Prague Journal

Thursday, October 07, 2004

One of the main benefits of being associated with the Fulbright organization is that you get invited to interesting lectures and events. This evening we went to a lecture about early Czech immigration to America at the American Embassy. The main speaker was Professor Emeritus Victor Greene from UW-Milwaukee. He described the fragmented Czech immigration in the early 1800s, which reached its peak around 1920: 600,000 people identified themselves as Czech on US census in 1920. By 1970 there were fewer people of Czech ancestry putting “Czech” as their heritage on US census reports, possibly because of fewer first-generation immigrants, but also because the Czechs assimilated fairly well. They had very likely the highest literacy rate: 97% could read or write. (By contrast, the literacy rates for Jewish and Polish immigrants were 90% and <70%,>To Reap A Bountiful Harvest: Czech Settlement Beyond The Mississippi River, 1850-1900, which described the Unity of Bohemian Ladies society (one of the first women-led mutual benefit societies). This organization, in existence until 1977, raised charity money by holding bazaars to sell goods that had been sent by relatives in the Czech lands. Her descriptions of the Czechs and Slovaks living in the United States and their ties to their homeland were quite interesting. Also interesting to us was the better understanding of the attitude toward non-“Teutonic” Europeans like Czechs, Poles, and Irish, which fueled the fires of the temperance movement. After the lecture, we went to dinner with Marty and Harriet (our anthropologist friends from Kansas State) at U Karlova Mostu (At the Charles Bridge) on Kampa Island. This was one of the areas devastated by the terrible flood of 2002. (The pictures on http://jskelly.com/pragueflood.html capture a bit of the scale of the floodwaters.) At Kampa, you can still see marks from the level of the water on some of the buildings (as high as the second story, since this island is beneath the Charles Bridge). There is still a lot of renovation going on, but most establishments look like they’ve been fairly well restored to full operation.

posted by JWinn @ 8:23 PM