New week deserves a new location of our History Camp – from Budapest we moved to Prague to analyze yet another uprising – the Prague Spring of 1968. Have a look at our first day spent in the Czech capital and learn what we did, which institute we visited and which different and inovative means of transport we used in only one day.
We started the new week in a different city than the one we finished the previous one in. The night train took us from Budapest to Prague, and with more or less hours of sleep we eagerly seized the new tasks that were presented to us by Tina and Clemens.
The first task was a discussion about the articles from our home countries we searched for before coming to the history campus, and which had to cover either the Hungarian uprising in 1956 or the Prague spring in 1968. We discussed our findings, compared our articles and discovered many similarities as well as quite some differences between them.
Presentation of the differences and similarities in national reports on the Hungarian uprising (Source: Eustory).
Those were partly coming from the fact that our countries used to be part of two different worlds, as Karl put it, some were part of the #freeworld, while others belonged to the #communistworld.
Karl contributing smart and hashtag-worthy thoughts (Source: Eustory).
Thus, diverse perspectives of the articles, varying in the sympathy with the Hungarian or Czech people or with the Soviet regime, as well as in censorship and propaganda included. We of course presented our findings in an originally and creatively prepared posters (proof: the photos above and below).
Creative process of making the poster (Source: Eustory).
Poster presentation in red (Source: Eustory).
Presentation of the discussion outcome (Source: Eustory).
The morning continued with a brief workshop on internet research by Clemens, during which we learned that even tough we use internet on daily basis, there are still things to learn and to be careful with when browsing the web – from asking uncle Google the correct questions, not relying solely on aunt Wiki(pedia), and up to considering our privacy and internet security.
From the issues of the modern era we then moved back to history with visiting The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, where we were presented with multi media sources from the life during 1948 and 1989 in the then communist Czechoslovakia (https://www.socialismrealised.eu).
Visiting the Institute for study of totalitarian regimes (Source: Eustory).
The presentation of the web catalogue, full of interesting historical sources, from documentaries, propaganda movies, TV features to personal letters about cherries for political prisoners, was enriched with our work with the use of the web catalogue and analisys of the primary sources published there. The visit of the institute was completed with the presentation of the archive of the state police and their files, built of course on the regime-led espionage.
Completely drawn into the source analisys (Source: Eustory).
After a long day of hard, yet interesting work, we dare to say we deserved a well prepared traditional Czech dinner and a rather Austrio-hungarian dessert.
Our participants are creative not only when working, but also with the choice of transport means (Source: Eustory).
P. S.: We of course did not leave all of our loyal followers without the daily live-stream at 9 PM (CEST) 😉 We invite all of you to tune in again tomorrow at 9 PM on Eustory’s Facebook page – when we are going to be on our way to yet another new destination.
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