Provides a systematic history from prehistory to the establishment of the Czech Republic.

This brief history of the Czech Lands has been compiled by leading Czech historians. Its brevity and clarity result from their highly skillful refinement and distillation of profound and detailed knowledge. This little book is one that the reader can either read from start to finish or use as reference for years to come.

With a keen eye for revealing details, Hillel J. Kieval examines the contours and distinctive features of Jewish experience in the lands of Bohemia and Moravia (the present-day Czech Republic), from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. In the Czech lands, Kieval writes, Jews have felt the need constantly to define and articulate the nature of group identity, cultural loyalty, memory, and social cohesiveness, and the period of "modernizing" absolutism, which began in 1780, brought changes of enormous significance. From that time forward, new relationships with Gentile society and with the culture of the state blurred the traditional outlines of community and individual identity. Kieval navigates skillfully among histories and myths as well as demography, biography, culture, and politics, illuminating the maze of allegiances and alliances that have molded the Jewish experience during these 200 years.

Czechoslovakia has captured the nation's imagination throughout the twentieth century. The Allied betrayal of the country to Nazi Germany in 1938 was to demonstrate the appalling consequences of naive appeasement of aggression. The wholesale reform of Soviet communism in the Prague Spring of 1968 won western support, and sympathy when it was crushed by Warsaw Pact tanks. The fierce communist regime thereafter was brought down almost magically in 1989. Czechoslovakia added to the international political vocabulary the term, 'Velvet Revolution', and the velvet metaphor has characterised much of the country's path-breaking postcommunist transformation and its peaceful break-up in 1993. In separate chapters on history, politics, economics, foreign relations and the new Czech identity, this book not only applauds the successes of the Czech Republic since 1993, but also uncovers the frayed edges of the velvet nation.

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 after World War I, and finally into the Czech Republic. Such a tumultuous political past arises in part from a fascinating native people, and A History of the Czech Lands profiles the Czechs in great detail, delving into past and present traditions and explaining how generation after generation adapted to a perpetually changing government and economy. In addition, Pánek and Tuma examine the many minorities that now call these lands home—Jews, Slovaks, Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, and others—and how each group’s migration to the region has contributed to life in the Czech Republic today. The first study in English with this scope and ambition, A History of the Czech Lands is essential for scholars of Slavic, Central, and East European studies and a must-read for those who trace their ancestry to these lands

A cultural history of the Czech people, examining the significance of the small central European nation's artistic, literary, and political developments from its origins through approximately 1960.

When Ladislav Holy precipitately left Czechoslovakia for the UK in 1968 he was already one of the leading anthropologists in Central Europe. In the following decades he made important field studies in Africa. Since 1986 he has been engaged in research in the Czech Republic, and he brings to this timely study of national identity the skills of a seasoned researcher, a cosmopolitan perspective, and the insights of an insider. Drawing on historical and literary sources as well as ethnography, he analyses Czech discourses on national identity. He argues that there were specifically 'Czech' aspects to the communist regime and to the 'velvet revolution', and paying particular attention to symbolic representations of what it means to be Czech, he explores how notions of Czech identity were involved in the debates surrounding the fall of communism, and the emergence of a new social system.

The book aims to present the unique geomorphological landscapes of the Czech Republic. The geomorphic uniqueness of this country benefits from the proximity to two distinct European geological domains: the old cratonized Bohemian Massif and the relatively young Tertiary fold and thrust belt of the Western Carpathians. Landscapes and Landforms of the Czech Republic introduces general physiographical characteristics of the landscape and presents the main driving factors leading to the evolution of the present landscape. The book contains twenty two chapters describing the most interesting geomorphic landscapes of the Czech Republic. The selection of individual landscapes was based on visual exceptionality (e.g. sandstone landscapes of the Northern Bohemia), scientific importance (e.g. patterned grounds in the Sudetic Mountains) and historical relevance (e.g. mining of the Nízký and Hrubý Jeseník Mountains). The final chapters of the book discuss the protection of geomorphic heritage in the Czech Republic.