Why has the 50th anniversary of a year generated so much interest just now? The year was 1968, and it witnessed an extraordinary outburst of protest and upheaval – one that transcended international borders. While the protests were triggered by diverse events and conditions, they seemed linked by more general aims of combatting institutionalized injustice […]
50 Years Since Prague Spring: Czechoslovak Dreams and Cold War Realities
This panel offers a retrospective examination of the 1968 Czechoslovak “Prague Spring”, or what the LBJ administration labeled the “Czechoslovak crisis.” Panelists Dr. Mary Neuburger, Professor of History and Director, Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and Dr. Jeremi Suri, Professor of History and Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs, offer […]
How do we talk about Enoch? Enoch Powell, Race Relations, and Public History in Britain
Embed from Getty Images by Edward Watson Fewer British politicians in the 20th century have been as inflammatory as Enoch Powell. On April 20, 1968, the Conservative MP and Shadow Defence Secretary criticized mass immigration from the Commonwealth into the UK during an address to the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham. Dubbed the “Rivers […]
Media and Politics From the Prague Spring Archive
By Ian Goodale In an unpublished letter to the Soviet daily newspaper Izvestiia, Liudmila Chukovskaya wrote that “muteness has always been the support of despotism.” This quote is cited in the booklet, Czechoslovakia and Soviet Public, compiled by the Radio Liberty Committee in New York in August 1968 to analyze the coverage of the Soviet invasion of […]
The Prague Spring Archive Project
By Mary Neuburger and Ian Goodale The Prague Spring Archive project, a collaboration between the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and UT Libraries, is now live. This open access online archive is the first step in a longer-term initiative by CREEES Director Mary Neuburger to digitize significant collections of primary documents […]
Restless Youth: The CIA, Socialist Humanism, and Yugoslavia’s 1968 Student Protests
By Aleksej Demjanski The 1960s saw an explosion of student activism across the globe. This increase in youth movements for social change was so influential that U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson had the Central Intelligence Agency illegally monitor student movements both at home and abroad. After some investigation, the CIA produced an over two-hundred-page report, titled […]
The Sapphires (2012)
Wayne Blair’s The Sapphires is the best new historical film that you most likely have not seen, yet. It is based on Tony Briggs’ 2004 play with the same name and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012.