Suchergebnisse

This article portrays two communities that are cut in half by new boundaries. The author tries to answer the questions of how the populations responded to this destruction of communality, how the changes affected their vision of local identity, & how each half adjusted to the new conditions. The story of St. Gingolph began as a border dispute between the republic of Valais & the Duke of Savoy & was settled in 1569 by establishing a new political divide along the River Morgue. Still today, half of the village is French, the other half is Swiss. During Napoleon I's brief control over European affairs the division of Laufenburg on Switzerland's border with Germany occurred when the Rhine became the boundary between the Holy Roman Empire & the Swiss Confederation. The history of both villages appears to confirm the existence of communal allegiances independent of national loyalty. The author concludes that the significance of a border depends on local physical & psychological conditions. E. Sanchez

On October 6, 1866, in Hanover and on October 8 in Kassel, Wiesbaden, and Frankfurt am Main, civil and military ceremonies completed the Prussian annexations of the Kingdom of Hanover, the Electorate of Hesse-Kassel, the Duchy of Nassau, and the Free City of Frankfurt. Together with the subsequent incorporation of Schleswig-Holstein on January 12, 1867, this augmentation of King William I's realm transferred more than five million German subjects and twenty-eight thousand square miles to Prussia and closed the physical gap between the east and central German main body of the kingdom and its prosperous Westphalian and Rhenish districts. For the first time a Hohenzollern subject could travel from the Russian border at Memel to the old Carolingian capital of Aachen on the Belgian frontier without setting foot on the territory of another German state.

On August 22, 1866, a month and a half after the disaster of Sadowa, Francis Joseph I of Austria wrote to his mother: "If you have the whole world against you and absolutely no friends, chances of success are few, but we must resist as long as we can, do our duty until the last, and finally perish honorably." To his council of ministers he put it less dramatically and less plaintively on September I: For a long time to come Austria would have to eschew war in all forms and for all purposes.