April - May 2015
Mail claire.nolte(at)manhattan(dot)edu
Claire Nolte is Professor of History at Manhattan College in New York City, where she was Chairperson of the History Department from 2001-2009, and Director of the Program in International Studies from 1996-2000. She was Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bucknell University from 1992-1993, and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri from 1991-1992. She completed her Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1990 with a concentration in East Central European History. She has received fellowships and grants from the Fulbright Program, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the Woodrow Wilson Center for Advanced International Studies.
Like many European cities, Prague changed dramatically in the course of the nineteenth century. Rapid industrialization caused the population of the city and its surrounding suburbs to explode, as peasants from the Czech-speaking countryside moved into the growing city. In 1857, German-speakers claimed to comprise over one-third of the population of Prague, but by 1910 only 7% counted themselves as German. While this process was driven by economic and demographic changes, as well as by new notions of identity, it was also manipulated by the emerging Czech leadership of the city. Following the liberalization of the Habsburg Empire, the first Czech mayor of the city was elected in 1861, launching an era of Czech domination of city government that continued until World War I. The Czech governments of Prague undertook to remake their city into a modern metropolis and cultural center with a distinctive Czech character. In addition to dismantling the city's walls, razing its ghetto, and introducing gas and electric works, streetcars, and modern sanitation, they also erected large, new public buildings and imposing monuments. Expressing the national program in their architecture and decor, these new buildings were a form of symbolic politics. As the new face of the city began to take shape, its leaders sought to promote it as a Czech capital to the outside world. They hosted festivals and economic exhibitions that drew visitors from outside the empire in an effort to advance the nation's political and economic agenda on the international level. Their project to czechicize the Bohemian capital laid the foundations for its emergence after World War I as the modern capital of an independent Czechoslovak state. In highlighting the intersection between modernization and nationalization, this study goes beyond the Czech context to contribute to an understanding of the processes of nation-building in the modern world.
The Sokol in the Czech Lands to 1914: Training for the Nation (Basingstoke, UK and New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002).
Co-editor, with George Kirsch and Othello Harris, Encyclopedia of Ethnicity and Sports in the United States (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000).
"Celebrating Slavic Prague: Festivals and the Urban Environment," Bohemia: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der böhmischen Länder, 52 (2012), no. 1: 37-54.
"Inter army silent Musae? Culture in Wartime Prague," Kafka, Prag und der Erste Weltkrieg/Kafka, Prague, and the First World War, edited by Manfred Engel and Ritchie Robertson. Oxford Kafka Studies II (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 2012), 93-105.
"Voluntary Associations and Nation-Building in 19th Century Prague," Different Paths to the Nation: Regional and National Identities in Central Europe and Italy, 1830-1870, edited by Laurence Cole (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), 82-99.
"All for One! One for All! The Federation of Slavic Sokols and the Failure of Neo-Slavism," Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe, edited by Pieter M. Judson and Marsha L. Rozenblit (New York: Berghahn Press, 2005), 126-140.
"Politics on the Parallel Bars: The Role of Gymnastic Clubs in the Czech Lands to 1914," Ethnic and National Issues in Russian and East European History, edited by John Morison (Basingstoke, UK and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's, 2000), 260-278.
"Ambivalent Patriots: Czech Culture in the Great War," European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, edited by Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 162-175.
"Choosing Czech Identity in Nineteenth-Century Prague: The Case of Jindřich Fügner," Nationalities Papers, 24, no. 1 (March 1996): 51-62.
Review of Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013) in American Historical Review, 119, no. 2 (April 2014): 635-636.
Review of Laurence and Daniel L. Unowsky, eds. The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial symbolism, popular allegiances, and state patriotism in the late Habsburg Monarchy. Austrian and Habsburg Studies, 9 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007) in Central Europe, 9, no. 2 (November 2011): 154-156.
Review of Pieter C. Van Duin, Central European Crossroads: Social Democracy and National Revolution in Bratislava (Pressburg), 1867-1921. International Studies in Social History, 14. (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009) in American Historical Review (June 2011): 894-895.
Review of Dittmar Dahlmann, Anke Hilbrenner and Britta Lenz, eds. Überall ist der Ball rund: Zur Geschichte und Gegenwart des Fußballs in Ost- und Südosteuropa-Die Zweite Halbzeit (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2008) in Slavic Review, 69, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 218-220.
Review of Nancy M. Wingfield, Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007) in Austrian Studies Newsletter, 20, No. 2 (Fall 2008):16.