When I assumed the editorship of CEH in 1991 the discipline of history was changing rapidly. Political, diplomatic, and economic history seemed to be fading after a long run, and even the nation state was being challenged as a central focus of research. Given the increasing interest in gender, race, post-colonialism, and memory, I had to consider “whither goeth” CEH. In part that decision is made for the editor by the manuscripts that are submitted to the journal. My own belief is that excellent history can be written based on a variety of theories, and with the employment of a diverse number of methodologies. I also concluded that weak and unconvincing history could equally be based on very different foundations as well.

In September of 1899 the Czech National Social Party issued a stern warning to parents in Prague as the school enrollment season approached: “Czech parents! Remember that your children are not only your own property, but also the property of the nation. They are the property of all of society and that society has the right to control your conduct!” Czech and German nationalists in the Bohemian lands were hardly alone in claiming that children comprised a precious form of “national property” (nationaler Besitz, národanímajetek) at the turn of the century. In an age of mass politics and nationalist demography, nationalists across Europe obsessed about the quantity and quality of the nation's children. They were, however, unique in their ability to transform this polemical claim into a legal reality. Between 1900–1945, German and Czech nationalist social workers and educational activists in the Bohemian lands attempted to create a political culture in which children belonged to national communities, and in which the nation's rights to educate children often trumped parental rights. In 1905, nationalists gained the legal right to “reclaim” children from the schools of the national enemy in Moravia, a right which they retained until 1938. By the time Ota Filip's father dragged him to the German school in Slezská Ostrava/Schlesisch Ostrau, children had become one of the most precious stakes in the nationalist battle, and a parent's choice of a German or Czech school had become a matter of unprecedented personal, political, moral, and national significance.

Recent work on the eighteenth-century public sphere has recast the debate about the Enlightenment's responsibility for the French Revolution. Historians have argued that the print public sphere and its concomitant forms of sociability, such as salons, reading clubs, and coffee houses created social spaces from which criticism of the state emerged. This elite criticism corroded the Old Regime's foundations and the revolutionary crash of 1789, if it was not directly the intellectuals' fault, was sufficiently related to their mental labors to show that enlightened publicness had consequences.

The diplomatic and religious climate in Protestant Northern Europe during the era of Louis XIV was filled with competing and at times contradictory impulses, and the repercussions of Louis's expansionist and anti-Protestant policies on the relations between the Protestant states were varied and complex. Taken in conjunction with the ascension of Catholic James II in Britain in February 1685 and the succession of the Catholic House of Neuburg in the Palatinate following the death of the last Calvinist elector in May of that year, Louis's reintroduction of the mass ins the “reunited” territories and his increasing persecution of the Huguenots in France added to an acute sense among European Protestants that the survival of their religion was threatened. It is a well-established theme in the standard literature on seventeenth-century Europe that the culmination of Louis's attack on the Huguenots in his revocation of the Edict of Nantes in October 1685 galvanized the continents Protestant powers in a common sense of outrage and united them in a spirit of political cooperation against France. Indeed, such an astute contemporary observer as Leibniz was to write in the early 1690s that it appeared now “as if all of the north is opposed to the south of Europe; the great majority of the Germanic peoples are opposed to the Latins.” Even Bossuet had to declare that “your so-called Reformation … was never more powerful nor more united. All of the Protestants have joined forces. From the outside, the Reformation is very cohesive, more haughty and more menacing than ever.”