Prague entered the First World War as the third city of the Habsburg empire, but emerged in 1918 as the capital of a brand new nation-state, Czechoslovakia. Claire Morelon explores what this transition looked, sounded and felt like at street level. Through deep archival research, she has carefully reconstructed the sensorial texture of the city, from the posters plastered on walls, to the shop windows' displays, the badges worn by passers-by, and the crowds gathering for protest or celebration. The result is both an atmospheric account of life amid war and regime change, and a fresh interpretation of imperial collapse from below, in which the experience of life on the Habsburg home-front is essential to understanding the post-Versailles world order that followed. Prague is the perfect case study for examining the transition from empire to nation-statehood, hinging on revolutionary dreams of fairer distribution and new forms of political participation.

Morelon reconstructs the collapse of the Habsburg Empire as it was experienced on the streets of Prague.

The collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy at the end of World War I ushered in a period of radical change for East-Central European political structures and national identities. Yet this transformed landscape inevitably still bore the traces of its imperial past. Breaking with traditional histories that take 1918 as a strict line of demarcation, this collection focuses on the complexities that attended the transition from the Habsburg Empire to its successor states. In so doing, it produces new and more nuanced insights into the persistence and effectiveness of imperial institutions, as well as the sources of instability in the newly formed nation-states.

Who owns the street? Interwar Berliners faced this question with great hope yet devastating consequences. In Germany, the First World War and 1918 Revolution transformed the city streets into the most important media for politics and commerce. There, partisans and entrepreneurs fought for the attention of crowds with posters, illuminated advertisements, parades, traffic jams, and violence. The Nazi Party relied on how people already experienced the city to stage aggressive political theater, including the April Boycott and Kristallnacht. Observers in Germany and abroad looked to Berlin's streets to predict the future. They saw dazzling window displays that radiated optimism. They also witnessed crime waves, antisemitic rioting, and failed policing that pointed toward societal collapse. Recognizing the power of urban space, officials pursued increasingly radical policies to 'revitalize' the city, culminating in Albert Speer's plan to eradicate the heart of Berlin and build Germania.

Streetscapes are part of the taken-for-granted spaces of everyday urban life, yet they are also contested arenas in which struggles over identity, memory, and place shape the social production of urban space. This book examines the role that street naming has played in the political life of urban streetscapes in both historical and contemporary cities. The renaming of streets and remaking of urban commemorative landscapes have long been key strategies that different political regimes have employed to legitimize spatial assertions of sovereign authority, ideological hegemony, and symbolic power. Over the past few decades, a rich body of critical scholarship has explored the politics of urban toponymy, and the present collection brings together the works of geographers, anthropologists, historians, linguists, planners, and political scientists to examine the power of street naming as an urban place-making practice. Covering a wide range of case studies from cities in Europe, North America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia, the contributions to this volume illustrate how the naming of streets has been instrumental to the reshaping of urban spatial imaginaries and the cultural politics of place.

During the 1800s, Manhattanville flourished as the West Side counterpart to its parent village of Harlem. The wide valley around present-day Broadway and 125th Street formed a unique gateway to the Hudson River between Morningside Heights and Washington Heights. Although rural, Manhattanville was the convergence of river, railroad, and stage lines, representing one of nineteenth-century New York City's most significant residential, manufacturing, and transportation hubs. However, this once-prominent upper Manhattan suburb eventually succumbed to the advent of mass transit and to the absorption of its distinctive features by the city in chase. Manhattanville: Old Heart of West Harlem acquaints readers with the richly diverse history and lore of this famously picturesque locale. From Henry Hudson's exploration of the area's waterfront in 1609 to Gen. George Washington's conversion of its terrain into a battlefield in 1776, momentous events marked Manhattanville's crossroads long before the village streets were laid out in 1806. Readers discover later landmarks, including New York's first Episcopal church to abolish pew rentals, where patriots, Tories, and African American abolitionists convened-today, Harlem's oldest continuing congregation on the same site. The book also introduces notable Manhattanville residents, such as founders Jacob and Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin, clothier Daniel Devlin, and New York City Mayor Daniel F. Tiemann.

This book asks how English authors of the early to mid twentieth-century responded to the nationalist revolution in neighbouring Ireland in their work, and explores this response as an expression of anxieties about, and aspirations within, England itself. Drawing predominantly on novels ofthis period, but also on letters, travelogues, literary criticism, and memoir, it illustrates how Irish affairs provided a marginal but pervasive point of reference for a wide range of canonical authors in England, including Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, and EvelynWaugh, and also for many lesser-known figures such as Ethel Mannin, George Thomson, and T.H. White.The book surveys these and other incidental writers within the broad framework of literary modernism, an arc seen to run in temporal parallel to Ireland's revolutionary trajectory from rebellion to independence. In this context, it addresses two distinct aspects of the Irish-English relationship asit features in the literature of the time: first, the uneasy recognition of a fundamental similarity between the two countries in terms of their potential for violent revolutionary instability, and second, the proleptic engagement of Irish events to prefigure, imaginatively, the potential course ofEngland's evolution from the Armistice to the Second World War. Tracing these effects, this book offers a topical renegotiation of the connections between Irish and English literary culture, nationalism, and political ideology, together with a new perspective on the Irish sources engaged by Englishliterary modernism.