Kategoria BISAC: History >> Eastern Europe - General

Though they shared a state for most of the twentieth century, when the Czechs and Slovaks split in 1993 they founded their new states on different definitions of sovereignty. The Czech Constitution employs a civic model, founding the state in the name of "the citizens of the Czech Republic," while the Slovak Constitution uses the more exclusive ethnic model and speaks in the voice of "the Slovak Nation."

"Defining the Sovereign Community" asks two central questions. First, why did the two states define sovereignty so differently? Second, what impact have these choices had on individual...

This volume has been published to coincide with the anniversaries of two significant milestones in Czech and Slovak history – the imposition of communist rule in 1948 and the doomed experiment to reform socialism which has come to be known as the Prague Spring of 1968.

The Balkan Games resulted on the one hand from the growth of modern European sport and the unsatisfactory performances of the Balkan athletes at national and international level, and on the other hand, from a desire to bring the Balkan peoples together in peace and concord. The Games were initiated in Athens in 1929 and increasingly became an integral part of the political, cultural and social life of the area. The common global reality is that when an athletic event is staged, attempted friendship seldom receives priority. In the 1930s, however, the Balkan Games provided a rare example of...

In October 1956, a spontaneous uprising took Hungarian Communist authorities by surprise, prompting Soviet authorities to invade the country. After a few days of violent fighting, the revolt was crushed. In the wake of the event, some 200,000 refugees left Hungary, 35,000 of whom made their way to Canada. This would be the first time Canada would accept so many refugees of a single origin, setting a precedent for later refugee initiatives. More than fifty years later, this collection focuses on the impact of the revolution in Hungary, in Canada, and around the world.

The Battle of Kosovo of 1389 holds enormous significance in the formation of modern Balkan nation states, especially among South Slav and Serbian nationalist circles. What has given this single battle such resonance, even more than six centuries later, and what does it reveal about the complex tangle of identity in the contemporary Balkans?

Robert Elsie's beautiful new translation brings a little-known Albanian epic account of the battle between the Ottoman Sultan Murat I and a coalition of Balkan forces brilliantly to life. The fantastic tale of Murat's campaign in Kosovo and his...

Vladimir C. Nahirny's brilliant study of major issues in Russian social and intellectual history synthesizes historical and sociological perspectives in an analysis of the nineteenth century Russian intelligentsia. He clarifies the concept of the intelligentsia itself, analyzes findings bearing on the social origins of different generations of intelligentsia, and enlarges understanding of conditions that facilitated the emergence of ideological groups among them. The Russian Intelligentsia develops a conceptually focused view of this distinct social group, arguing that the Russian...

A dramatic account of life in Czechoslovakia's great capital during the Nazi Protectorate

With this successor book to Prague in Black and Gold, his account of more than a thousand years of history in the great Central European capital, Peter Demetz focuses on the six years that Prague was under German occupation in World War II: from the bitter morning of March 15, 1939, when Hitler arrived from Berlin to set his seal on the Nazi takeover of the Czechoslovak government, until the liberation of Bohemia in April 1945. Demetz was a boy living in Prague then,...

David Cautes wide-ranging study examines how outstanding novelists of the Cold War era conveyed the major issues of contemporary politics and history. In the United States and Western Europe the political novel flourished in the 1930s and 1940s, the crisis years of economic depression, fascism, the Spanish Civil War, the consolidation of Stalinism, and the Second World War.

Starting with the high hopes generated by the Spanish Civil War, Caute then explores the god that failed pessimism that overtook the Western political novel in the 1940s. The writers under scrutiny include...