Sedemdesiat rokov Historického časopisu
Seventy Years of the Historical Journal

Summary/Abstract: The study is an analysis of seventy years of the Historical Journal, which has been the main historical periodical published in Slovakia from its inception until the present day. The study documents how, in Slovak political and social conditions, a professional social science journal was dependent on the general political situation in the country. The Historical Journal was created simultaneously with the establishment of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in 1953. From the beginning, the totalitarian political power imposed control over scientific research and especially demanded the use of Marxist methodology from the social sciences. At the time the magazine was created, Marxist historiography did not exist in Slovakia. It was the Historic Journal that was supposed to be the tribune of Slovak Marxist historiography. The magazine was under political control for 36 years. At that time, Slovak historiography was developing primarily quantitatively, but despite political pressure, several interesting and valuable works were published. The positive development of the journal in terms of quality was recorded at the end of the 1960s, after which there was another regression, which was forced by the political period of the so-called Normalization. The Historical Journal, the only historical journal in Central Europe that is registered in the CCC database and in addition in other world and European databases, experienced its greatest boom after the political and social change in 1989. The analysis in the presented study shows that the Historical Journal was influenced by the political order during its existence, but on the other hand, it was also able to actively shape Slovak historiography in a positive sense.

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