Awards

• Winner of Winner of the 2016 George Blazyca Prize Winner of the 2017 ASEEES Barbara Jelavich Book Prize.
• Winner of Winner of the 2016 George Blazyca Prize, awarded by the British Association for Slavonic & East European Studies Winner of the 2017 Barbara Jelavich Book Prize, awarded by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies .
• Winner of Winner of the 2016 George Blazyca Prize, awarded by the British Association for Slavonic & East European Studies Winner of the 2017 Barbara Jelavich Book Prize, awarded by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
• Winner of Winner of the 2017 ASEEES Barbara Jelavich Book Prize.

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9780198789291

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Reviews

[T]his superb volume by Benes takes a decidedly bottom-up approach to Austria, providing a fascinating account of the emergence of Czech and German socialism, a topic bizarrely neglected in English-language scholarship....Highly recommended. --R. J. Goldstein, CHOICE

[an] inspiring study ... Benes highlights the autonomy of ordinary workers to form their own views on nationhood, class relations, and political means and aspirations. He does so by analyzing a rich collection of sources, ranging from proletarian prose and poetry to speeches, essays, diaries, and memoirs of rank and file workers and party activists. * Peter Bugge, Hungarian Historical Review * [Benes] directs our attention, rather, to the grass roots, where a transnational, socialist movement fighting exclusion from political society on class grounds gradually switched focus, once the vote had been won, to a struggle against exclusion on the grounds of national minority status. In the process, social democracy split along ethnic lines, because neither side understood the concerns of the other. As Benes insists and illustrates, with copious and vivid evidence from Czech and German memoirs, newspapers, pamphlets and popular literature, this distinctly working-class variant of nationalism was, by the time of the First World War, a mass movement; the opinions of party leaders were irrelevant. * Comments by the jury of the BASEES George Blazyca Prize 2016 * From start to finish, Benes demonstrates a nuanced and dispassionate appreciation for how asymmetries between the German and Czech national movements played out among socialists of both tongues ... Rooted in an impressive array of archival materials, this book brims with telling popular texts, all translated into clear and colloquial English. Benes is to be congratulated for his original and significant contribution to the historical literature. * Jeremy King, European History Quarterly * This compelling study, which began as a dissertation in history at the University of California, Davis, explores how industrial workers in imperial Austria came to embrace nationalist forms of politics in the decades before the Great War... Rooted in an impressive array of archival materials, this book brims with telling popular texts, all translated into clear and colloquial English. Benes is to be congratulated for his original and significant contribution to the historical literature. * Jeremy King (Mount Holyoke College), European History Quarterly Vol. 48.1 * an important book * Slavic Review *

[Benes] directs our attention, rather, to the grass roots, where a transnational, socialist movement fighting exclusion from political society on class grounds gradually switched focus, once the vote had been won, to a struggle against exclusion on the grounds of national minority status. In the process, social democracy split along ethnic lines, because neither side understood the concerns of the other. As Benes insists and illustrates, with copious and vivid evidence from Czech and German memoirs, newspapers, pamphlets and popular literature, this distinctly working-class variant of nationalism was, by the time of the First World War, a mass movement; the opinions of party leaders were irrelevant. * Comments by the jury of the BASEES George Blazyca Prize 2016 * From start to finish, Benes demonstrates a nuanced and dispassionate appreciation for how asymmetries between the German and Czech national movements played out among socialists of both tongues ... Rooted in an impressive array of archival materials, this book brims with telling popular texts, all translated into clear and colloquial English. Benes is to be congratulated for his original and significant contribution to the historical literature. * Jeremy King, European History Quarterly * This compelling study, which began as a dissertation in history at the University of California, Davis, explores how industrial workers in imperial Austria came to embrace nationalist forms of politics in the decades before the Great War... Rooted in an impressive array of archival materials, this book brims with telling popular texts, all translated into clear and colloquial English. Benes is to be congratulated for his original and significant contribution to the historical literature. * Jeremy King (Mount Holyoke College), European History Quarterly Vol. 48.1 *

Author Information

Jakub Bene%s was born in Berkeley, California to Czech and Slovak parents, one of whom was raised in America. He took his bachelor's degree at Middlebury College, Vermont before returning to California and completing his doctorate under the supervision of Professor William Hagen at UC Davis. Since 2012 he has lived and worked in the UK, first as postdoctoral fellow at the University of Birmingham, and most recently at Oxford. Bene%s's scholarly interests are focused on modern central and eastern Europe, particularly on the history of nationalism, social movements, and popular culture. His next project looks at rural unrest during the collapse of Austria-Hungary.

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