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Preface฀to฀the฀Second฀Edition It is a rare privilege to publish a revised edition of a scholarly book twenty-five years after the first edition appeared. When I first published this study of the German minority of Prague in 1981, studies of ethnicity and nationalism in the Habsburg Monarchy focused on the ideology of the national movements and on parliamentary and electoral politics. There were studies of nationalism in the Monarchy as a whole, for the Austrian half and for Hungary, and for various individual crown lands, but no local studies of ethnic and national identification or of nationalist social and political mobilization. Most historians of Habsburg Central Europe tended to take popular national loyalties as more or less given, originating in centuries-old cultural affinities; what mattered was how the nationalist movements developed as ideological and political phenomena. Historians of this part of Europe might treat the evolution of modern national loyalties for critical intellectuals, but they generally did not examine the creation of ethnic and national identities as broader social processes. Influenced by French and British social history of the early modern era, by local studies of communities in seventeenth and eighteenth century France, Spain, and New England, and by anthropological and sociological studies of national identity and ethnic change, I broke ranks with conventional Habsburg historiography in the course of my dissertation research on the German minority of Prague in 1972–73. The rich documentation I found in the Prague and Vienna archives was revelatory in a number of ways. I was not prepared, in fact, for how much evidence there was for the construction during the nineteenth century of individual loyalties to the competing national causes, for the creation and transformation of German and Czech group solidarities, and for the contingency and malleability of many residents’loyalties through the second half of century. That this was true in Prague, the focus of so much of Czech-German political contention, was indeed surprising. Discussions of the construction of ethnic and national identities and group solidarities are commonplace today, but historians hardly even had an acxiii xiv฀฀฀฀฀฀฀◆฀฀฀฀฀฀฀PREFACE฀TO฀THE฀SECOND฀EDITION cepted vocabulary to describe these processes in the early 1970s.Afew historians initially responded with some skepticism to the dissertation and the ensuing book, questioning how much one local study could prove and objecting to some of the social science methodology and concepts. Nonetheless, the first edition of the book found an audience; and by the middle and late 1980s a number of younger historians of modern Central and East-Central Europe were beginning to examine from various perspectives the construction of national loyalties as popular social and politico-cultural phenomenon. Since the 1980s, this research has been advanced greatly by the adoption of anthropological views of ethnic group formation and ethnic change among political scientists, and sociologists as well as a growing number of historians. Two pathbreaking works on nationalism and the political and social construction of nations, both first published in 1983, Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY), and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (first ed., London and New York; rev. ed., 1991), along with the theoretical and empirical work which followed have created a greatly increased scholarly and public interest in the processes of creating national loyalties in the modern world. In contrast to the situation for historical research on Habsburg Central Europe in the early 1970s, there is now a rich theoretical literature on national identification and the construction of national solidarities and an accompanying analytic vocabulary. There is also a larger audience today for intensive local studies of how popular loyalties and group solidarities have developed over time. All of this has created increased interest in my study of the German minority in Prague, particularly since to date there have still been only a handful of intensive local studies of ethnic and national identification in Habsburg Central Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In presenting this second edition, I have been able to refine the conceptual vocabulary and deepen many of my interpretations , taking advantage of developments from the last twenty-five years in the social sciences and historical scholarship. The introduction has been recast, and I have corrected some minor factual errors in the body of the study. The references and bibliography have been updated to take note of recent publications. Otherwise, the empirical base of the study remains essentially...

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