This review essay evaluates the evolution of the Hungarian journal of social history, Korall társadalomtörténeti folyóirat (Coral: A journal of social history), founded in 1999 as a new forum of social history research. Korall promoted two distinct understandings of social history, stated only implicitly in the first years of the journal, but later elaborated more explicitely by the editors, as core definitions of their research programme. A first, narrow acceptation places social history within the field of (historical) sociology and favours structural approaches and concepts specific to the social sciences rather than the actual historical context. A second definition is wider, including a variety of topics such as environmental history, cultural history, economic, and demographic history, being meant to function as a powerful counter-discourse against positivistic, traditional and political-orientated history, still dominant in contemporary Hungarian historiography. Based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative content analysis, the review essay argues that, during its eight years of existance to date, Korall has undergone a process of internationalization. Although most articles published in the journal continue to focus on topics pertaining to the history of Hungary—especially during the "dualist period," 1867-1918—references to international events, authors, and theories have lately acquired a greater importance

The history of the ethnic borderlands of Hungary and Romania in the years 1867–1944 were marked by changing national borders, ethnic conflicts and economic problems. Using a local case study of the city and county of Szatmár/Satu-Mare, this thesis investigates the practice and social mechanisms of economic nationalizing. It explores the interplay between ethno-national and economic factors, and furthermore analyses what social mechanisms lead to and explain inclusion, exclusion and annihilation.

The underlying principle of economic nationalizing in both countries was the separation of citizens into ethnic categories and the establishment of a dominant core nation entitled to political and economic privileges from the state. National leaders implemented a policy of economic nationalizing that exploited and redistributed resources taken from the minorities. To pursue this end, leaders instrumentalized ethnicity, which institutionalized inequality and ethnic exclusion. This process of ethnic, and finally racial, exclusion marked the whole period and reached its culmination in the annihilation of the Jews throughout most of Hungary in 1944.

For nearly a century, ethnic exclusion undermined the various nationalizing projects in the two countries: the Magyarization of the minorities in dualist Hungary (1867–1918); the Romanianization of the economy of the ethnic borderland in interwar Romania (1918–1940); and finally the re-Hungarianization of the economy in Second World War Hungary (1940–1944).

The extreme case of exclusion, namely the Holocaust, revealed that the path of exclusion brought nothing but destruction for everyone. This reinforces the thesis that economic nationalizing through the exclusion of minorities induces a vicious circle of ethnic bifurcation, political instability and unfavorable conditions for achieving economic prosperity. Exclusion served the short-term elite’s interest but undermined the long-term nation’s ability to prosper.