On this day in 1939, all the universities and colleges in Prague closed. 1,200 Czech students were arrested, and nine students and professors were executed. November 17th has since been known as International Students’ Day. On the 28th of October in 1939, the Medical Faculty of Charles University held an anti-Nazi demonstration to commemorate the...
In 1963, Ilona Wiss stood across the street from a villa situated on the corner of Pevnostní and Dělostřelecká in Prague, Czech Republic, with her mother and her brother. The villa, which her grandparents had built, was now property of the Czech government. As they stood before the villa, Ilona’s mother, Edith, told her children...
Czechoslovakia 1968 is a short documentary film about 50 years of history of Czechoslovakia, composed entirely of sepia toned archival footage. It was produced in 1969 and it focuses primarily on “Prague Spring”, also known as the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. A virtually wordless visual history of Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 1968, it is a collection of images...
Who would have thought that The International Order of St. Hubertus was Czech? When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died at the Cibolo Creek Ranch in Texas, the Huffington Post called called “the International Order of St. Hubertus, an Austrian society that dates back to the 1600s.” Correction… It is a Bohemian society, one founded in what is...
Josef Koudelka returned home from Romania in the August of 1968, a mere two days before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. As the military forces of the Warsaw Pact invaded the city of Prague and the tanks rolled in, Koudelka took to the streets, where he recorded the historical event with his camera. His photographs...
I bet you had no idea that Brno Built the Future in 1956… “In the city of Brno, modernism lives on. Brno, the capital of Moravia and the Czech Republic’s second-largest city, is a long way from Chicago. But in the 1920s and 1930s, it was one of the hotbeds of Modernism in Central Europe.” –International...
Today I wanted to share a look back at Czechoslovakia before World War I. The first image I want to share is this map. When the Czech Republic was first put on a map, it was placed there as Czechoslovakia. The Bohemian Kingdom officially ceased to exist in 1918 by transformation into Czechoslovakia. No one...
It’s amazing to be able to watch a rare film of Tomas G. Masaryk, the Father of Czechoslovakia, speaking English for “Fox Movietone News” on November 29, 1929. But perhaps more amazing is what he actually SAYS in the clip. “If I observe the inventiveness of our modern scientists, I sometimes fancy a much greater invention,...
Have you ever flown out of LAX and saw what appeared to be an abandoned city below? What is it? Los Angeles Ghost Town? Well… Yes. Today it is a ghost town. Palisades del Rey (aka Surfridge) was a beachfront city developed in the early 1920’s by the famed Dickinson & Gillespie Co. At the turn of...
On August 21, 1968 dozens of tanks rolled through the streets and aimed at the crowds of students and protesters. Shooting was heard, screams and cries. People were in shock. They could not believe that the invaders were Russians – the same Russians who had liberated them in 1945 at the close of World War II....
