This book takes a new approach to interwar Prague by addressing religion as an integral part of the city’s cultural history. Berglund views Prague’s cultural history in the broader context of ...religious change and secularization in 20th-century Europe. Based on detailed knowledge of sources, the monograph explores the interdisciplinary linkages between politics, architecture and theology in the building of symbolism and a “new mythology" of the first Czechoslovak republic (1918-1938). Berglund´s text provides an important service for understanding both Czech history as well as current Czech political debate. The author’s method can be characterized as culture history, able to connect several disciplines, emphasizing common topic (religion, politics, symbolics). Modern Czech elites, superficially characterized as “ateistic", appears in a new light to be deeply religious, a transition from more traditional, (mostly) Catholic religiosity, to a concept of a new, modern, ethical religion. The study incorporates biographical research, focusing on three principal characters: Tomás Garrigue Masaryk, Czechoslovakia’s first president; his daughter Alice Garrigue Masaryková, founding director of the Czechoslovak Red Cross; and Joze Plecnik, the Slovenian architect who directed the renovations of Prague Castle.
Prague Panoramasexamines the creation of Czech nationalism through monuments, buildings, festivals, and protests in the public spaces of the city during the twentieth century. These "sites of memory" ...were attempts by civic, religious, cultural, and political forces to create a cohesive sense of self for a country and a people torn by war, foreign occupation, and internal strife.The Czechs struggled to define their national identity throughout the modern era. Prague, the capital of a diverse area comprising Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Poles, Ruthenians, and Romany as well as various religious groups including Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, became central to the Czech domination of the region and its identity. These struggles have often played out in violent acts, such as the destruction of religious monuments, or the forced segregation and near extermination of Jews.During the twentieth century, Prague grew increasingly secular, yet leaders continued to look to religious figures such as Jan Hus and Saint Wenceslas as symbols of Czech heritage. Hus, in particular, became a paladin in the struggle for Czech independence from the Habsburg Empire and Austrian Catholicism.Through her extensive archival research and personal fieldwork, Cynthia Paces offers a panoramic view of Prague as the cradle of Czech national identity, seen through a vast array of memory sites and objects. From the Gothic Saint Vitus Cathedral, to the Communist Party's reconstruction of Jan Hus's Bethlehem Chapel, to the 1969 self-immolation of student Jan Palach in protest of Soviet occupation, to the Hosková plaque commemorating the deportation of Jews from Josefov during the Holocaust, Paces reveals the iconography intrinsic to forming a collective memory and the meaning of being a Czech. As her study discerns, that meaning has yet to be clearly defined, and the search for identity continues today.
Original, engaging, and authoritative, this study has much to say about the political climate in Prague after the downfall of communism, and makes insightful conclusions about the factors that ...contributed to present political circumstances in the region.
In the 1960s, socialist and capitalist urban planners, architects, and city officials chose the urban periphery as the site to test out new ideas in modernist architecture and planning: the outskirts ...of Prague and a bedroom suburb of Toronto would be the sites for experimental urban development. In the Suburbs of History overcomes the divisions between East and West to reassemble the shared histories of modern architecture and urbanism as it shaped and re-shaped the periphery. Drawing on archives, interviews, architectural journals, and site visits to the peripheries of Prague and Toronto, Steven Logan reveals the intertwined histories of capitalist and socialist urban planning. From socialist utopias to the capitalist visions of the edge city, the history of the suburbs is not simply a history of competing urban forms; rather, it is a history of alternatives that advocated collective solutions over the dominant model of single-family home ownership and car-dominated spaces.
Six million people visit Prague Castle each year. Here is the story of how this ancient citadel was transformed after World War I from a neglected, run-down relic into the seat of power for ...independent Czechoslovakia—and the symbolic center of democratic postwar Europe. The restoration of Prague Castle was a collaboration of three remarkable figures in twentieth-century east central Europe: Tomáš Masaryk, the philosopher who became Czechoslovakia’s first president; his daughter Alice, a social worker trained in the settlement houses of Chicago who was founding director of the Czechoslovak Red Cross and her father’s trusted confidante; and the architect, Jože Plečnik of Slovenia, who integrated reverence for Classical architecture into distinctly modern designs. Their shared vision saw the Castle not simply as a government building or historic landmark but as the sacred center of the new republic, even the new Europe—a place that would embody a different kind of democratic politics, rooted in the spiritual and the moral.With a biographer’s attention to detail, historian Bruce Berglund presents lively and intimate portraits of these three figures. At the same time, he also places them in the context of politics and culture in interwar Prague and the broader history of religion and secularization in modern Europe. Gracefully written and grounded in a wide array of sources, Castle and Cathedral in Modern Prague is an original and accessible study of how people at the center of Europe, in the early decades of the twentieth century, struggled with questions of morality, faith, loyalty, and skepticism.
The 2011 Mw 5.7 Prague earthquake is the second largest induced earthquake in Oklahoma, and occurred after decades of wastewater disposal. The local geological structure that led to the triggering of ...this large earthquake is not well understood. In this study, tomographic inversion of seismic data recorded by a dense local seismic network resulted in a high‐resolution 3D velocity model with three major layers. The model clearly illuminates the geometry and characteristics of the Meeker‐Prague Fault that hosted the 2011 Prague sequence. A conceptual model is proposed to link the tomographic structure to the triggering process of the sequence. The low‐permeability second layer at ∼1.5–3.5 km may be the key that delays the occurrence of the first sizeable earthquake after decades of wastewater injection. However, a low‐shear‐velocity zone within this layer at the intersection of two major faults could have provided a fluid pathway to facilitate downward fluid propagation.
Plain Language Summary
The recent surge of seismicity in the central United States since 2008 has largely been attributed to wastewater disposal from oil and gas production. The 6 November 2011 Mw 5.7 earthquake near Prague, is the second largest earthquake ever recorded instrumentally in the state of Oklahoma. Previous studies mainly focused on the characterization of seismicity in the 2011 Prague earthquake sequence and found that the majority of earthquakes occurred along the Meeker‐Prague fault, which is a ∼20 km splay fault off the Wilzetta fault zone. In this study, we apply the seismic traveltime tomography technique on data recorded by a dense local seismograph network to image the fine upper crustal velocity structure in the Prague fault zone. Our results clearly mapped zones with significant velocity anomalies in the fault zone compared to the surrounding area. And the velocity anomalies coincide with the clusters of seismicity, indicating that fluid injection probably played an important role in altering the properties of the fault zone and therefore promoting the occurrence of earthquakes. This study highlights that it is critical to investigate the fault zone structure to advance our understanding of the process of pore pressure diffusion and fluid migration in triggering of induced seismicity.
Key Points
We develop a fine fault zone velocity structure for the 2011 Mw 5.7 Prague earthquake and relocate the earthquakes using the 3D models
The results depict the Meeker‐Prague Fault that hosted the majority of the larger events in the Prague sequence
We propose a conceptual model that links velocity structure to the triggering process of the Prague sequence due to wastewater injection
At the end of the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I forced the Irish Franciscans into exile. Of the four continental provinces to which the Irish Franciscans fled, the Prague Franciscan College of ...the Immaculate Conceptionof the Virgin Mary was the largest in its time. This monograph documents this intense point of contact betweentwo small European lands, Ireland and Bohemia. The Irish exiles changed the course of Bohemian history in significantways, both positive — the Irish students and teachers of medicine who contributed to Bohemia’s culture and sciences— and negative — the Irish officers who participated in the murder of Albrecht of Valdštejn and their successors who served in the Imperial forces. Dealing with a hitherto largely neglected theme, Parez and Kucharová attemptto place the Franciscan College within Bohemian history and to document the activities of its members. This wealth of historical material from the Czech archives, presented in English for the first time, will be of great aid for international researchers, particularly those interested in Bohemia or the Irish diaspora.
This is a unique history of what in the 1980s was the world’s largest association in the media field. However, the IOJ was embroiled in the Cold War: the bulk of 300,000 members were in the socialist ...East and developing South. Hence the collapse of the Soviet-led communist order in central-eastern Europe in 1989–91 precipitated the IOJ’s demise.The author – a Finnish journalism educator and media scholar – served as President of the IOJ during its heyday. In addition to a chronological account of the organization, the book includes testimonies by actors inside and outside the IOJ and comprehensive appendices containing unpublished documents.
Thèse dirigée en cotutelle par Pierre Monnet et Eva Schohlotheuber (Université Heinrich Heine de Düsseldorf), soutenue devant un jury composé de Bruno Bleckmann (Université Heinrich Heine de ...Düsseldorf), Lenka Bobkova (Université de Prague), Boris Bove (Université de Rouen), Roger Lüdeke (Université Heinrich Heine de Düsseldorf) et Michel Margue (Université de Luxembourg). Résumé : La thèse étudie les chances de participation politique et d’ascension sociale des élites bourgeoises de la Vieil...
The Jewish Tandelmarkt in Prague's Old Town was a nonresidential Jewish exclave, situated outside of Prague's Jewish Town. This thriving marketplace afforded Jewish merchants and peddlers an ...opportunity to ply their wares in the Old Town, but it also left them unprotected in the face of physical and verbal attacks. This article examines memoirs, travelogues, guidebooks, newspapers, novels, and visual images to understand how the Tandelmarkt (junk market) functioned in various discourses about Prague Jewry, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jews were vulnerable and exposed in the Tandelmarkt, but the centrality and visibility of this marketplace also allowed non-Jews to observe their “exotic” Jewish neighbors. A nineteenth-century novelist described the Tandelmarkt as a “theater” where passersby could “lose themselves” for half an hour in its disarray and commotion. At times it was a theater of violence, where Jews fell victim to attack. It was also a theater of emancipation, where Jews could show their Christian neighbors that they were capable of self-improvement and change.
