The aim of this master's thesis is the study of the development and changes of the wedding customs in the years 1948 - 1989, i.e. during the period of communistic Czechoslovakia. These developments and changes were monitored by oral history quality research - by the direct interviews with participants in discussions and comparison with available sources and photographic documentation from the weddings in each period of time. The work is focused more detailed on the influence of the socialism and its economic and cultural conditions over the development of wedding practices and customs and then on deviations from the Western, or better to say non-communistic model of changes in wedding customs in Europe during the post-war period of the 20th Century. The research was pursued at the regional level. The narrators were selected with regard to their responsibility for the appropriate generation and to the time they have married.

The presented thesis mainly focuses on an analysis of twenty years of the politics of electoral reform in Czechoslovakia (1990-1992), on the federal level (the Federal Assembly), and the national level (the Czech National Council), respectively, and later on the politics of electoral reform in the Czech Republic, on the national level (the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic). First, the thesis discusses how and why electoral systems are chosen and changed. Recent analysis of the politics of electoral reform has yielded two main theoretical perspectives regarding the reforms of recent decades. The first one, the power-maximizing perspective, assumes that politicians control the choice of the electoral system and that they are motivated to maximize their power. The other perspective allows for a wider range of actors - in particular, including ordinary citizens as well as politicians - and sees electoral reform as the product of a mix of inherent and contingent factors. Reform can, under this approach, occur in response to specific instances of systemic failure. More recently, Alan Renwick (in 2010 and more precisely in 2011) seeks to develop a more refined understanding of electoral reform processes through two steps. At the outset, there is an acknowledgement that there are...

Aim of the thesis is to examine the influence of strategic culture on states and their most substantial decisions. The concept of strategic culture introduced first by Jack Snyder in the 1970s is today generally accepted, there are even warnings that culturalism may become too fashionable, indeed some authors say this is already happening. Most works however focus on strategic cultures of countries with long and rich history, historical experience and a great amount of various doctrinal documents - such as USA, Russia, China or India. My aim is to identify the influence of strategic culture in small countries, with a rather short period of independence - Finland and Czechoslovakia before World War II. They differ in one crucial decision: Czechoslovakia had decided to yield to German territorial demands, while Finland had decided not to do so and as a result faced a war against the Soviet Union. Hypothesis of this work is that this crucial difference is caused by different strategic cultures in the two contexts.

Title: Comparison of the Czechoslovak and German prison systems following World War II Author: Klára Pinerová Department: Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts, Institute of Economic and Social History Supervisor: prof. PhDr. Jiří Štaif, CSc. After World War II, countries that fell into the Soviet sphere of influence experienced major social, political and economic changes in a process which is in literature usually referred to as "Sovietization". This dissertation analyzes this process in the particular case of prison systems in Czechoslovakia and the Societ Occupation Zone which later became the German Democratic Republic. Its main focus lies on the way the Soviet model was applied in both countries, what kinds of similarities or differences can be traced in its development and what were the factors and reasons causing them. The main argument of the dissertation is that Sovietization, even though it produced similar results, was carried out in different ways in the individual countries, depending not only on previous development, but also on the geopolitical position and specific features of the country as well as on the will of the local communist establishment to adopt the Soviet model. It should be also noted that the Soviet model was not uniformly defined, but subject to konstant...

This Master thesis, U.S. and the Czechoslovak Crisis in 1938: Policy of Appeasement?, examines the policy of the United States in 1938 during the dispute between Czechoslovakia and Nazi Germany over the Sudeten German issue. This paper is a case study and it analyzes a diplomatic correspondence and public statements of key representatives of U.S. foreign policy in the period March to October 1938. The goal of the paper is to evaluate the U.S. policy towards the Czechoslovak crisis and to consider whether or not the U.S. policy could be labeled as a policy of appeasement. There are four chapters. The first chapter recapitulates U.S. foreign policy before 1938, briefly describes issues of appeasement and describes the Czechoslovak-U.S. relations before 1938. The second chapter deals with U.S. policy during the so-called May crisis. The third chapter focuses on U.S. policy during the Munich Conference. The fourth chapter analyzes attitudes and actions of U.S. representatives in the time of the Munich Conference.

This thesis is dealing with emigration from Czechoslovakia during the reign of Communistic party in 1948-1989. The aim of the thesis is to interpret phenomenon of the emigration and exile in historical context and to supplement it with testimonies of Czechoslovak émigrés in Denmark, which was not very usual aim of Czech emigration. Emigration is caused by different reasons during periods, which makes the fundamental difference between emigration and exile. The thesis is concerning on unique motives and causal links of the emigration of every single interviewee as well as particular process of emigration and its influence to their attitude to native Czechoslovakia.

This thesis analyzes the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938) in terms of coalition behavior. It describes all aspects related to this phenomenon using the analytic and descriptive method. The work starts with the introduction to the coalition theory, including the typology of coalition governments and other theoretical aspects related to the coalition formation. Defining coalition factors in the First Republic are analyzed together with the description of the historical context, while stressing the national issues that largely affected creation of governments. The relation between the legislative and the executive power, the electoral system and the party system with the list of relevant parties are presented as other key factors related directly or indirectly to the coalition behavior. Political parties had decisive influence, that's why the group of their leaders called "The Five" was able to fade the importance of the parliament and the government during a certain period. On the other hand, there was also a great popularity and authority of T. G. Masaryk, the first Czechoslovak president. The main part of this thesis deals with the actual coalition behavior in years 1918-1938 and analyzes coalition formulas. The work describes the governments during the First Republic, their specifics, stability, and...

The diploma thesis "Czechoslovak insite art" deals with the topic of the historical and theoretical development of insite art in Czechoslovakia. In the theoretical part attention is paid to the development of the theory and terminology of insite art and its relation to other kinds of art. To provide the richer and highly complex description the thesis also reflects on the historical development in the world and the history of insite art in Czechoslovakia too. The main part of the diploma thesis focuses on two projects of Slovak National Gallery. The first project is an international exhibition "Trienále insitného umenia" which took place three times between 1966 and 1972 in Bratislava. The second project which the organizers of the exhibition made was publishing of "Buletin INSITA" which has become an crucial source of information for this diploma thesis. The next part of the diploma thesis consists of interviews with Katarína Čierna, an art theorist, and with Pavel Konečný, an art collector. The interviews were made by methodology based on oral history which completes and supplements information from literature, archival sources and contemporary press. Keywords: insite art, Trienále insitného umenia, Bulletin INSITA, Štefan Tkáč, naive art, Czechoslovakia, Bratislava, Insitafilm

This master's degree thesis, adhering to the genre of contemporary history studies, depicts the lifestory of Ivan M. Havel. Theoretically it is grounded in personalism, especially regarding to works of Ch. Mounier and M. Scheler and establishes as the primary point of reference the phenomena of individual personality, uniquely embedded into the surrounding social world. From this basic tenet the explanation is built towards the understanding of general categories, using the contexts and traditions, in which the personality had been engulfed. This thesis makes use of both oral history method and archival sources and documents study. Ivan M. Havel can be understood within enduring context of his family's intellectual, civic, political and entrepreneurial tradition, where several specific phenomena stand out. First the non-partisan spirituality, second the emphasis, laid of socially responsible conduct of business; third the stress, laid on achieving broad education, going beyond established domains and disciplines and fourth the sociability, spanning over all of these attributes. Ivan M. Havel's biography is therefore traced mainly within the period up to the 1989 year, since the childhood, deeply influenced by his grandfather H. Vavrečka, through his coming of age, spent close to the Šestatřicátníci literary...

(by Eric Holtschke) The end of the Cold War and thus the collapse of the Eastern Bloc was, in the words of Mary Farrell, "one of the late twentieth century's defining moments"1 : Communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe collapsed, opening up the road to democracy together with freedom of speech, freedom of thought and free elections, as well as free and independent movement of people. The end of the Cold War, which started as a direct result of the Second World War, came about by means of mass demonstrations, the first of which took place in Plauen (GDR) on 7 October 1989. Only a few months later, no-one could be sure how the world would develop. The so-called 'voice' was followed by 'exit' in the German Democratic Republic - and the Czechoslovakians were close to the events taking place in the embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Prague. The end of the autocratic system was followed by the process of democratisation, characterised by upheavals and the restructuring of political conditions. Free and independent elections marked the end of democratisation in both the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia. The consolidation period was determined by the dissolution of both of the aforementioned countries, succeeded by 1) the absorption of the entirety of former East German...