A History of the Habsburg Empire 1526–1918

An impressive achievement in a task of extraordinary difficulty.The outstanding asset of this work does not consist in in its comprehensiveness and objectivity, however, nor even in the wide knowledge and special expertise Kann can bring to bear from his early legal training, his formidable scholarship on the nationalities question, and his keen critical appreciation of the diverse cultures of the monarchy. Its greatest merit derives from the author's determination always to ask fundamental questions, his care to discriminate between surface phenomena and deeper causes, his skill in finding significant patterns in an apparently chaotic welter of events, his facility for perceptive and penetrating distinctions and generalizations. In short, he tried with considerable success to tell what really happened in history rather than simply what obviously happened.—Canadian Historical Review