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Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Modern History

Coordinator

Francesca Brunet

Francesca.Brunet@unibz.it

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The so-called “long nineteenth century” is a period of profound changes, which are reflected in the political, social, cultural, economic, institutional and legal history of this region. A century which, also for Tyrol, opens and closes with epochal events. On the one hand, the end of the ancien régime, the secularization of the bishoprics of Trento and Brixen and finally the creation – after a series of changes of government – of the Crownland of Tyrol, with which the territories of today’s Austrian Tyrol and the provinces of Bolzano and Trento were unified into a single region, within the overall framework of the Habsburg Empire. On the other, the outbreak of the First World War, which led, among its consequences, to the dismemberment of the Crownland and its integration partly into the Austrian Republic, partly into the Kingdom of Italy.

And yet, beyond some specific areas (such as the uprising of 1809, which has been the subject, on the occasion of its bicentenary, of a new and important campaign of studies by historians, especially German-speaking ones; or 1848, the Risorgimento and then irredentist movements, which long represented the only nineteenth century area of interest in the historiography of Trentino), the nineteenth century in Tyrol met for a long time little historiographical fortune. Above all, there is a scarcity of research that includes the Crownland as a whole, and not only the German or Italian part.

The projects carried out in the research area “Modern Regional History” aim at filling, at least in part, this gap by highlighting, in particular, some crucial aspects of the social and institutional history of the Tyrolean region as a whole.

Research Projects