The journal publishes new research, review essays, and other materials of significance that explore the historic relationship between the United States and Austria, including the lands of the historic Habsburg empire.
Content is interdisciplinary and emphasizes transatlantic exchange, across the fields of historical, political science, economics, law, and cultural studies.[2] The Journal is covered in the Scopus abstract and citation database, in the MLA Bibliography, and it is included in ERIH PLUS, as well as in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Its 2023 Scopus impact factor is 0.18, with a sharply rising three-year average. The journal is indexed and accessible via the digital library of the Scholarly Publishing Collective at Duke University Press.
Austrian-American relations
By the mid-eighteenth century and the period of the American revolution, the Austrian-American relationship had already become significant.[3] Transatlantic trade had already begun here between the Austrian-controlled port of Trieste and Philadelphia, while by the 1780s, the imperial court established the first Austrian representative in the Americas, Baron de Beelen-Bertholff, as a trade envoy.
In 1820, appointed by Emperor Francis II, Alois von Lederer became the first Austrian Consul General to the United States. By 1829, with the blessing of Klemens von Metternich, Austrian religious and entrepreneurial elites had established the Leopoldine Society, a missionary endeavor founded to support Catholics in the United States, though in its early years, the Society devoted some of its greatest attention to Anishinaabe groups and Indigenous Peoples of the Upper Midwest.[4][5]
During the American Civil War, Habsburg elites, such as Charles Frederick de Loosey, the Austrian consul in New York, finessed a balance among U.S., Austrian, and Mexican interests.[6][7] Meanwhile, immigrants from across Austria-Hungary had begun to shape everyday life in the fields of media and commerce, popular and high culture, and more.[8][9]
The First World War reconfigured Austrian-American relations, not least through the postwar redrawing of Austro-Hungarian borders and the financial reconstruction of the First Austrian Republic.[10][11] But inasmuch as the U.S. Senate had rejected the Treaty of Versailles, the process of reaching a U.S.-Austrian peace took a circuitous and prolonged path.[12] These latter developments represent only a few of the highlights in a twentieth-century characterized by a series of bilateral milestones in political, economic, and diplomatic relations between the two countries.[13][14]
A central feature of the Austrian-American relationship is the movement of people between the two countries. Immigrants and refugees from Austria and the historic Habsburg region have contributed significantly in American achievements in the arts, culture, and sciences, even as these trailblazers have been described as "silent invaders."[15][16]
The consequences of economic hardship in the 1920s, together with political instability, and most notably, the lethal persecution of Jews in the wake of the 1938 Anschluss with Nazi Germany forced those Austrians who could to leave the country. Frederike Maria Beer-Monti, the only person painted by both Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele in full-length portraits, managed the Artists' Gallery in New York.[17] Graphic designer, artist, and author, Lisl Weil developed a style of drawing that adapted Viennese traditions for high-end American fashion publications, and she collaborated with the Little Orchestra Society, making live drawings with charcoal on a large white canvas while the orchestra performed The Socerer's Apprentice.[18]
Neverthelless, with few exceptions, as when the U.S. Justice Department barred Austrian president Kurt Waldheim from entering the United States, American public opinion has only occasionally registered the Austrian National Socialist past. Following the Second World War, images, tropes -- and not least, revenue -- generated by the tourism industry did much to promote symbols of natural beauty, Alpine purity, and culture, and delivered a comforting, if forgetful, new gloss to the Austrian nation brand.[19] Meanwhile, the entertainment industry continues to reshuffle episodes in Austrian-American history, via familiar tropes of imperial Austria, the Cold War, "Coca-Colonization", and more.[20][21][22]
Published volumes
The Journal of Austrian-American History publishes articles representing the full diversity of scholarship on the Austrian-American relationship. The first volume, which appeared in 2017, included articles on Hungarian migrant marriages in the United States, a study of Austrian and Dustbowl refugees, as they appear in Hollywood cinema, and an assessment of Hip hop, Malcolm X, and Muslim activism in Austria.[23][24][25] The volume that followed featured a special issue on migration from Central Europe, together with articles on the ties between the industrialist and arts patron Walter Paepcke, the Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy, and an emerging Bauhaus sensibility in Chicago, among others.[26]
The Journal has also presented archival research foregrounding the correspondence of prominent Habsburg-Americans, with articles devoted to John R. Palandech (Ivan Palandačić), the well-known immigrant publisher, politician, and entrepreneur in Chicago, as well as an essay by Walter D. Kamphoefner on language and loyalty among German Americans during World War I.[27][28] Oral histories of American diplomatic personnel stationed in Vienna from 1945–55, recorded by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, have also been published.[29]
Transatlantic cultural relations remain a continuing focus of Journal contributions. The 2020 volume included an investigation of Vienna and the British-American film production, The Third Man, as a locus classicus for postwar espionage, while the 2021 volume presented five essays devoted to "Americans in Vienna 1945-1955." The 2022 special issue highlighted "Musical Diplomacy in Austrian-American Relations."[30][31]
The 2022 journal special issue also featured a review by Günter Bischof of Allied post-World War II occupation and nation-building, and its lessons for the future.[32] That same volume included a special issue on "Austrian Children and Youth Fleeing Nazi Austria," with four contributions, ranging from an essay on Ernst Papanek to an article on intracategorical complexity in the memoirs of young Jewish Austrian emigrants to the United States.[33][34][35]
Following the 2023 collection of essays devoted to the Hungarian-American scholar István Deák, the Journal presented new research on the United States and the development tourism in Austria, together with articles on Central European Initiatives in 19th Century America."[36] In 2025, the Journal published a special issue on "Austrian Women Artists and Transatlantic Exchange in Design and Pedagogy," together with research on László Frank, the postwar Hungarian prophet of anti-Americanism who spent the war years in Shanghai exile.[37][38]
Editorial board
The editorial board of the Journal of Austrian-American History is composed of Austrian history scholars in the United States and Europe, including Siegfried Beer, Peter Becker, Günter Bischof, Gary B. Cohen, Olivia Florek, Farid Hafez, Christian Karner, Nathan Marcus, Anita McChesney, Britta McEwen, Martin Nedbal, Nicole M. Phelps, Dominique Reill, Julia Secklehner, Robert Schuett, Janis Staggs, and Jonathan Singerton. Journal editor is Michael Burri.
↑ Journal of Austrian-American history. 2017. OCLC964078930.
↑ Singerton, Jonathan (2022). The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy. The Revolutionary age. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ISBN978-0-8139-4821-8.
↑ Marcus, Nathan (2018). Austrian reconstruction and the collapse of global finance, 1921-1931. Cambridge, Massachusetts. ISBN978-0-674-98258-1. OCLC1030308116.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
↑ Suppan, Arnold (2019). The Imperialist Peace Order in Central Europe: Saint-Germain and Trianon, 1919-1920. Vienna. ISBN978-3-7001-8635-9. OCLC1134393329.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
↑ Bischof, Günter (2017). The Marshall Plan: saving Europe, rebuilding Austria: the European recovery plan, the ERP Fund, the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation. Hans Petschar (1sted.). [New Orleans]. ISBN978-1-60801-147-6. OCLC1007133337.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
↑ The Vienna Summit and its importance in international history. Günter Bischof, Stefan Karner, Barbara Stelzl-Marx. Lanham. 2014. ISBN978-0-7391-8557-5. OCLC869556201.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link)
↑ Spaulding, Ernest Wilder (1968). The Quiet Invaders: The Story of the Austrian Impact upon America. Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag.
↑ Bischof, Günter (2017). Quiet Invaders Revisited: Biographies of Twentieth Century Immigrants to the United States. Transatlantica. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag. ISBN978-3-7065-5606-4.
↑ Wagnleitner, Reinhold (1994). Coca-colonization and the Cold War: the cultural mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN0-585-02898-2. OCLC42329416.
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