Just how ordinary was everyday life during normalization in Czechoslovakia? In their discussions of the lives of “ordinary people,” historians have underplayed the fear and secrecy present in the daily experiences of Czechs and Slovaks in the late communist period. In linking writings by dissidents to Czech and Slovak oral histories in the collections of the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library, I seek to problematize the dissident/ordinary person dichotomy used in recent historiography, and argue that the chasm between (...) these two apparently opposite groups has been exaggerated. Through an analysis of the themes of family, education and mobility, I will show that domestic life was not an escape from politics, but was in itself politicized. From audiovisual interviews, I will glean normalization-era memories of the need for what Václav Havel called “silence” and “mystification”-in the classroom, in the pub and in the home. (shrink)

"De interpretatione" from Aristoteles. Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was a Greek philosopher born in Greece.

Communist library secret fond in Romania,.

The main roles of libraries are developing and providing access to collections of cultural heritage. While the specific policies necessary to accomplish these roles may vary across different types of libraries, these institutions have at their core a dual role in preserving and supporting access to documents illustrating an era of knowledge and culture. Libraries are thus significant institutions in the process of learning, but also in that of remembering and forgetting at a social level. This article (...) provides an overview of the structure and organization of the public library system in the last two decades of the Communist regime in Romania. As part of a larger information history project, the research discusses the characteristics of this system created to support mass education and the ways in which public libraries also became institutions of memory in Communist Romania. The description of the library system structure is enriched by an overview of the professional training available for librarians and descriptions of the main library services related to access to collections and memories. The analysis of archival materials and oral history interviews with librarians document how these services were implemented and delve into the challenges encountered. Partial access to knowledge and information was a core part of the offered library services. As a consequence, services that were part of the Communist library system could be a source of long-term memory impairment at the social level. (shrink)

By Jerome Rothenberg. Contributions by Steven Clay, Rodney Phillips.

This article presents some of the personal observations of a veteran Israeli scholar whose long-years' encounters with the 'real' as well as the 'imagined' eastern Europe have shaped his historical research. As an Israeli-born historian of Polish-Ukrainian origin, he claims to share an ambivalent attitude towards his countries of origin with other fellow- historians. Jewish emigrants from eastern Europe have been until very late in the modern era members of an old ethno-religious group. One ethnos out of many in a (...) diverse multi-ethnic environment, whose demographic core survived and flourished for centuries in the old places. Several decades of social, economic, and political upheavals exposed the Jewish population to drastic changes. These changes lead several intellectuals who left their home countries to look back at what have happened as both involved actors, and distant observers. Israeli historians of east European origin found themselves confronted with a crucial question: in what way the past in the Old Country connected to the history of Israel. Following some 40 years of academic career in the field of eastern European Jewish history, it is claimed that until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the image of eastern Europe that runs through the Israeli historical research has been shaped in large part by members of the different generations of emigrants, outside of eastern Europe. The renewed direct contact after 1989 caused a dramatic change: within a few years, Israeli historians were examining archives and libraries throughout eastern Europe. After seven decades of isolation between the Israeli historian and the primary sources necessary to his/her research in the archives, the new wave of documents was celebrated in Israeli Universities. Yet far more influential was the revolution prompted in 1989 on the historical perspective from which Israeli historians could now examine the Jewish past. What happened in 1989 has seemed, to some Israeli historians, a breaking point marking the end of the eastern European period in the course of Jewish history. The article concludes with some thoughts on a new historical perspective. A one that fits a time when hundreds of thousands of immigrants from what was the largest eastern-European Jewish collective in the world inhabit a remote Middle Eastern nation-state. (shrink)

The article addresses the notion of communism with a special angle of factuality and negativity, and not in the usual sense of a futurist utopia. After considering the main contemporary theories of communism in left-leaning political thought, the author turns to the Soviet experience of an “actually existing communism.” Apart from and against the bureaucratic state, a social reality existed organized around res nullius, that is, an unappropriated world that was not a collective property, as in the (...) case of res publica. The alienation from things and from the state resulted not only in the sense of oppression, but in a new culture of a paradoxical “communality”, where the “Other,” be it a thing or a person, appears rather as ground, not figure. This culture of a non-thematic gaze led to a formation of a communality as a given, and not as a utopian desideratum. I claim that this is a major difference between the current Western society and a post-Communist society. The former is more solidary and collectivist, but only consciously and deliberately so, operating from an individualist ontology, while the latter is individualist, but with an assumption of the “Other” as a pre-given fact. In this chiasmus, both “communisms” are problematic, so that an alternative model of individuation, rather than the atomization of an assumed collectivity, would be preferable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:1. IntroductionThe scientific efforts of Jesuits were the hot topics of the history of science. It was said that you could find a Jesuit behind most of the scientific accomplishments of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. The idea was not far from the truth because Athanasius Kircher of Rudjer Josip Bošković proved to be among the best. But Jesuit studies seem to have passed their peak and it is (...) time to research the early modern science successes of other religious orders. The Parisian Franciscan Marin Mersenne with his worldwide correspondence was the German-Roman Jesuit Kircher’s match and several other Franciscans were not less important. Therefore it is time to give the Franciscan scientists of the past centuries the fame they deserve.We celebrated the 800th anniversary of the Franciscan order in the year 2009. The Franciscans of Ljubljana were mentioned for the first time in 1242 as already established and resident in Ljubljana, soon after the establishment of Franciscan order. Later they were unable to survive the protestant challenge in 1569,1 when almost all citizens of Ljubljana accepted Luther’s Christianity. Although they never really left Ljubljana, the Franciscans officially returned to Ljubljana after several decades.Between the years 1646 and 1660 the Augustinian church of Annunciation of Our Lady was erected on behalf of the Baron Konrad Ruessenstein from the Upper Carniola castle Strmol. The front walls were finished in 1700, and half of a century later the famous Italian sculptor Francesco Robba made the main altar. The Emperor Josef II suppressed the Ljubljana Augustinians in 1784 and somewhat later gave their friary and church to their Franciscan neighbors from the opposite side of Ljubljanica River. The Barons Ruessensteins were not offended by the change and still took care for the church. The Baron Alexis Ruessenstein gave his important alchemical manuscripts to the new friary owners, the Franciscans.2After the death of the Emperor Josef II, Gabriel Gruber’s best student Jožef Marija Šemerl redesigned a former Franciscan Friary for a Lyceum. Gruber, who later became the General of the Jesuit Order, was among the best engineers in Habsburg Monarchy. The church of the Assumption of Our Lady was removed and leveled.3 After the earthquake Ljubljana got the market place in the former site of the Lyceum.The church of Annunciation of Our Lady or simply the Franciscan Church remains one of the most typical sightseeing posts in Ljubljana, even if the name of the square in front of it passed from Mary to France Prešeren, the greatest Slovenian poet, in the time of Communist regime in 1949.Click for larger viewFigure 1. The first page of the index of the copy of alchemistic manuscript of Alexis Baron Ruessenstein’s, the son of Konrad Baron Ruessenstein from the castle Strmol, Ruessenstein, ibid. FSLJ-29 F 54, 234–35 .Click for larger viewFigure 2. Alexis baron Ruessenstein about the Quicksilver in the copy of his original handwriting kept in Ljubljana Franciscan Library .Škerpin’s booksThe Ljubljana Franciscan Library was established in 1233.4 Žiga Škerpin renewed the Franciscan Library which was located on the right side of the Ljubljanica River during his lifetime. He was the provincial of Croatian-Carniolan province between the years 1732–1735 and again between the years 1745–1748. He became the court’s secret advisor,5 and acting general definitor of all Franciscans. During his numerous foreign travels, including Italy and Spain, he collected books. Between the years 1733–1746 Škerpin brought to Ljubljana no less than 1668 titles of.. (shrink)

Nigeria is a developing country with youths that have great potentials. They embrace new innovations easily. In Anambra State of Nigeria alone, there are eight (8) higher institutions. It was observed that in the rural areas recently, youths indulge in drug taking and other anti-social acts. Many of them are dropout from schools. The rural libraries could play big roles by reverting them to skillful living again that is by equipping the libraries with information resources that would interest (...) the youths and attract them back to complete their education. A questionnaire titled “Using the rural library for youth development” was constructed and distributed among the youths and librarians in five (5) villages that have rural libraries. 300 copies of questionnaire was made and distributed. 235 respondents were gotten. The response rate became 78%. Findings were made. It was suggested that the government should build and equip the rural libraries to modern standard, provide current materials and also employ more librarians to work there. (shrink)

A librarian’s view of adapting an academic reference library to a Grade I listed church in North Oxford.

All research agrees that youth was an important social category for the communist regimes. At the beginning of the Cold War, youth was perceived in literature as a subject under the regimes’ total control. Later on, scholars understood that gaining the support of young people was a political priority for the Communists. To follow this complicated relationship between youth and the communist regime, I first looked at the complexity of the concept. Second, I have moved beyond the Manichean perspective of (...) the Cold War and sought to study it in its complexity and continuity within generations. Ultimately, this contextualisation helps readers better understand the works in the current issue, which examines the problem of youth from several perspectives. (shrink)

This paper examines some aspects of the institutional history of post-war Romanian philosophy, with a special focus on the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of People’s Republic of Romania. The aim of this article is to shed more light on the main aspects of philosophical research during cultural Stalinism, and to underline the inflexion points within Romanian “philosophical” writings between 1948 and 1965. I examined the lack of human resources and its impact on the emergence of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, as (...) well as the main research topics studied at the Philosophy Section of the Institute of History and Philosophy and Institute of Philosophy especially in the 1950s. I focused also on the context of unmasking and purging of the “philosophical” front mainly in late 1950s, underlining the Agitprop fight against Revisionism and “bourgeois” influence in social sciences. The avatars of the philosophical field are analysed through the lens of professor’s Constantin Ionescu Gulian’s destiny as an important manager of the institutions producing philosophy during the aforementioned period. (shrink)

The text presents an analysis of the situation with women philosophers in Croatia during the communist socialist period (1945 – 1989). The analysis is concentrated on two aspects: receiving doctorate degrees in philosophy and publications. Our analysis shows that during that period, women philosophers were proportionally approximately on the level of today’s women philosophers in western countries, including present-day Republic of Croatia by both criteria, i.e. the number of doctors of philosophy and the number of publications. Communist socialism was beneficial (...) for women philosophers in two ways. First, administratively, it removed obstacles from women’s employment at universities and scientific institutes. Second, communism and socialism, being themselves philosophical and socio-philosophical doctrines, offered a set of new topics, investigations, and elaborations for further development. These factors made it possible that in Croatia, which at the time was economically and educationally much less developed than most of today’s western countries, proportionally the same number of women philosophers had an academic post as today in the western world (including today’s Croatia). We also analysed seven major philosophical journals published at the time and found that between 1945 and 1989, in percentage, 15,4% of the texts were authored by women. The proportion of women authorship is 0,2. This is an impressive number if we think that at that time the proportion of women authorships was higher than in today’s JSTOR, bearing in mind the differences in publication procedures then and now. (shrink)

The history of Russian social anthropology has long been best known for the work of three, late nineteenth‐century “exile ethnographers,” each sent to the Russian Far East for their anti‐tsarist activities as students. All three men—Vladimir Bogoraz, Vladimir Iokhel'son, and Lev Shternberg—produced voluminous and celebrated works on Russian far eastern indigenous life, but it was the young Shternberg who had perhaps the most profound effect on setting the agenda for the canonic evolutionist line soon to take hold in late Russian (...) imperial and early Soviet ethnography. This essay draws on archival, library, and field research to revisit the life and work of Shternberg in order to tell the story of “group marriage” that he documented for the life of one Sakhalin Island indigenous people, Gilyaks (or Nivkhgu, Nivkhi). Documented in this way by Shternberg, the Nivkh kinship system proved a crucial “missing link” for Friedrich Engels, who had long been eager to provide evidence of primitive communism as man's natural state. For Gilyaks, the die was cast. Their role as the quintessential savages of Engels’ favor made them famous in Russian and Soviet ethnographic literature, and significantly enhanced their importance to Soviet government planners. This essay tracks that episode and its aftermaths as a pivotal moment in the history of Russian social anthropology and of evolutionist thought more broadly. (shrink)

Polish intellectual historian Leszek Kołakowski proposed in the 1960s an innovative, now virtually forgotten, reimagining of a crucial concept in the history of Roman Catholicism: the idea of "Counter-Reformation." Kołakowski's lifelong affinity for early modern Europe's Catholic dissidents led him into dialogue in the era of Vatican II with Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the leader of a movement of young Polish reformers who styled themselves "Catholic socialists." Seeing them as the bedrock of a new Catholic Counter-Reformation, Kołakowski sketched the role he hoped (...) Poland might play in reinventing not only Catholicism, but religious life in the modern world. (shrink)