STANLEY Z. PECH PRIZE

At the 1985 annual meeting in Washington, D. C., the CSA adopted a motion by Stanley Winters to create an award to be given every two years for an outstanding article published by a member of the Czechoslovak History Conference, now the Czechoslovak Studies Association. It was later determined to name the award in honor of Stanley Z. Pech.

2010 PECH PRIZE COMPETITION (Articles published in 2008-2009)

Paulina Bren, "Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall...Is the West the Fairest of Them All?: Czechoslovak Normalization and Its (Dis)contents," Kritika 9, no. 4 (2008): 831-854.

"Mirror, Mirror on the Wall" examines the ways in the West was "reimagined... and incorporated into the project of communism" (832) and in so doing gives us a strikingly new picture of late communism in Czechoslovakia. Looking at the ways in which Czechoslovaks compared themselves to the West, Bren argues, allows us to see how much communist society had changed from the 1960's to the 1980's. In the years before the Prague Spring, Czechoslovaks who had traveled to the West held their country up to Western economic standards and found it lacking. After 1968, most did not have the luxury of travel outside the Bloc, but Czechoslovakia's normalizers continued to fight their battle with the image of the prosperous West. While many (including Václav Havel) have argued that Communist regimes of the 1970's and 1980's bought acceptance by giving in to their citizens' consumerist desires, Bren claims that the Czechoslovak state fully realized it could never compete with the West on those terms. Instead, communist officials tried to make their case on the basis of lifestyle. Using interviews and media reports from émigrés who decided to return home, Bren shows how the regime effectively argued that it could provide a better quality of life than a capitalist society ever could. Czechoslovaks could expect a stress-free workplace, plenty of leisure time and time for family, a strong social welfare system, and the ability (even the right) to "self-actualize." The regime suggested that this was a fair trade for the material possibilities of capitalism, which were, after all, not guaranteed to anyone, even by effort. Unfortunately for the government, its offer of a lifestyle based on the ability to self-actualize was hampered by the growing desire of many citizens to do so via the accumulation of goods. Even so, Bren persuasively argues, it would be a mistake to see the normalization era as simply about consumerism. Instead, it was an attempt, however flawed, to create a new kind of socialism, one based on individual actualization instead of collective action. And it meant that the experience of communism after 1968 was a completely new phenomenon - not just because of what people now owned or hoped to own, but in their ideals and expectations of life more broadly.

Honorable mention was awarded to Chad Bryant for "Into an Uncertain Future: Railroads and Vormärz Liberalism in Brno, Vienna and Prague," Austrian History Yearbook 40 (2009): 183-201. This wonderfully written, insightful article examines the awe and terror that accompanied the beginnings of train travel in the Habsburg lands. It not only considers the railroad as a motor of economic and urban development, but as the vehicle of hopes and fears, combining the history of technology and the economy with the history of emotions. Using reportage about train accidents in the 1830's, Bryant shows that Austrians tended to have a more tempered view of progress than their Western neighbors. Instead of full steam ahead, they preferred a more moderate pace of no more than 35 km/hr.

Prize Committee:
Melissa Feinberg, Rutgers University
Mills Kelly, George Mason University
Jonathan Larson, University of Iowa

THE NEXT PECH PRIZE COMPETITION

The next Pech Prize competition will be held in 2012, accepting articles published in 2010 and 2011.

The rules for the award are:

1. The amount of the prize shall be determined by the President of the Czechoslovak Studies Association with the concurrence of the Executive Committee within three months after the biennial election of officers.

2. Essays submitted shall have been published or accepted for publication in a professional journal or a volume of essays and shall deal with topics of the peoples of Czechoslovakia within and without its historical boundaries.

3. Other things being equal, the prize judges shall give preference to essays by recent Ph.D.s over others.

4. Candidates for the prize may be identified by author self nomination, submission by a Czechoslovak Studies Association member, or by members of the Stanley Z. Pech Prize Committee, with the criterion for eligibility being the author's membership in the Czechoslovak Studies Association.

5. The President of the Czechoslovak Studies Association shall, within three months of his/her election, appoint a Prize Committee of three members, including one member that he/she shall designate as chairperson, which Committee shall evaluate the submitted essays and transmit their decision to the President for announcement and presentation of the Prize at the next annual meeting of the Czechoslovak Studies Association.

6. One prize only shall be awarded and the name of the recipient shall be the only one to be made public, subject to the decision of the Committee.

PAST PECH PRIZE WINNERS

2006-2007
Sheilagh Ogilvie, "'So that Every Subject Knows How to Behave': Social Disciplining in Early Modern Bohemia," Comparative Studies in Society & History, vol. 48, no. 1 (January 2006): 38-78.

2004-2005
Peter Bugge, "The Making of a Slovak City The Czechoslovak Renaming of Pressburg/Pozsony/Presporok, 1918-1919," Austrian History Yearbook 35 (2004): 205-227.

2002-2003
Bruce R. Berglund, "Building a Church for a New Age: The Search for a Modern Catholic Art in Turn-of-the-century Central Europe," Centropa, vol. 3 no. 3 (September 2003): 225-240.

2000-2001
Katherine David-Fox, "Prague-Vienna, Prague-Berlin: The Hidden Geography of Czech Modernism" in Slavic Review, 59, no. 4 (Winter 2000) 735-760.

1998-1999
Karl F. Bahm, "Beyond the Bourgeoisie: Rethinking Nation, Culture and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe," in Austrian History Yearbook, 29, part 1 (1998) 19-35.
and Igor Lukes, "The Slansky Affair: New Evidence," in Slavic Review, 58, no. 1 (Spring 1999) 160-187.

1996-1997
Anna Drabek, "Die Frage der Unterrichtssprache im Königreich Böhmen im Zeitalter der Aufklärung," in Österreichische Osthelfte 38 (1996) 329-355.

1993-1994
Claire Nolte, "Our Brothers Across the Ocean: The Czech Sokol in America to 1914," in Czechoslovak and Central European Journal 2, no. 2 (Winter 1993) 15-37.

1991-1992
Hillel Kieval, "The Social Vision of Bohemian Jews: Intellectuals and Community in the 1840s" in Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein , eds., Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

1987-1988
Owen V. Johnson, "Newspapers and Nation-building: The Slovak Press in Pre-1918 Slovakia," in Hans Lemberg et al, eds., Bildungsgeschichte, Bevölkerungsgeschichte: Gesellschaftsgeschichte in den Böhmischen Ländern und Europa, Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1988, pp. 160-78.

1985-1986
Kevin F. McDermott, "Dependence or Independence? Relations between the Red Unions and the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, 1922-1929," in Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, ed., East European History: Selected Papers of the Third World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1988, pp. 157-83.