Institut für Geschichte der Univ. Wien: Reihe „Geschichte am Mittwoch“ in Koop. mit dem Institut für die Erforschung der Frühen Neuzeit (Web)
Zeit: 18.11.2026, 18.30 s.t.-20.00 Uhr
Ort: Univ. Wien, Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien, Hörsaal 30
Modernity was not created only by entrepreneurs, inventors and their machines. It also rested on the labour of many people who left the traditional communities and wage labour became the centre of their lives. These people are usually not considered part of the urban middle classes; on the contrary, they were often at risk of falling into precarity. Still, they have articulated and defended their interests. The aim of the project is to explore how they conceptualised their situation, even if they expressed themselves through action rather than writing. We pursue the hypothesis that the rioters and their actions formed a specific non-elite public sphere as an alternative to the emerging bourgeois society. To prove this hypothesis, the project focuses on social interactions and conflicts of various dimensions in selected cities, involving journeymen, factory workers, and ,the mobʻ. By analysing the mass protests in 1793 in Prague, the hunger riots in Vienna in 1805, the journeymen’s unrests in the 1820s, or the workers’ strikes and machine demolitions in the 1840s the project examines not only the logics and justifications behind these action, but it asks to what extent these logics fit into either a traditional or a modernist interpretive framework of social protests.
Moderation: Anton Tantner
– Pavel Himl, professor of (early) modern history at the Charles Univ., Praha
– Jakub Raška, junior reseacher at the Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciencies, Praha
– Josef Řičář, postdoc researcher at the Charles Univ., Praha
– Edmund Trubáček, Ph.D. student at the Charles Univ., Praha

Abteilung für Regionalgeschichte mit Schwerpunkt Schleswig-Holstein, Christian-Albrechts-Univ. zu Kiel
Institut Historische Sozialforschung (IHSF) der AK Wien und FAKTory. Literatur, Wissen und Beratung für Studierende
Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ÖAW) und Österreichisches Staatsarchiv (ÖSTA)
Qwien – Zentrum für queere Kultur und Geschichte
Buchpräsentationen im Rahmen der Lehrveranstaltung „Geschichte der Sozialen Arbeit“ an der Hochschule Campus Wien
Zentrum für Regionalgeschichte/Centro di Storia Regionale, Brixen/Bressanone