The nineteenth-century Hungarian dance floor provides an invaluable tool for mapping the contours of both an emerging civil society and the political practices of Hungarian nationalism. During the 1840s, consciously “national” costumes, music, dances, and language became de rigueur in all areas of social life, and especially on die dance floor. Because associations and newspapers linked such cultural practices to opposition politics, these balls allowed a large number of men and women usually excluded from public life to display their patriotism and political allegiances. In this way, the diffuse set of ideas, feelings, and allegiances connected witii nineteenth-century liberalism and nationalism spread more widely in Hungary. These developments did not occur without conflict, and an examination of debates surrounding the dance floor reveals widely divergent views on participation in civil society and the boundaries of the nation.

In 1863, the geologist Adolf Schmidl published a thick book on the Bihar/Bihor Mountains, a highland region on the border between the Hungarian Kingdom and Transylvania. Calling the Bihar/Bihor Mountains one of the “least known regions in the Austrian Monarchy,” Schmidl offered his work as small contribution to Vaterlandskunde and one, he hoped, that would inspire others to follow him into the region. The book provided a detailed analysis of the mountains' hydrography, topography, flora, and fauna. The biological diversity of the region especially excited Schmidl, and his discoveries included four new species of plants and a new species of animal (a leech found only in thermal waters). Schmidl was no less impressed by the ethnographic diversity of this region. Although Romanians belonging to the Greek Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches comprised the vast majority of the population, Schmidl counted six ethnic groups and as many religions in the mountains. According to Schmidl, “national agitation” was “entirely foreign” to the region, whose inhabitants enjoyed peaceful and fraternal relations with one another. The Romanians, he underlined, “are among the most loyal in the Austrian monarchy and their devotion to the dynasty is unfeigned and unshakeable.”

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A century ago, Bihar/Bihor County was a rather unremarkable corner of the Hungarian Kingdom, one situated far from international boundaries. The population of Bihar/Bihor was almost equally split between ethnic Hungarians and ethnic Romanians, a fact of little consequence until the last decades of the nineteenth century, when a number of middle-class national activists began to emphasize the region's status as a national borderland and worked to define and defend the Hungarian-Romanian border they saw running through it. This essay explores the nationalists' efforts through a local cultural association, A Biharvármegyei Népnevelési Egyesület (Bihar County Society for Popular Education). Its aim is to show that the sharp lines that appeared on maps of "the nationalities of Austria-Hungary" emerged in a particular historical context, and also that these lines were much more blurry than many mapmakers and historians would have us believe.