The Habsburg Monarchy, which spread over geographically diverse areas with a variety of cultures and ethnicities, was based on a social order which was strictly ...

Consumption is always embedded in social and cultural contexts. The consumer society is a relatively new phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ...

For people today knowledge is above all the product of science. The idea that knowledge is something which must be proved empirically is a relatively new one. ...

Today’s society still has the rich and the poor, those with possessions and those who have none. ...

For many centuries what a person believed was not a private matter: religion shaped society much more strongly than it does today. ...

Over the centuries improvements in hygiene, medicine and food supply led to increases in population and life expectancy. ...

For a long time the distance that people could move was determined by the muscle power of their legs or the tractive force of animals, and it could also be rest ...

As emperors, kings, archdukes and dukes the Habsburgs played a decisive role in shaping the history of Central Europe for more than six centuries. ...

To differentiate means to divide into categories. People were assessed according to many different critieria: by sex, class, religion, property or ethnicity. ...

People like to see history as a development which always leads to improvement, as a series of steps bringing innovations and progress in technology and society. ...

A look behind the scenes: What is life like as an empress? What does an emperor eat? What does he wear? Where does he live and where does he sleep? ...

Labour and work do not mean the same thing at all times. This is also true of the fruits of labour. Hence questions arise such as: Who works for whom? ...

In the strictly hierarchical societies of past centuries every class had its own ways of expressing itself, whether it was a matter of consumption, manners, in ...

The traditional view of Habsburg history as the history of a dynasty is based on the story of specific events and personalities. ...

Human beings are social animals: they meet in private and in public, they have more or less close contacts with one another, and they enter into love relationsh ...