Habsburg studies is a quite rich and interesting field, but it can be quite daunting to approach.

For nineteenth-century military history, the aforementioned Rothenburg book on Archduke Charles is good, but also check out his The Army of Francis Joseph for coverage of the later army. The title of Alan Sked's biography Radetzky: Imperial Victor and Military Genius is indicative of the author's bias, but is an important filling in of the gaps between the Napoleonic period and the Revolutions of 1848. For broader coverage of the army as a social institution, Istvan Deak Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918 is essential reading and often quite interesting, including such sundry details as a murder for a commission. Austro-Hungarian naval policy is a relatively understudied topic, but both Milan Vego's Austro-Hungarian Naval Policy and The Naval Policy of Austria-Hungary, 1867-1918. Navalism, Industrial Development, and the Politics of Dualism by Lawrence Sondhaus rectify this paucity somewhat. Vego's book is a condensation of his dissertation and focuses largely upon naval matters and strategic calculations. Sondhaus, on the other hand, is more indicative of the trends in historiography on the naval arms build up of the early twentieth century (eg Jon Sumida, Nicholas Lambert, Jan Rüger) that look beyond arms race and nationalism to examine the interest politics and domestic factors that lurked behind this expansion.

Extending beyond military matters, David Good's The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1750-1914 is an excellent and accessible foray into economic history and challenges some of the conventional assumptions about the untenability of the empire. On a more regional level, Allison Frank's Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia examines one sector of the Dual Monarchy's economy, oil, and uses it to extrapolate a number of insights into the wider state of the empire. For cultural history, Carl Schorske's Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture is one of the landmark texts on Viennese culture and politics at the turn of the century. Keep in mind, that each chapter was initially an article in the New York Review of Books, so reading Schorske has a very impressionistic quality to it as it is not as coherently organized as a monograph or specialized text. Schorske was so influential that the anthology Rethinking Vienna 1900 examines much of Schorske's ideas and subjects. Schorske pioneered a fusion between political and cultural history, which became highly influential in Habsburg studies. Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848-1916 by Daniel Unowsky examines the popular imperial culture of the long-lived emperor Franz Joseph and the imperial court's attempt to construct an "Austrian" identity that eschewed nationalism. This dynastic patriotism was not completely successful and its mixed legacy is explored in the anthology Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy edited by Laurence Cole and Daniel L. Unowsky.

Older scholarship through the 1970s emphasized the foredoomed nature of the empire and the intractability of the national problem. More recently, scholars of the dual monarchy have questioned this teleology that nationalism is the poison of empires. The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914 by Gary Cohen was one of the first books to examine the shifting nature of ethnic politics and discover they did not follow a preordained political trajectory. Similarly, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans. A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948 explores the role of national identity and "amphibians" that could fit into easy ethnic categories. This story of a frustrated national awakening is also a topic covered in Pieter Judson's Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria which is about the ambivalence over national identity. It should be noted that this new trend in scholarship does not deny the existence of nationalist politics nor does it assert it did not harm the larger interests of the states, but these scholars instead argue that nationalism required an external catalyst to be truly divisive. Maureen Healy's Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I exemplifies this approach by looking at the intersection of ethnic politics, food supply, and attitudes towards the Habsburgs.

The First World War obviously strained the Dual Monarchy to collapse. Aside form the Holger Herwig text /u/elos_ suggested, A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire by Geofrey Wawro approaches the war with particular criticism directed towards the Habsburg empire and its military leaders. Note though that while Austria-Hungary's relative military ineptitude is not really in doubt, not all historians agree with Wawro and Herwig critical approach. Sked's survey The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815-1918 takes issue with the notion of imperial decline in general, he goes on a mini-rant in the book that the publisher forced the title upon him, and questions Austria-Hungary's responsibility for the outbreak of the war. Like Healy, The Undermining of Austria-Hungary: The Battle for Hearts and Minds by Mark Cornwall contends that external factors exacerbated preexisting ethnic tensions. Although it covers the periods prior to and after the First World War, Tim Snyder's The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke focuses on Wilhelm von Habsburg and shows that not all Habsburgs were archaic leftovers ill at ease with nationalism and modern politics.

Finally, the novels of Joseph Roth, especially The Radetzky March, A 1001 Nights, and The Emperor's Tomb are good windows into the mentalities of the Dual Monarchy. A prominent writer in the interwar period, Roth was a perceptive journalist, novelist, and misanthrope, but had some incredibly intelligent perceptions in how the empire functioned and the type of people that inhabited it. In my experience, consuming Roth in conjunction with various monographs and studies on Austria-Hungary enhanced the experience of reading both.

Austria isn't really my focus but I have two wonderful works on them:

• Napoleon's Great Adversary: Archduke Charles and the Austrian Army 1792–1814 by Gunther Rothenberg

• The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1918

The latter work is mostly focused on the Austro-Hungarian side of things.

What methods do you use to retain large amounts of information in the beginning of research on a subject without essentially writing a book’s worth of notes?

Am I writing a paper? Then I look for very specific things while I read and write them down, note page numbers, etc. and go back and reread them once I have the full context of the chapter absorbed.

If I'm just reading casually to learn about the subject I do basically the same thing. One thing that I personally enjoy doing is taking a pen and just scribbling in the book. I'll make braces around important passages (or what I find important) and write notes in the margins. I'll quote important lines in particular.

Thus if I ever need something offhand I'll be able to find it easily but also if I just want a refresher on that area in general or just want to reread some of that stuff I have the option to just get 'the cliffnotes' so to say.