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Born January 1, 1993 after it split with Slovakia, the Czech Republic is one of the youngest members of the European Union. Despite its youth as a nation, this land and the areas just outside its modern borders boasts an ancient and intricate past. With A History of the Czech Lands, editors Jaroslav Pánek and Oldrich Tuma—along with several scholars from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and Charles University—provide one of the most complete historical accounts of this region to date. Pánek and Tuma’s history begins in the Neolithic era and follows the development of the state as it transformed into the Kingdom of Bohemia during the ninth century, into Czechoslovakia aft...
Albrecht von Wallenstein (1583-1634), one of the most famous and controversial personalities of the Thirty Years War, gained heightened prominence in the nineteenth century through Schiller's monumental drama Wallenstein (1798-99). This study tests Schiller's impact on historians as well as on later literary texts.
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Austria 1867-1955 connects the political history of German-speaking provinces of the Habsburg Empire before 1914 (Vienna and the Alpine Lands) with the history of the Austrian Republic that emerged in 1918. John W. Boyer presents the case of modern Austria as a fascinating example of democratic nation-building. The construction of an Austrian political nation began in 1867 under Habsburg Imperial auspices, with the German-speaking bourgeois Liberals defining the concept of a political people (Volk) and giving that Volk a constitution and a liberal legal and parliamentary order to protect their rights against the Crown. The decades that followed saw the administrative and judicial institution...
While researching for my book about the Indian Air Force Himalayan Eagle – The Story of the Indian Air Force, I came across some very interesting details about the military/warrior traditions of India that seemed at odds with the general image of a country thought to be spiritual and pacifist - the Buddha and “Mahatma” Gandhi immediately spring to mind in this context. The details were intriguing enough for me to embark upon another ambitious project - to gather together and collate the data available on this Indian warrior tradition and its resurgence in modern-day India. This work is the presentation of certain pertinent details that are available in the open sources but told in a co...
A philosophical investigation into the connections between trust and violence The limiting of violence through state powers is one of the central projects of the modern age. Why then have recent centuries been so bloody? In Trust and Violence, acclaimed German intellectual and public figure Jan Philipp Reemtsma demonstrates that the aim of decreasing and deterring violence has gone hand in hand with the misleading idea that violence is abnormal and beyond comprehension. We would be far better off, Reemtsma argues, if we acknowledged the disturbing fact that violence is normal. At the same time, Reemtsma contends that violence cannot be fully understood without delving into the concept of tru...
The volume is based on papers given at the London Symposium 'Vienna Meets Berlin: Culture in the Metropolis Between the Wars' which took place at the Institute of Germanic Studies in December 2001. The book surveys the cultural links between Vienna and Berlin with a focus on the inter-war years and some post-1945 continuities. It includes a centenary tribute to Ödön von Horváth and contributions on theatre, film, journalism (the feuilleton in particular), literature, music and socio-political issues. Together, the studies can be read as a narrative of interaction between the two capital cities. The industrial and modern Berlin of the 1920s proves an irresistible magnet for many Viennese, whose letters and journalism time and again reflect on the differences between the cities. The year 1933 marks the political cut-off point, when in many cases exile becomes the predominant theme.
This book presents a collection of twelve seminal essays by Czech historians on the history of the Czech lands from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, which originally appeared in Czech publications as articles and book chapters and are translated here for the first time in English. The essays address a broad range of topics, including politics, religion, demography, everyday life, crime, and rural and urban society. By bringing to English-speaking readers the rich history and historical writing of the Czech lands through the lens of Czech historians, the book seeks to expand knowledge about the place of these lands in late medieval and early modern Europe, and the rich mosaic and shared history of the peoples and cultures of Europe.
Can an orthodox Christian creed and ritual be combined with a liberal church administration and a tolerant civic acceptance of not-so-orthodox views and practices? This question—perennial among Catholics for the past two centuries and the goal of the Anglican quest for a via media—finds an affirmative answer in Zdenek V. David's history of the Utraquist church of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Bohemia. This church declared its autonomy from the Roman church in 1415 after the Bohemian preacher Jan Hus, who had decried clerical abuses and opposed the pope's doctrinal and juridical authority, was condemned by a Roman church council and executed. Sometimes called "Hussitist" (a usage David...
The classic reference work that provides annually updated information on the countries of the world.