The Czech Historical Review

The Czech Historical Review is an example of a scientific periodical, which has always had the ambition to play a coordinating role in the historical sciences in the Czech lands. Thanks to the exceptional personalities who stood at its birth in 1895 (Jaroslav Goll and Antonín Rezek, later Josef Pekař) and in 1990 at its rebirth (František Šmahel), the acronym “ČČH” has become a good brand. The journal withstood the difficulties brought about by the changing political situation and sometimes the unsatisfactory financial possibilities of the publisher. It closed twice under the pressure of dictatorship – first the Nazi (1941), then the Communist (1950/1951) – and in the period of obligatory Marxist-Leninist ideology it experienced (under the name The Czechoslovak Historical Review, 1953–1989) a deep decline in which the results of standard scientific work were difficult to push through next to the dogmatically conceived texts. The rising from the ashes in the 1990s proved that The Czech Historical Review has its place in Czech and international historiography and that its service to the field is both possible and necessary.