Author(s): Kevin LaGrandeur / Language(s): Turkish,English
/ Publication Year: 0
Keywords: posthumanism; philosophy; science;
Our world is in trouble. Climates are changing, oceans rising, storms becoming more extreme and unpredictable, more animals are becoming extinct, the gap between rich and poor is increasing, as is social disruption, and dangerous wars are looming. Things don’t look promising. Can posthumanism rescue us, our fellow living things, and our planet from demise? Maybe.
Keywords: ANUBiH; Academy of Sciences and Art of Bosnia and Herzegovina;
Akademija nauka i umjetnosti Bosne i Hercegovine nastala je iz Naučnog društva koje je utemeljeno 1951. godine, odlukom Skupštine Republike Bosne i Hercegovine, najvišeg organa državne vlasti u zemlji u periodu osnivanja Naučnog društva Bosne i Hercegovine.
Author(s): Václav Bůžek / Language(s): English,Czech
/ Publication Year: 0
Keywords: Ferdinand I; death; 16th century; methodology;
In recent years my academic work has focused increasingly on Ferdinand I (1503-1564) and the sons from his marriage to Anna Jagiellon (1503-1547); Maximilian II (1527-1576), Charles of Styria (1540- 1590) and Ferdinand of Tyrol (1529-1595). Although the lives of these Habsburgs have received a great deal of attention from historians stretching back from the 19th century to the present day, studies by researchers in several world languages have usually ignored the final years of these rulers, who suffered from various serious illnesses which affected their ability to govern. In order to find out more about this period through their perspective and the eyes of their social circle, I had to opt for a less traditional methodological understanding of the theme and undertake time-consuming research examining neglected personal and official sources, particularly in foreign archives and libraries. I began to think about the methodological basis I would use during my initial deliberations on Ferdinand I’s illness, death and funeral, which I included among the aspects of his passing.
In his book In Defence of History from 1997, Richard J. Evans looked at the relationship between historical reality and the way in which historians write about it – the ‘discourse on history’. In his dispute with postmodern ideas – i.e. linguistic and literary-critical perspectives – he stated that these phenomena could not be combined; i.e. the discourse does not in itself shape the past: “the most that it is possible to argue is that it constructs our attempts to represent it”. Without any doubt historical discourse primarily shapes our ideas about the past and our understanding of the past in relation to the world today. And in an era of deep social and scientific scepticism, this has also understandably led to doubts concerning the certainty of an objective knowledge of the past, and with it a discussion ranging between two extreme positions – the belief on the one hand that ‘accurate’ work with historical sources guarantees a problem free, objective understanding of the past, while on the other is the assertion that history is conceivable solely as texts produced by historians.
I first met Josef Sebastian in 2008. Actually, that wasn’t the very first meeting. I had previously been drawn to a study from the mid-20th century by the Brno historian Michael Vaňáček dedicated to admirers of the French Revolution among the clergy in the Znojmo region. It is rare enough to find revolutionary sympathisers among the Catholic clergy, but the fact that this story was also set in my native region meant that I couldn’t ignore it. However, I’d never wanted to get involved in ecclesiastical history and in any case this was only of marginal interest. In the spring of 2009, my friend Jarda from the Catholic Theological Faculty and I were organizing the biennial for the Czech Society of 18th Century Studies, which we decided would focus on the Catholic Enlightenment. We were working with our friend Claire on a project about the dissemination of information on the French Revolution and so it occurred to me that I could have a closer look at these troublesome south-Moravian priests and thus connect the theme of the biennial with that of my own research. This would also satisfy the curiosity which is always awoken in me by such ‘red priests’. There was no doubting though that it would be in the form of a brief paper, as such a marginal issue was certainly not allowed to divert me from my central theme of the dissemination of information on the French Revolution, propaganda strategies and the formation of public opinion which I wanted my book to be about! Anyway, I said to myself, his ‘ideas’ will no doubt be naïve and predictable. What could a village priest at the other end of the world, as the Znojmo region was at the time, know about the French Revolution!
It has never ceased to amaze me how a historical text comes into existence. In the beginning, there is nothing, or almost nothing. Only a thought, an idea. We might even call this a dream or a desire. The desire to know what was previously unknown, to reveal the undiscovered, to bring to light what had previously been shrouded in darkness. Georges Duby, the famous French historian from the Annales School, had good reason to say that the historian had to dream – to dream seriously, but dream nevertheless. Because without these dreams, without fantasy, imagination, it would be difficult to conjure up an original historical publication.
It is almost bordering on the banal to state that historical research often involves a great deal of chance. Of course, seldom does a document turn up that pushes the boundaries of a discipline, as happened to Carlo Ginzburg in the Venice archives, which became the starting point for his study of the ‘benandanti’. However, sifting through collections which are not directly related to the researcher’s current project might bring unexpected stimuli.
Severomoravská mikrohistorie – splétání narativů při analýze vývoje sídelního prostoru
Author(s): Stanislav Balík / Language(s): English,Czech
/ Publication Year: 0
Keywords: North Moravia; microhistory; 18th century; 19th century;
At the beginning there wasn’t supposed to be a book or any historical research. After I had managed to revive the activities of the Karel the Elder of Žerotín Foundation at the end of 2015, its former chair and current member reiterated at several board meetings that the Foundation would be able to publish a reprint of the oldest map of Bludov, the rare Glaubitz map from 1741, the original of which is kept in the Olomouc section of the Provincial Archive in Opava. He had already had this dream back in the 1990s. I had overheard this twice and just thought – what was the point of it all? Something for a few anoraks… It came up again at another meeting at the start of 2018, which was when I thought about making it much wider by publishing a whole atlas of historical maps depicting Bludov (the aforementioned Glaubitz map, the first and second military mappings /1764-1768, 1837-1838/, a map of the Stable Cadastre and an indication sketch of the Stable Cadastre /1834/ and a map of the local nomenclature) and adding a legend. I already knew those maps – I had spent several hours studying them and I realized there would be little point in publishing them without a commentary.
If I look at my own motives for something which the editors of this collection have called the Adventure of Historical Interpretation, then I can find four sources of inspiration. The first is the increasing tendency to create works which are, according to the current Czech methodology for evaluating science, ‘socially relevant’. In other words, works which meet the social demands that exist today. Although the methodology defines these demands as coming mainly from the commercial sector or public institutions, I see them as a link to the current discourse reflected in, for example, films and political debate. I would never intentionally write a book that no-one would be interested in and which I would defend on academic grounds as being basic research, while simultaneously being well aware of the limits of its impact. The second impulse comes from the tradition of historiography and the simple need to tell a story – in my case, mainly about people, institutions and relationships. I believe that such an approach is expected from historians, it is rewarding to meet this expectation as it is a reader-friendly approach, it gives the work order and I also happen to enjoy it. It is exciting to follow the twists and turns of the story’s journey in the detective-like investigation of the sources. And then the third impulse: it already feels like a slightly conservative attitude but the informative value of the source is of great importance to me. The source has the right of veto.
Hledání klíče - Příběh biografie Vincenta Zapletala
Author(s): Tomáš Petráček / Language(s): English,Czech
/ Publication Year: 0
Keywords: Vincent Zapletal; critical biography; history;
In order to reflect on the creative process of writing a work of history I have chosen my second monograph, which is a critical biography of the Moravian Dominican Vincent Zapletal (1867-1938) published in Czech in 2006 and in an abridged version in French the following year.
Author(s): Jiří Lach / Language(s): English,Czech
/ Publication Year: 0
Keywords: Josef Borovička; historical research; communism;
After 1989, historiographical research focused on the most important figures in modern Czech historical science. The choice of historians often followed the path established by František Kutnar in his Overview of History from the 1970s. The fifty-year hiatus in historical research during the Nazi occupation and under the Soviet-sponsored regime called for numerous wrongs to be atoned for and for works which had been written decades before to be published. Marek’s Jaroslav Goll and Kalista’s study of Pekař rehabilitated both the authors and the subjects of their biographical interest. In particular, Jaroslav Goll is associated with the development of Czech historical sciences, while the foundation of the independent state dramatically increased the diversity of the discipline and strengthened and enlarged its institutional structure, which in turn increased the number of historians. After 1948, the life and work of many of these historians had become taboo as they were not part of the canon of communist science.
I have to admit that I have always been attracted to themes connected to the changing lives of Catholic priests in the 19th and 20th centuries, transformations to their identity, to their role in society and their pastoral preferences. I have also been interested in how the development of modernity impacted on the religious needs of people from village communities and the dynamically expanding towns, and the extent to which priests and the religious elites were able to respond to these changes. A great deal of scholarly attention has also been focused on issues linked to the mobilizing potential of the priest and the cultural struggle at the end of the 19th century. How were the youth educated in such an atmosphere and to what extent were priests and the faithful aware of being at the centre of a merciless struggle between ideas and even ideologies?
Keywords: end of 20th century; historians; methodology; communism;
If at the end of the 20th century you wanted to know whether Moscow or the authentic extreme left had been more powerful in postwar Central Europe, you had to go to Russia. The promising partial opening of the Soviet archives began a trend and researchers let themselves be seduced by the vision of uncovering the secrets of Bolshevism’s success. The symbolic representation of this vision was an imaginary map of the blank spaces in Soviet history.
It seems slightly egocentric to write about how you wrote your own book, and I also wonder if such a contribution would even interest anyone. It was only at the repeated urging of my esteemed colleague, Jiří Suk (whose books always become bestsellers), that I set myself to this task. Perhaps the mere mention of his name will attract some readers to a book consisting of several such egotistical texts.
Our memories are unreliable and it is hard to resist viewing our own work as being coherent, with a beginning, middle and meaningful end. Fortunately, while I was writing Making the Most of Tomorrow. I took some notes along the way which I have been able to refer to. I will try to use them to guide the reader through my original inspiration and ideas about the book’s theme, all the way to its final form. If my initial ideas were quite closely connected to the source of my values and the environment where I matured both academically and as a person, then this made it all the more difficult to gradually revise them under the pressure from the sources and the awareness of broader contexts.
Author(s): Jiří Hanuš / Language(s): English,Czech
/ Publication Year: 0
Keywords: history; 20th century; Rio Preisner; biography;
Whenever a historian turns to the genre of biography, several dangers lie in wait. Although there may be a sense of calm from having opted for a very traditional genre, at the same time there has to be an awareness of the many pitfalls. Writing biographies today is no simple matter: there is the danger of a descriptive ‘passage of life’; the arduous selection of fundamental or even fateful decisions taken at a crossroads in life; for the better-known figures there is the danger of popularization, while for the lesser well known there is the need to overcome deep-rooted stereotypes in the imagination implanted by school education and deep-rooted ideas about ‘important personalities’.
The fall of the communist regime in November 1989 had a major impact on my decision to move away from subjects which had interested me as a student of history at Prague’s Faculty of Arts from 1986-1992. I left the Early Modern Age (the Estates’ Uprising) and the turn of the 20th century (a dissertation on the Goll school and a fascination with the fin de siècle) for contemporary history, which had been newly established in 1990. The generation of ‘Normalization’ children, which I belong to, had never experienced living history as a wide-ranging political drama, and then suddenly it was upon us like a gust from the mountains. Like many people of my age, I began to search for a comprehensive explanation for the Czechoslovak traumas which, during my adolescence spent in an average housing-estate family, I absorbed in the form of disquieting fragments - Horáková, Slánský, Dubček, 1968 invasion, Palach, Charter 77, Havel.
The historical interpretation of recent events (contemporary history) has its familiar features. The very fact that historians not only work with sources but also with eyewitnesses who are often associated with them creates special demands for the ‘weaving of the narrative’. Historical knowledge not only clashes with the social (collective) memory but also with the ever-changing interpretations of the individual actors themselves. Therefore, in addition to reconstructing events and interpreting them, the historian also has to re-interpret already-existing narratives. The historian of contemporary events constructs a story within a context which society is familiar with first-hand. Therefore, it not only has the meaning of a symbol which can be related to the past, but it has its own specific, emotional, strategic or directly socio-political dimension. Put simply, the historian of contemporary history not only has to work with historical material and the interpretations which already exist around it, but also with (his/her and collective) experiences, prejudices and interests. None of this is straightforward.
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