This article examines one of thousands of reports describing murder trials that are stored in the archives of the Habsburg ruler in Vienna. The monarch was required to evaluate every civilian death sentence in his realm, including the Kingdom of Hungary, and he alone could decide if the execution should proceed or be commuted. But it was the relevant justice minister who composed the reports and framed the decision for the monarch. Through these reports, the minister shaped what would happen through persuasive narrative and expert advice. After evaluating seven hundred reports, we selected one specific case: a murder conviction in Budapest in 1915. We show how the justice minister, an expert in criminal justice reform and an opponent of the death penalty, directed the emperor towards clemency and contributed to the steady decrease in the use of capital punishment.

La jerarquización de recursos constituye uno de los procedimientos más empleados para evaluar la subsistencia de los cazadores-recolectores en el pasado. Para el Centro Occidente Argentino (COA) esta jerarquización se fundaba en el tamaño corporal de las presas. Aquí incorporamos datos sobre los costos de manejo, generando el primer ordenamiento de recursos para la región que contempla los elementos requeridos por los modelos de optimización (Kcal/tiempo post-encuentro). Luego del guanaco (Lama guanicoe) —presa de mayor rendimiento— este ranking situó en segundo y tercer lugar a los huevos de Rheidae y los armadillos (Dasypodidae), respectivamente, resaltando la importancia de presas tradicionalmente consideradas de bajo rendimiento. Siguiendo la teoría de aprovisionamiento óptimo, elaboramos el modelo de amplitud de dieta (MAD) para los desiertos más representativos de Nordpatagonia: el de Monte y el patagónico. En este último, la mayor disponibilidad de guanacos tornó menos ventajosa la incorporación de nuevos ítems a la dieta. Para el Monte, la dieta óptima se amplió, incluyendo recursos menores como ciertos peces (i.e., Percichthys trucha). En definitiva, el MAD permitió reinterpretar tendencias temporales en la subsistencia humana, sosteniendo una ampliación en el espectro de recursos explotados hacia el Holoceno tardío en el COA. En general, las expectativas del MAD son confirmadas con el registro zooarqueológico regional.

Hungary has a long, rich history of wine production. Historians have emphasized wine's importance to the development of both the Hungarian economy and Hungarian nationalism. This article ties together these historiographical threads through a case study of a small village in one of Hungary's most famous wine regions. Tracing the village's history from the 1860s to World War I, the article makes three main claims. First, it demonstrates that from the start, this remote village belonged to wider networks of trade and exchange that stretched across the surrounding region, state, and continent. Second, it shows that even as Magyar elites celebrated the folk culture and peasant smallholders of this region, they also cheered the introduction of what they saw as scientific, rational agriculture. This leads to the last argument: wine achieved its place in the pantheon of Hungarian culture at a moment when the local communities that had grown up around its production and stirred the national imagination were undergoing dramatic and irreversible change.

In 1863, the geologist Adolf Schmidl published a thick book on the Bihar/Bihor Mountains, a highland region on the border between the Hungarian Kingdom and Transylvania. Calling the Bihar/Bihor Mountains one of the “least known regions in the Austrian Monarchy,” Schmidl offered his work as small contribution to Vaterlandskunde and one, he hoped, that would inspire others to follow him into the region. The book provided a detailed analysis of the mountains' hydrography, topography, flora, and fauna. The biological diversity of the region especially excited Schmidl, and his discoveries included four new species of plants and a new species of animal (a leech found only in thermal waters). Schmidl was no less impressed by the ethnographic diversity of this region. Although Romanians belonging to the Greek Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches comprised the vast majority of the population, Schmidl counted six ethnic groups and as many religions in the mountains. According to Schmidl, “national agitation” was “entirely foreign” to the region, whose inhabitants enjoyed peaceful and fraternal relations with one another. The Romanians, he underlined, “are among the most loyal in the Austrian monarchy and their devotion to the dynasty is unfeigned and unshakeable.”

The subject of this article is the Tiszaeszlár blood libel, one of several sensational Jewish ritual murder cases to unfold in central and eastern Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century. By focusing on a region far removed from Tiszaeszlár, the article underscores the rapidity with which antisemitic violence traversed Hungary in the early 1880s. In examining the causes, function, and impact of this violence, Robert Nemes demonstrates the centrality of the provinces for understanding the depth and dynamism of political antisemitism in Hungary. Nemes also argues that Tiszaeszlár acted as a formative political experience for many people in the provinces and explores the wider consequences of this event, both in the near and in the long term.