European Coasts Of Bohemia

The Danube-Oder-Elbe Canal promised to create an integrated waterway system across Europe, linking Black Sea ports to Atlantic markets and giving landlocked Czech nation its own connections to the ocean. The fascinating history of this never-completed project, European Coasts of Bohemia tells the story of the experts who confronted and contributed to different and often conflicting geopolitical visions of Europe. Jíra Janác shows how the canal-backers adapted themselves to various political developments, such as the break-up of the Austrian–Hungarian Empire and the integration into the Soviet Bloc, while still managing to keep the canal project alive.

In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare gave the landlocked country of Bohemia a coastline—a famous and, to Czechs, typical example of foreigners' ignorance of the Czech homeland. Although the lands that were once the Kingdom of Bohemia lie at the heart of Europe, Czechs are usually encountered only in the margins of other people's stories. In The Coasts of Bohemia, Derek Sayer reverses this perspective. He presents a comprehensive and long-needed history of the Czech people that is also a remarkably original history of modern Europe, told from its uneasy center. Sayer shows that Bohemia has long been a theater of European conflict. It has been a cradle of Protestantism and a bulwark of the Counter-Reformation; an Austrian imperial province and a proudly Slavic national state; the most easterly democracy in Europe; and a westerly outlier of the Soviet bloc. The complexities of its location have given rise to profound (and often profoundly comic) reflections on the modern condition. Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, Karel Capek and Milan Kundera are all products of its spirit of place. Sayer describes how Bohemia's ambiguities and contradictions are those of Europe itself, and he considers the ironies of viewing Europe, the West, and modernity from the vantage point of a country that has been too often ignored. The Coasts of Bohemia draws on an enormous array of literary, musical, visual, and documentary sources ranging from banknotes to statues, museum displays to school textbooks, funeral orations to operatic stage-sets, murals in subway stations to censors' indexes of banned books. It brings us into intimate contact with the ever changing details of daily life—the street names and facades of buildings, the heroes figured on postage stamps—that have created and recreated a sense of what it is to be Czech. Sayer's sustained concern with questions of identity, memory, and power place the book at the heart of contemporary intellectual debate. It is an extraordinary story, beautifully told.

The Danube-Oder-Elbe Canal attracted a great deal of attention throughout the twentieth century. Its promoters, The Danube-Oder-Elbe Canal, attracted a great deal of attention throughout the twentieth century and defined it as a tool for integrating a divided Europe. Although the canal was situated almost exclusively on Czech territory, it promised to create an integrated waterway system across the Continent that would link Black Sea ports to Atlantic markets. In return, the landlocked Czechoslovakian state would have its own connections to the sea. Today, the canal is an important building block of the European Agreement on Main Inland Waterways. This book provides a fascinating story of the experts who confronted and contributed to different and often conflicting geopolitical visions of Europe. The canal was never completed, yet what is more remarkable is the fact that the canal remained on various agendas and attracted vast resources throughout the twentieth century.

Asserts that Prague could well be seen as the capital of the twentieth century, describing how the city has experienced and suffered more ways of being modern than perhaps any other metropolis.

Europe's critical infrastructure is a key concern to policymakers, NGOs, companies, and citizens today. A 2006 power line failure in northern Germany closed lights in Portugal in a matter of seconds. Several Russian-Ukrainian gas crises shocked politicians, entrepreneurs, and citizens thousands of kilometers away in Germany, France, and Italy. This book argues that present-day infrastructure vulnerabilities resulted from choices of infrastructure builders in the past. It inquires which, and whose, vulnerabilities they perceived, negotiated, prioritized, and inscribed in Europe's critical infrastructure. It does not take 'Europe' for granted, but actively investigates which countries and peoples were historically connected in joint interdependency, and why. In short, this collection unravels the simultaneous historical shaping of infrastructure, common vulnerabilities, and Europe.

Whilst much recent scholarly work has sought to place early modern British and Irish history within a broader continental context, most of this has focused on western or northern Europe. In order to redress the balance, this new study by David Worthington explores the connections linking writers and expatriates from the later Tudor and Stuart kingdoms with the two major dynastic conglomerates east of the Rhine, the Austrian Habsburg lands and Poland-Lithuania. Drawing on a variety of sources, including journals, diaries, letters and travel accounts, the book not only shows the high level of scholarly interest evidenced within contemporary English language works about the region, but how many more British and Irish people ventured there than is generally recognised. As well as the soldiers, merchants and diplomats one might expect, we discover more unexpected and colourful characters, including a polymath Irish moral theologian in Vienna, an orphaned English poetess in Prague, a Welsh humanist in Cracow, and a Scottish physician and botanist at the Vasa court in Warsaw. This examination of the diverse range of Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English religious, intellectual, political, military and commercial contacts with central Europe provides not only a more balanced view of British and Irish history, but also continues the process of reintegrating the histories of the European regions. Furthermore, by extending the focus of research beyond widely studied areas, towards other more illuminating, international aspects, the book challenges scholars to analyse these networks within less parochial, and more transnational settings.

An investigation of borders as moving entities that influence our notions of territory, authority, sovereignty, and jurisdiction. In Borders as Infrastructure, Huub Dijstelbloem brings science and technology studies, as well as the philosophy of technology, to the study of borders and international human mobility. Taking Europe's borders as a point of departure, he shows how borders can transform and multiply and and how they can mark conflicts over international orders. Borders themselves are moving entities, he claims, and with them travel our notions of territory, authority, sovereignty, and jurisdiction. The philosophies of Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk provide a framework for Dijstelbloem's discussion of the material and morphological nature of borders and border politics. Dijstelbloem offers detailed empirical investigations that focus on the so-called migrant crisis of 2014-2016 on the Greek Aegean Islands of Chios and Lesbos; the Europe surveillance system Eurosur; border patrols at sea; the rise of hotspots and "humanitarian borders"; the technopolitics of border control at Schiphol International Airport; and the countersurveillance by NGOs, activists, and artists who investigate infrastructural border violence. Throughout, Dijstelbloem explores technologies used in border control, including cameras, databases, fingerprinting, visual representations, fences, walls, and monitoring instruments. Borders can turn places, routes, and territories into "zones of death." Dijstelbloem concludes that Europe's current relationship with borders renders borders--and Europe itself--an "extreme infrastructure" obsessed with boundaries and limits.

From roaring nightlife to peaceful yoga retreats, Ibiza’s hippie-chic atmosphere is its hallmark. This quintessential Mediterranean hot spot has served as an escape for artists, creatives, and musicians alike for decades. It is a place to reinvent oneself, to walk the fine line between civilization and wilderness, and to discover bliss. Ibiza Bohemia explores the island’s scenic Balearic cliffs, its legendary cast of characters, and the archetypal interiors that define its signature style.