Abstract
Prospectus of the academic course "The Shaping of Modern Central Europe: Habsburg Modernization and Slavonic Politics". This course traces how the changes in the wider World transformed economic, social, cultural and political realities in Central Europe during the second half of the 19th - early of the 20th century.
Major themes include urbanization and changes in lifestyle, embourgeoisement and proletarianisation; social emancipation and the making of new elites; mass education and the growth of communications; the transition from absolutism to constitutionalism, and from religious prescription to competing secular and clerical norms. While the course deals with social and economic questions, it looks at social issues in terms of national cooperation and conflict.
Unavoidably, Czechs, Poles, Slovaks and Ukrainians are more fully treated than the other peoples of the region though an attempt has been made to keep them in view as much as possible. In political sphere, Russia-oriented politics of a large part of Slavonic elites are studied along with their loyalty to respective metropoles, Austria and Hungary.