Overview

Przemyśl, Poland: A Multiethnic City During and After a Fortress, 1867–1939 examines the economic, political, demographic, and cultural ramifications of Austro-Hungarian military investment in Przemyśl, Poland, from the inception of the fortress in the 1870s, through four months of siege in World War I, to the decades of social change before World War II. The city of Przemyśl lies a few miles west of the Poland–Ukraine border. In the decades before World War I, the Austro-Hungarian military poured money, troops, and material into this multiethnic city and transformed it into the Empire's largest fortress complex. Though intended to protect the border with Russia and inspire political loyalty, the resultant garrison instead made the city a target and prompted revulsion among local socialists who opposed the army's dominant position in town.The heart of this book is the exploration of the relationship between soldiers and civilians in urban environments. The city's physical and demographic growth was irreversibly tied to the army, yet much of the population rejected the garrison and fought with its soldiers. By 1907, Przemyśl featured one of the largest social democratic movements in Austrian Galicia. By 1914, the city was besieged by the Russian Army, and by 1918, the city was part of the new Second Polish Republic. Przemyśl, Poland is the story of how a single city transformed radically over a few decades, with lasting lessons about the consequences of the military culture colliding with civilian life.

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9781612498096

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John E. Fahey is a historian at the United States Naval History and Heritage Command. He has taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Georgia Military College, and George Mason University. He earned his MA in European history at George Mason University, where he interned at the Center for Military History, and then went on to Purdue University, where he earned a PhD focused on the late Austro-Hungarian Empire. While at Purdue, Fahey received a Fulbright grant to conduct research in southeastern Poland, and he deployed with the United States 3rd Infantry Division to Kandahar, Afghanistan, as an intelligence officer. He is the author of ""Undermining a Bulwark of the Monarchy: Civil-Military Relations in Fortress Przemyśl (1871–1914)"" in the Austrian History Yearbook, and coauthor of ""Habsburg Grand Strategy in the Napoleonic Era"" in The Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars.

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