Joshua Shanes Announced As 2022 Rath Prize Winner

The 2022 prize committee is pleased to announce Joshua Shanes’ article, “The ‘Bloody Election’ in Drohobycz: Violence, Urban Politics, and National Memory in an Imperial Borderland” as the 2022 Rath Prize Winner. The committee applauds the way in which the author reconstructs and contextualizes one discrete occasion of bare-fisted politics in a time of democratization and tense electoral contestation in the Austrian crownland of Galicia. The resulting picture illuminates the power of nationalist ideology to re-interpret local divisions in a way that shapes how conflicts are understood and memorialized. At the same time, it also highlights the limits of that same nationalist ideology in local politics in an area traditionally seen as divided primarily along national lines. Engaging multiple historiographies and written in an elegant, accessible style, “The ‘Bloody Election’ in Drohobycz: Violence, Urban Politics, and National Memory in an Imperial Borderland” is an insightful exploration of identity and its shifting, fragmented nature in an early 20th-century imperial borderland.  https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/austrian-history-yearbook/article/bloody-election-in-drohobycz-violence-urban-politics-and-national-memory-in-an-imperial-borderland/0F8C76C6221644E2D20EC4C0B2E2F6D5