into a democratic and, at the extreme, a republican one. Fear of this extremism finally drove the moderates into the counterrevolutionary camp.

Since the Viennese rebels fought to achieve many of the goals fundamental to democracy, historians have generally tended to idealize the revolutionaries and forget their shortcomings. R. John Rath has sought to evaluate the revolution from the point of view of the political ideologies of 1848 rather than those of the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, he has clearly and objectively stated the case for both the left and the right, pointing out the failures and shortcomings of each.

At its publication, this was the first detailed English-language book on the Viennese Revolution of 1848 in more than a hundred years. The author has not confined himself to the bare bones of history. In his descriptions of the times and lively portrayals of the chief actors of the revolution, he has vividly restaged a drama of an ideal that failed.

Since the collapse of socialism, Bulgaria’s population has been on the move—out of rural regions and into cities, or out of the country altogether. Yet today there is a countermovement of young, urban Bulgarians, born around 1989, seeking to repopulate rural villages and reclaim traditional Bulgarian folklife. Though many of these young Bulgarians have no direct experience with a rural lifestyle nor memories of thriving village life, their actions and movements are inspired by a nostalgic vision of the past. And so, beyond a spatial return, this rural revitalization movement speaks to visions of an alternate future, one sparked by dismay with the conditions of contemporary life.

Using ethnographic and folkloristic methods, Sarah Craycraft paints a complex, detailed picture of responses to Europeanization, carried out through neoliberal folklife projects as they collide with ongoing efforts to build a revitalized rural Bulgaria in the ruins of the past. Contextualized within a particular Southeast European nation, the study speaks to broader questions of rural revival, public-facing culture work, intergenerational folklore, and the imbrication of folklore with politics and culture.