CHANGES IN THE PICTURE OF ‘OCTOBER 28’ IN CZECH HISTORY TEXTBOOKS

The study follows the changes in the picture of the circumstances surrounding the origin of the Czechoslovak Republic and the course of the day Oct 28, 1918 in Czech history textbooks from 1920-2013. The changes between the texts from the interwar years and those published aft er February 1948 are clear in the degree of attention paid to the activities of the foreign resistance, the actions of its main representatives, deployment of the Czechoslovak legions, and the personalities of the domestic resistance. While in the older “Eurozone” works these themes were given widespread coverage, in the textbooks from the Socialist period certain facts were reduced to a minimum. Readers were deprived of the names of those who came to the head of the newly created ‘bourgeois’ state, since the ‘working people’ were identified as the creators of independence. The textbooks of the last twenty-five years are marked by the objectivity and balance of the information and themes covered in them; in addition they adopt a multi-perspective approach. Th e empirical research confirms that since Oct 28, 1918 was the beginning of the evaluated period of Czech history, so the most significant of the creators of our independence hold a dominant place in the Czech national memory. The significance of the national holiday by which we commemorate the birth of the independent state is not given the importance it had in the first twenty years of the existence of the CSR. However, we see as encouraging the finding that many young people emphasize the need to remember the democratic tradition of our past, as well as the personalities who belong to it.