This article charts the path and the activity of the Andalusian nobleman Pero Tafur in the Czech lands at the end of 1438 and beginning of 1439. The visit formed part of his extensive four-year journey across European countries, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. The main motive was to meet with King of the Romans and of Bohemia Albert II. The meeting occured in February 1439 in Wroclaw, where Tafur arrived via Prague and Saxony in the entourage of the royal chancellor Kaspar Schlick, and from there he continued through Moravia to the south to Austria. The rather obscur testimony of the well-travelled knight is not only a remarable document of this monarch as a person and the contemporary historical context of Albert´s brief reign, but also provides an interesting image of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia in the atmosphere of the slowly extinguishing Hussite wars., Jaroslav Svátek., and Obsahuje literaturu a odkazy pod čarou
From the 1780s on, the court of the Princes of Schwarzenberg generally maintained four or five personal doctors. These privileged positions were frequently held by individuals who also practised as municipal or county physicians. In their castles in Bohemia the Schwarzenbergs also employed surgeons and apothecaries, and in line with the professionalization of medical care during the Enlightenment they attached great importance to the training of health workers. In the first three decades of the 19th century health care in the context of the Schwarzenberg primogeniture became even more specialized and the number of medical staff on the various Schwarzenberg estates increased. In addition to their own physicians, the Schwarzenbergs also entrusted their health needs to eminent medical experts drawn primarily from the Habsburg court and the University of Vienna and later, from the 1830s on, to many doctors working in the Czech Lands. This study considers the relationship between the high nobility as representatives of social elites on the one hand and the Enlightenment medicalization of society with its professionalization of health care on the other. It maps the structure of medical care within one aristocratic family and their estates and its transformation over a fifty‐year period. It also attempts to discover who the Schwarzenbergs’ doctors were and what socio‐cultural background they came from., Václav Grubhoffer., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
V této edici Jitka Vondrová předkládá dosud neznámý elaborát historika Václava Krále nazvaný „Informace o stavu československé historiografie“, který byl předán 21. srpna 1969 – tedy v den prvního výročí invaze armád Varšavské smlouvy do Československa – na sovětském velvyslanectví v Praze a určen v prvé řadě do rukou tajemníka pro ideologii Ústředního výboru Komunistické strany Sovětského svazu Pjotra I. Děmičeva. Editorka dokument objevila v materiálech oddělení propagandy ÚV KSSS v Ruském státním archivu pro nejnovější dějiny (Rossijskij gosudarstvennyj archiv novejšej istorii) v Moskvě. Obsahem dokumentu je hodnocení poměrů ve zdejší historiografii nejnovější doby z krajně dogmatických pozic. Pisatel „odhaluje“ mocnou nátlakovou skupinu, respektive „teroristický gang“ mezi historiky, která se s pomocí „reakčních živlů“ v ústředních orgánech KSČ (tedy reformních komunistů) pokouší ovládnout mocenské pozice v historiografii a zvrátit výklad československých dějin ve 20. století od pojetí marxistického k buržoaznímu ve smyslu masarykovské ideologie. Za vůdce této skupiny označuje Milana Hübla a Jana Křena, mezi další její protagonisty řadí například Viléma Prečana, Milana Otáhala, Karla Bartoška nebo Václava Kurala. Identifikuje také centra „kontrarevoluce v historiografii“, zejména Ústav dějin KSČ, Vysokou školu politickou ÚV KSČ, oddělení nejnovějších dějin v Historickém ústavu ČSAV a Českou historickou společnost. Závěrem uvádí konkrétní návrhy na reorganizaci jednotlivých historických institucí a doporučuje propustit a zcela vykázat z odborné sféry přibližně sto čtyřicet historiků. V obsáhlém úvodním komentáři editorka zasazuje dokument do kontextu politických aktivit radikálně levicového křídla v Komunistické straně Československa po srpnu 1968 a také do souvislostí tehdejšího vývoje československé historiografie a kariéry autora dokumentu. Václav Král (1926–1983) byl marxistický historik skálopevně dogmatického myšlení a zabýval se nejnovějšími československými dějinami, zejména obdobím zániku první republiky a německé okupace. Svou kariéru započal v padesátých letech, v roce 1962 se stal ředitelem Československo-sovětského institutu. Během šedesátých let se však ideologická schémata, jimiž nahlížel na dějiny, stávala předmětem kritiky a Král se odborně ocital v izolaci od hlavního proudu československého dějepisectví, jehož protagonisté usilovali o restituci historiografie jako kritické vědy a její osvobození od přímé závislosti na politice. Jeho šance znovu přišla po vpádu intervenčních vojsk, kdy se intenzivně zapojil do činnosti krajní levice, v komunistické straně. Ta sloužila jako přímá páka sovětského vlivu, předkládala radikální požadavky na odsouzení „pražského jara“ jako kontrarevoluce a odvolání všech jeho stoupenců a tlačila i nového generálního tajemníka ÚV KSČ k zaujímání stále konformnějších prosovětských stanovisek. Václav Král si přitom ve svém elaborátu vyřizoval i osobní účty s historiky, kteří ho kritizovali. Brzy poté sám nemilosrdně realizoval politiku čistek v praxi v Československo-sovětském institutu a v Historickém ústavu. V čase „normalizace“ pak svou pozici historického prominenta dále upevnil, když se stal předsedou vědeckého kolegia ČSAV, vedoucím katedry historie na Filozofické fakultě Univerzity Karlovy a byl jmenován profesorem., In this edition, Jitka Vondrová presents a hitherto unknown report by the historian Václav Král (1926–1983). Entitled “Informace o stavu československé historiografie” (Information on the State of Czechoslovak Historiography), the report was presented at the Soviet Embassy, Prague, on 21 August 1969 (on the first anniversary of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia), and was intended primarily for Piotr N. Demichev, Secretary for Ideology at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Vondrová discovered the document amongst material of the Propaganda Department of the CPSU in the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, Moscow. The document is an assessment of the state of Czechoslovak contemporary history from extremely dogmatic positions. Král “exposes” a powerful interest group, which he portrays as a “terrorist gang,” amongst the historians. With the help of “reactionary elements” in the central organs of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (that is, the reform Communists) the group was trying to gain the upper hand in historiography and return the interpretation of Czechoslovak history in the twentieth century from the Marxist conception to the bourgeois in the sense of Masarykian ideology. He calls Milan Hübl (1927–1989) and Jan Křen (b. 1930) the leaders of the group, which included Vilém Prečan (b. 1933), Milan Otáhal (b. 1928), Karel Bartošek (1930–2004), and Václav Kural (b. 1928). He also identifies the centre of “counter-revolution in historiography,” particularly the Institute of History of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, the Party University, the Department of Contemporary History in the Institute of History at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, and the Czech Historical Society. He concludes with some concrete proposals for the reorganization of the individual institutions of historical research, and recommends dismissing about 140 historians and banning them from the field altogether. In a comprehensive introduction, the editor puts this document into the context of the political activities of the radically left wing of the Czechoslovak Communist Party after the Soviet-led occupation in late August 1968 and also into the context of contemporaneous developments in Czechoslovak historiography and the career of the author of the document. Král was a dogmatic Marxist historian of contemporary Czechoslovak history, particularly of the end of the First Republic and the German occupation. His career began in the 1950s, and in 1962 he became head of the Czechoslovak-Soviet Institute., In the 1960s, however, the ideological models he employed in historiography came under criticism, and Král found himself isolated from the mainstream of Czechoslovak historiography as the leading historians endeavoured to have historiography restored as a critical discipline free from direct dependence on politics. Král was given another chance after the Soviet-led military intervention, when he became seriously involved in the extreme left wing of the Communist Party. A direct instrument of Soviet influence, this wing of the CPCz put forward radical demands for the condemnation of the “Prague Spring” as a counter-revolution and for the dismissal of all those who supported it. It also put pressure on the new general secretary of the Central Committee of the CPCz to take up increasingly conformist, pro-Soviet positions. In his report, Král is also settling personal accounts with historians who criticized him. Soon after writing it, he himself mercilessly carried out the policy of purges in the Czechoslovak-Soviet Institute and the Historical Institute. In the period of “Normalization” he then shored up his own position as a prominent historian when he became Chairman of the Academic Board of the Czechoslovak Academy and Head of the Department of History at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, and was also given a professorship., and Dokumenty
The present study aims at sketching some aspects of the last phase of existence of one mixed Czech-German community (Karlov-Libinsdorf), on the basis of ethnographic and historical sources. It offers a reflection of a more general process from the point of view of a local microlevel, a process that finally resulted in the ethnic homogneization of the Czech lands. The analysis of the controversy fo r national character of the community is being realized, on the one hand, through the study of the competition for the character of national schools in the locality, and, on the other hand, through the symbolical importance that the contesting parties ascribed to the existence of this mixed enclave. As a result of the general ethnic homogneization, the inhabitants of the naturally double-language community were confronted with the necessity of the unequivical declaration of their ethnicity. The nacionalization of the collective identity of the local inhabitants and the necessity of the „actualization“ of this identity according to the political situation of the moment was being imposed through the general social context and through the movement of „ethnic defense“ that was being incited from the outside, by the representants of the „defense associations“ The possible alternatives, however, were in competition one to another and, at the same time, they were inconsistent with the „traditional“ local (i.e. non-ethnic) identity. This dilemma hadbeen „imported“ from the outside, from the makrosocial level, but had to be solved on the level of local everyday life. In the situation of real existence of two different (ethnic) linguistic groups in the community under study, however, didn't exist the need to express the social reality through explicitly ethnical cathegories. If this expression was realized, it was in the direction to the outside, especially as a reaction to the demands from part of the State administration to define unequivocally the ethnic denomination - for example, for the use of the population censuses at the times of the Austria-Hungary and the Czechoslovak Republic or during the Protectorate when asking for the citizenship of the Protectorate or of the Reich - or in connexion with the regular interventions of the nationally outspoken activists. Similarly, also the institutionalized form of the „national struggle“ that seemingly found its possibility for expression in creating theparallel social structures in the community acquired such imposed character. There are many arguments for the assumption that the rivalry of the nationalist associations didn’t stem from the authentic local conditions. The local inhabitants could not be labeled as the ori and ginators of the conflicts with nationalist bacground, even though they have been sometimes perceived as the actors of such conflicts. We can sum up that the nationalization of the social ties didn’t occur spontaneously and represents rather a product of the interventions to the life of the community and a response to the ethnic enunciation imposed from the outside
Biologie dekompozitorů byla vždy tak trochu na druhé koleji širšího vědeckého i veřejného zájmu. Není se trochu čemu divit – než se přehrabovat v něčem nevábném, je pohodlnější pozorovat zvířata na rostlinách či jejich predátory. Nicméně dekompozitoři si naši pozornost zaslouží už jen tím, že po nás uklízejí, ať jde o kontinuální úklid koprofágů, tak o jednorázový úklid, který po nás provedou nekrofágové, a tím pomáhají udržovat to krásné a přitažlivé v chodu a stabilitě. Z koprofágů se již od věků pyramid těší jisté pozornosti koprofágní brouci, nicméně za poslední léta o nich v naší literatuře mnoho slyšet nebylo. Cílem tohoto článku je tedy představit širší veřejnosti tyto koprofágní brouky s jejich osobitou a zajímavou ekologií, která zajímavě ovlivnila jednu lidskou kulturou., Dung beetles are introduced as an important and interesting ecological group. Their ecology, what they eat and their impact on human culture and society are reviewed. Although they are no longer considered to be a deity, dung beetles still prove to be highly beneficial for both nature and human society, thanks to their degradation of dung., and František Xaver Jiří Sládeček.
The article presents the results of the social-anthropological field research realized in the town of Tachov and several adjacent villages (especially Lesná, Mýto). It focuses on the mapping of the so called small history, identified through the biographical method, that is, stories related to the lives of the interviewed persons. It analyzes the situation during and after the return migration and final settlement of the region, as it is presented in the memories of the participants of the provesses of settlement, as well as their descendants. The article is structured into several blocks according to the priorities of the narratives, ascertained during the field research. These priorities are: memories of the industry of the pre-war era, the theme of return migrants and settlers, their integration and mutual relations with other ethnic groups. At the same time, it was possible to create an image of the spontaneous tale-telling repertoire. The main purpose of the research was to follow-up with the researches of the region realized in the 1970s and 1980s and to supplement them with new data.
In this article the author examines the coexistence of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren and the Communist regime in the fi rst several years after the Communist takeover, 1948–56. The first part of his analysis, inspired by French and German research on the social history of power by Sandrine Kott and Thomas Lindenberger, outlines the points of contact as well as ideological and political affinities between Protestants and Communists before the February 1948 takeover. These were particularly clear in the Protestant weekly Kostnické jiskry (Sparksfrom Constance) after the Second World War. Owing to this rapprochement andalso to their refl exes developed for survival in the unfavourable circumstances the Protestant minority adapted with relative success to conditions in the Communist dictatorship. To consolidate themselves, they skilfully used instruments offered by the regime, such as “voluntary” work groups (brigády), while the regime relied on Protestants (particularly ministers) in some of its important political strategies such as collectivization and elections. The author pays particular attention to the theologian and philosopher Josef Lukl Hromádka (1889–1969), who was, in his day, a central figure amongst Czechoslovak Protestants. His “instrumentalization” also operated in two directions: in the West, as a representative of Christian peace activities, he helped to create the illusion of religious freedom in Communist Czechoslovakia, but he also served Protestants as a “shield” and mediator enabling them to establish and maintain contacts with Western theologians. In the article the author also seeks to demonstrate that assiduous analysis of archive records of State, Party, and Church provenance reveals the inner contradictions in the Communist apparat regarding relations with the churches and its own powers as well as links of alliance amongst some of its organs and the churches.
Th e article presents the Marxist feminist perspective on primitive accumulation and early capitalist history put forward by Silvia Federici in her work, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. According to Federici and other Marxist feminists, Marx’s description of the origins of capitalism lacks an important diff erentiation. Whereas in Capital the main focus is placed on the male, waged proletariat, Federici focuses more on the changes in gender relations and status of women that accompany the process of primitive accumulation. Th e article fi rstly situates the origins of feminist perspectives on primitive accumulation into their historical context and links them with their preceding debates. Th e following sections then present a comparison of Marx’s and Federici’s account of primitive accumulation and the early history of capitalism. Th e article mainly focuses on the forms of primitive accumulation that are absent in Capital. Th ese forms include, above all, a new division of labour, subjugation of reproduction to the needs of capital, and an economical, legal, cultural, and symbolical degradation of women.