Prague Underground (culture)
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Prague Underground (culture)
Prague underground was an underground culture developed in Prague, Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s and 1970s during the Normalization period. The movement was characterized by resistance against conformity, conventions, and consumerism. Because of its non-conformity, it had serious problems with the communist regime which considered it as a political opposition. It was mainly expressed with experimental rock, art rock and psychedelic rock music (The Plastic People of the Universe, DG 307) and samizdat literature, partially inspired by the culture scene around Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground. The unofficial leader of this commune was art-historian and poet Ivan Martin Jirous. He designated the status of the community as a parallel world independent on the mainstream regime. Although being imprisoned many times, he never gave up on leading role in the movement. Among the fans of this subculture was, for example, former Czech President Václav Havel. This friendship led to ...
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Counterculture
A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores.Eric Donald Hirsch. ''The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy''. Houghton Mifflin. . (1993) p. 419. "Members of a cultural protest that began in the U.S. In the 1960s and Europe before fading in the 1970s... fundamentally a cultural rather than a Protest, political protest." A countercultural movement expresses the ethos and aspirations of a specific population during a well-defined era. When oppositional forces reach Critical mass (sociodynamics), critical mass, countercultures can trigger dramatic cultural changes. Prominent examples of countercultures in the Western world include the Levellers (1645–1650), Bohemianism (1850–1910), the more fragmentary counterculture of the Beat Generation (1944–1964), followed by the globalized counterculture of the 1960s (1964–1974). Definition and characteris ...
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Intentional Community
An intentional community is a voluntary residential community which is designed to have a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork from the start. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political, religious, or spiritual vision, and typically share responsibilities and property. This way of life is sometimes characterized as an " alternative lifestyle". Intentional communities can be seen as social experiments or communal experiments. The multitude of intentional communities includes collective households, cohousing communities, coliving, ecovillages, monasteries, survivalist retreats, kibbutzim, hutterites, ashrams, and housing cooperatives. History Ashrams are likely the earliest intentional communities founded around 1500 BCE, while Buddhist monasteries appeared around 500 BCE. Pythagoras founded an intellectual vegetarian commune in about 525 BCE in southern Italy. Hundreds of modern intentional communities were formed across ...
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Counterculture Of The 1960s
The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon that developed throughout much of the Western world in the 1960s and has been ongoing to the present day. The aggregate movement gained momentum as the civil rights movement in the United States continued to grow, and with the intensification of the Vietnam War, it would later become revolutionary to some. As the 1960s progressed, widespread social tensions also developed concerning other issues, and tended to flow along generational lines regarding human sexuality, women's rights, traditional modes of authority, rights of non-white people, end of racial segregation, experimentation with psychoactive drugs, and differing interpretations of the American Dream. Many key movements related to these issues were born or advanced within the counterculture of the 1960s. As the era unfolded, what emerged were new cultural forms and a dynamic subculture that celebrated experimentation, modern incarnations of B ...
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History Of Subcultures
History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of these events. Historians seek knowledge of the past using historical sources such as written documents, oral accounts, art and material artifacts, and ecological markers. History is not complete and still has debatable mysteries. History is also an academic discipline which uses narrative to describe, examine, question, and analyze past events, and investigate their patterns of cause and effect. Historians often debate which narrative best explains an event, as well as the significance of different causes and effects. Historians also debate the nature of history as an end in itself, as well as its usefulness to give perspective on the problems of the p ...
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Underground Culture
Underground culture, or simply underground, is a term to describe various alternative cultures which either consider themselves different from the mainstream of society and culture, or are considered so by others. The word "underground" is used because there is a history of resistance movements under harsh regimes where the term ''underground'' was employed to refer to the necessary secrecy of the resisters. For example, the Underground Railroad was a network of clandestine routes by which African slaves in the 19th century United States attempted to escape to freedom. The phrase "underground railroad" was resurrected and applied in the 1960s to the extensive network of draft counseling groups and houses used to help Vietnam-era draft dodgers escape to Canada, and was also applied in the 1970s to the clandestine movement of people and goods by the American Indian Movement in and out of occupied Native American reservation lands. (See Wounded Knee). The filmmaker Rosa von Praun ...
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Culture In Prague
Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human Society, societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.Tylor, Edward. (1871). Primitive Culture. Vol 1. New York: J.P. Putnam's Son Culture is often originated from or attributed to a specific region or location. Humans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation and socialization, which is shown by the diversity of cultures across societies. A cultural norm codifies acceptable conduct in society; it serves as a guideline for behavior, dress, language, and demeanor in a situation, which serves as a template for expectations in a social group. Accepting only a monoculturalism, monoculture in a social group can bear risks, just as a single species can wither in the face of environmental change, for lack of functional responses to the change. Thus ...
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History Of Prague
The history of Prague covers more than a thousand years, during which time the city grew from the Vyšehrad Castle to the capital of a modern European state, the Czech Republic. Prehistory The land where Prague came to be built has been settled since the Paleolithic Age. Several thousand years ago, trade routes connecting southern and northern Europe passed through this area, following the course of the river. From around 500 BC the Celtic tribe known as the Boii were the first inhabitants of this region known by name. The Boii gave their name to the region of Bohemia and the river Vltava. The Germanic tribe Marcomanni migrated to Bohemia with its king, Maroboduus, in AD 9. Meanwhile, some of the Celts migrated southward while the remainder assimilated with the Marcomanni. In 568, most of the Marcomanni migrated southward with the Lombards, another Germanic tribe. The rest of the Marcomanni assimilated with the invading West Slavs. (The "Migration of Nations" started in the ...
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Prague Spring
The Prague Spring ( cs, Pražské jaro, sk, Pražská jar) was a period of political liberalization and mass protest in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. It began on 5 January 1968, when reformist Alexander Dubček was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), and continued until 21 August 1968, when the Soviet Union and most of Warsaw Pact members invaded the country to suppress the reforms. The Prague Spring reforms were a strong attempt by Dubček to grant additional rights to the citizens of Czechoslovakia in an act of partial decentralization of the economy and democratization. The freedoms granted included a loosening of restrictions on the media, speech and travel. After national discussion of dividing the country into a federation of three republics, Bohemia, Moravia-Silesia and Slovakia, Dubček oversaw the decision to split into two, the Czech Socialist Republic and Slovak Socialist Republic. This dual federation was the only for ...
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Mánička
Mánička (in plural: máničky) is a Czech term used for young people with long hair, typically men, in Czechoslovakia through the 1960s and 1970s. Long hair for males during this time was considered an expression of political and social attitudes in communist Czechoslovakia. Background Long hair was associated with the subcultures and youth movements that arose in the Western world during the mid-1960s, such as Hippies and rock music. Following the February coup d'état of 1948, the new communist régime condemned some elements of the Western culture as an inherently decadent imperialist "import" into the socialist world. At first, communists persecuted sympathizers of rock 'n' roll and bebop, and later they focused on supporters of rock music. Their methods were compared with the campaigns of Nazi régime against the supporters of jazz and swing during the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The term "máničky" is also generally associated with the generation gap that in ...
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Charter 77
Charter 77 (''Charta 77'' in Czech and Slovak) was an informal civic initiative in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic from 1976 to 1992, named after the document Charter 77 from January 1977. Founding members and architects were Jiří Němec, Václav Benda, Ladislav Hejdánek, Václav Havel, Jan Patočka, Zdeněk Mlynář, Jiří Hájek, Martin Palouš, Pavel Kohout, and Ladislav Lis. Spreading the text of the document was considered a political crime by the Czechoslovak government. After the 1989 Velvet Revolution, many of the members of the initiative played important roles in Czech and Slovak politics. Founding and political aims Motivated in part by the arrest of members of the rock band the Plastic People of the Universe, the text of Charter 77 was prepared in 1976. The first preparatory meeting took place on 10 December 1976 in Jaroslav Kořán's apartment, and initial signatures were collected. The charter was published on 6 January 1977, along with the names o ...
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Václav Havel
Václav Havel (; 5 October 193618 December 2011) was a Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright, and former dissident. Havel served as the last president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992 and then as the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003 and was the first democratically elected president of either country after the fall of communism. As a writer of Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays, and memoirs. His educational opportunities having been limited by his bourgeois background, when freedoms were limited by the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Havel first rose to prominence as a playwright. In works such as '' The Garden Party'' and ''The Memorandum'', Havel used an absurdist style to criticize the Communist system. After participating in the Prague Spring and being blacklisted after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, he became more politically active and helped found several dissident ini ...
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Czech President
The president of the Czech Republic is the head of state of the Czech Republic and the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of the Czech Republic. The president mostly has ceremonial powers as the day-to-day business of the executive government is placed within the prime minister, and since many of the president's actions require prime ministerial approval the ultimate responsibility for the president's conduct lies with the government. However, the president is solely responsible for appointing the prime minister, the Cabinet ministers, as well as the members of the Czech National Bank, and nominating justices to the Constitutional Court, who are subject to Senate approval, among others. The current president, Miloš Zeman, assumed the office on 8 March 2013. He was re-elected in 2018. Powers The framers of the Constitution of the Czech Republic intended to set up a parliamentary system, with the prime minister as the country's leading political figure and the de facto ch ...
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