Miroslav Beneš
John Knox and Christopher Goodman in the (im)mortal Fight against Women, Bastards and Outlanders
Christopher Goodman and John Knox were 16th century famous theologians
and reformers, who were well-known for their radical resistence against the authority
of English Queen Mary Tudor and Scottish Queen-Regent Mary de Guise. During the years they spent in exile, they wrote their most famoust works – How Superior Powers Ought To Be Obeyed By Their Subjects: And Wherein They May Lawfully By God´s Word Be Disobeyed And Resisted and The First Blast of Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.
The main subject of this research is a comparison of already mentioned writings, while the main emphasis is placed on the comparison of common topics – that means criticism of women rulers, their illegitimate origins, succession rights and relationship with foreigners,
and theory of legitimate defence against bad rulers.
Ondřej Lee Stolička
The Selection of Central-European Knights for the Order of the Golden Fleece during the Regency of Spanish Queen Mariana of Austria (1665-1675)
The death of Spanish King Philip IV in 1665 and the young age of his only legitimate son, Charles II, led to the governorship of Mariana of Austria during the years 1665-1677. This matter significantly influenced the relationships between Vienna and Madrid because Austrian siblings represented the Habsburg family's policy. The relationship between Emperor Leopold I and his older sister Mariana of Austria determined for this period not only foreign policy of their monarchies but the Spanish Habsburgs also lost their upper hand against the younger line of the Habsburg family. For Leopold I, his sister represented the most crucial agent in Madrid besides his ambassador. Mariana of Austria became an important source of benefits for the Central European nobility, which traditionally hoped for financial and other support from the Spanish King. Mariana of Austria even influenced one of the most male dominated spaces in the early modern world, which represented the Order of the Golden Fleece because, as a woman, she could choose the new owners of the Insignia of the Golden Fleece.
Matthieu Magne
Art in everyday life in the Habsburg monarchy. Count Charles-Joseph de Clary-Aldringen (1777-1831)
The article explores the relation between aristocratic status and art in daily life of Charles-Joseph de Clary-Aldringen, the landlord of Teplice in Bohemia. The aristocrat acquired great skills in all arts, but was not a professional. He was an amateur who used art to express his membership of the grand monde by taking part in performances, by staging himself, and by knowing how to decipher all the social codes. We discuss his role as a diarist, as artist drawing pictures, as theatre actor and as collector of art. We show how the competition between aristocratic families motivated him to develop the spa of Teplice. We explore the role of drawing and letter-writing in his self-expression. If the professional lives by his art, amateurs like the Comte de Clary live by the arts. The requirements are different. The aristocrat seeks to construct and stage an identity where the nobleman becomes the artist of his own life by combining the imperative of social distinction with aesthetic pleasure.
János Ugrai
Hungarian Consequences of the Toleration Missions to Bohemia and Moravia around 1800
The help provided by Hungarian fellow believers played a crucial role in the revival of Protestantism in Bohemia and Moravia after the Edict of Toleration of 1781. Two thirds of the approximately 70 reorganized Reformed congregations had Hungarian pastors from Hungary. Most of them had been sent by the Reformed Church District of Tiszáninnen, which convinced almost 40 young preachers to participate in the „Bohemian mission.“ Whereas the missionary work of the pastors in Bohemia and Moravia has been amply researched, the impact of their missions on Hungary has been largely neglected. Their mission was, however, a relationship with two ends. In this article I seek to close this gap on the basis of recently collected data on students from the Bohemian lands at the Reformed College of Sárospatak and the documents on the repatriation of the Toleration Preachers and their widows who returned back to Hungary.
Sean Wilentz
The 1619 Project and Living in Truth
The controversy over the New York Times’s 1619 Project is the latest in a set of recurring struggles over how American history ought to be taught and understood. The author tells the story of how he came to be involved in the controversy, and how he and a small group of liberal colleagues, objecting to grave factual errors in the project, found themselves increasingly stranded as the debate sharply polarized. Instead of doing their professional duty in keeping the facts straight, the Times editors opted for face-saving evasions, only to see their claims of accuracy and respect for facts collapse. The controversy signals a flattening of historical perspective made worse under the presidency of Donald Trump, promoting cynical, highly ideological claims to the effect that sustaining white supremacy has, since the founding of the U.S., been the nation’s core principle and chief mission. Amid the threat to free and honest intellectual discourse which the controversy signifies, American historians must learn the lesson of „living in truth,“ in their historical work as well as in politics.
Ivo Cerman
America’s Racist Founding? An East-European View
The article discusses the recent movement initiated by the NYT to „reframe“ American history, as if the United States was established in 1619 and its main aim was to preserve slavery at any price. We sum up the timeline of the discussion from 2019 till the present. Since an East European historian sees the striking similarities with the Communist anti-American propaganda, we ask here, to what extent is this present approach dependent on the propagandist image of the past. In the first part, we explore the way history of Black Americans had been exploited by the propaganda from 1951 to 1990, then we examine the arguments put forward by the present-day 1619 Project. Whereas the Communist propaganda put emphasis on the principle that Black and white workers should unite against capitalism (or „fascism“), the present-day approach sees Black Americans as the only exploited class in the US. It has racialized also many other elements of the Marxist historiography (e.g. primary accumulation, class struggles).
Anthony Flood
The History of Herbert Aptheker: Partisanship’s Threat to Truth-telling
Communist theoretician Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003) was the rare American writer whose history books were approved for mass consumption in the Communist bloc. A Columbia University Ph.D., he wrote or edited more than fifty books and lectured widely, but never held a professorship, due solely to his Communist politics. This paper explores the convergence of his academic interests and revolutionary commitment and argues that it justified the decades-long exclusion of Aptheker from the profession. His idiosyncratic view of truth as a function of „partisanship with the oppressed“ ironically condemns defenders of Stalinist regimes such as he was. Its methodological implications should inform the evaluation of his historical writings, no matter how much some of them may have inspired generations of African Americans.
Jonathan Singerton
Science, Revolution, and Monarchy in Two Letters of Joseph Donath to František Antonín Steinský
Two letters from the surviving eighteenth-century correspondence between the polymath professor of history František Antonín Steinský in Prague and his friend, the merchant Joseph Donath in Philadelphia reveal an interesting episode in the transatlantic connections between Central Europe and North America. On the one hand, Donath’s scientific observations conducted on behalf of Steinský and his associates reveal the shared enlightened pursuits between both regions, while on the other hand, Donath’s scorn for the perceived political backwardness of his former compatriots reflect the widening divide ushered in by the Age of Revolutions. Alongside the first biographical accounts of both Donath and Steinský in English, this article presents for the first time a full transcription of two letters sent from Philadelphia to Prague in the 1790s. It explores the role of science and political discussion within their friendship across the Atlantic and contributes towards unearthing the wider interplay of interpersonal relationships between two different socio-political systems, namely a monarchy and republic.
