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"This article deals with the relationship between public opinion and rumour from ancient times, through the Middle Ages and right up to today. It will examine the terms which were used and which often depended not just on a particular author but usually an entire social class. The most often used terms to describe opinion, fama and existimatio, occurred in the speeches of politicians which were presented as the valuable opinions of the elite whereas the concepts opinio, rumor or sermo were considered as low value and unreliable opinions of plebeians to whom the ruling classes attributed the spreading and creation of rumours. The concept of fama, more often fama publica, indicated in the Middle Ages a local network of knowledge, a mechanism for the collective evaluation of an individual. In this sense it played an important role in the courts of law. The issue of rumours is common to all subsequent historical periods because public opinion usually both generated, and was supported, by rumour. The article also puts forward a hypothesis why the all-powerful fama dissapeared from the courtrooms, why it lost its significance and became purely a rumour." (author's abstract)

"In recent years, sociology in Britain -and in national contexts influenced by British sociology- has been diagnosed by various parties as suffering from a wide range of ailments. These forms of selfcriticism become ever more acute in terms of their potential effects as huge transformations in university funding regimes are brought to bear on the social sciences. But none of these critiques engages satisfactorily with what is a much more foundational and serious set of problems, namely the very nature of sociology itself as a historically-situated form of knowledge production. Sociology claims to know the world around it, but in Britain today much sociology seriously fails in this regard, because it operates with radically curtailed understandings of the long-term historical forces which made the social conditions it purports to analyse. A sophisticated understanding of the contemporary world is made possible only by an equally sophisticated understanding of very long-term historical processes, precisely the sort of vision that mainstream British sociology has lacked for at least the last two decades. This paper identifies the reasons for the development of this situation and the consequences it has for the nature of sociology's knowledge production, for its self-understanding, for its claims to comprehend the contemporary world, and for its apparent social "usefulness". A markedly more selfaware and historically-sensitive sociology is proposed as the answer to the pressing question of what aspects of sociology should be defended in the turbulent context of British higher education today." (author's abstract)

The fourth edition of the manuscript of Listing of historical and art monuments which was prepared under the joint project of Archeological Commission of CASA and Society for the Promotion of German Science, Arts and Literature in Bohemia. The author of this art-historical topography of Litoměřice, which was written in the first two decades of the 20th century, is a local canon, church historian and conservator of monument preservation Vinzenz Luksch.

This article is based on a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with women and men suffering from fertility problems. It analyses the negotiations between partners confronted with the diagnosis of infertility and seeking the best solution. The analysis examined how men and women define their roles in the treatment of infertility, how they perceive their partners' coping and involvement, and confl icting and controversial topics and situations. Data suggest that the burden of infertility is unequal. While treatment involves a woman fully in the physical and the psychological sense, the involvement of the man and potential father in the treatment process is reduced to his provision of genetic material on demand. The research revealed two factors that infl uence and separate the experiences of men and women: the different time/age frame of the reproductive experience and the physical aspect of infertility and reproduction. Both factors are anchored in the praxis of assisted reproduction. The treatment process is administered in a way that, instead of reshaping or challenging traditional defi nitions of parenthood or gender roles, confi rms the status quo.

This paper focuses on "The Philadelphia Negro": a community study that stands at the start of American social research. This somewhat forgotten empirical study from 1899 describes the historical conditions and the economic and social causes and circumstances behind the formation and existence of the "Seventh Ward", a slum neighbourhood in Philadelphia inhabited by African-Americans. The study used survey and other methods of observation and analysis of historical, economic and social data. The study was written by the erudite Harvard University graduate William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, an African-American, and an economist, historian and sociologist. Using primary and secondary literature and archive sources this paper shows that Du Bois was the author of the first empirical social research study in the United States. It looks at his life, his research, and his opinions on racial issues. He created a programme of research on the African-American population and from 1898 to 1910 he headed the first school of sociology on the American continent at the University of Atlanta. He published the results of scientific analyses of the lives of African-Americans in the south of the United States in sixteen volumes of the Atlanta University Studies. Racial prejudices among the American sociological elites prevented both Du Bois and his work from receiving the attention they rightly deserve.

The article describes the role of the Chicago School of Sociology in the development of empirical social research. It traces the increase in the significance of the education of doctoral students on American universities at the turn of the 20th century, and the role of philanthropic foundations. It focuses on the contribution of prominent individuals: W. R. Harper, rector and founder of the University of Chicago, obtained top figures and founded journals in some major fields. A. W. Small was the first chair of the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, founded the American Journal of Sociology and wrote the first two textbooks of sociology. W. I. Thomas was responsible for the famous study Polish Peasant in Europe and America and for the theoretical foundations passed on to his successors. In 1916 R. E. Park published a project in which Chicago became a social laboratory and he inspired and was an advisor for numerous doctoral projects that later were published as sociological monographs. The methodologist E. W. Burgess organized empirical research for the school of doctoral studies that emerged in Chicago and successfully worked there for twenty years. It is beyond the scope of one article to discuss also the monographs by doctoral students at the University of Chicago. Paper examines in detail only the monograph by Park, Burgess and McKenzie titled The City.

This publication represents an account of the evolution of Europe's role in international economic and political relations. We have employed a historical approach throughout the book so that we could reflect on various challenging issues. Among the most important is the rise in Europe's influence during the late Middle Ages and the early Industrial Era, the dramatic weakening of Europe in the first half of the 20th century, and its recent search for a new role in the globalized world. To make an informed contribution, we discuss a vast array of works of many prominent authors. Combining the most recent findings, this publication analyses a fascinating story of the rise and decline of Europe's important political units. To give a more comprehensive perspective on the key events and factors, a similar account of Europe's most important rivals and partners is also added. We hold that only honest and dedicated attempt at combining an institutional analysis with historically specific revelations of actors' motivations based on available historical data can enable us to understand not only the historical origins of recent developments, but also the motivations, interests, and ambitions of the most important actors, both in Europe and in the world. We strive to balance our emphasis on institutional and technological innovations with paying sufficient attention to the unique historical circumstances as well as to political power, conflicts, and war

The paper focuses on the Latin American perspective on modernity, especially on the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano's notion of coloniality. Coloniality is explained as a theoret- ical framework for critical reflection of modernity with an emphasis on the forms of knowledge (episteme) and on non-Western, more specifically Latin American historical experiences and perspectives. The aim is to introduce some Latin American efforts to critically understand coloniality as the other face of modernity and to develop a distinctive critique of capitalism, globalisation and Eurocentrism in their historical dynamics, In the first part, the paper briefly introduces Latin America as a geocultural place and a object of social research in a historical perspective. Special attention is paid to the question of racial classification and authenticity. In the second part, the paper focuses on the notion of coloniality as it was conceptualised by A. Quijano and by other Latin American authors. In the third and fourth parts, the paper deals with the problem of coloniality in wider epistemic contexts of modern social sciences and in relation to the notion of alterity and to the question of decolonisation of social scientific thinking. The final discussion addresses some of inspirational and problematic points of this conception such as problems of decolonisation, intellectual dependency and critique, and the problem of conceptualisation of differences in scientific discourses.

An edition of 15th-century German-language tax records from the Cheb region, accompanied by extensive historical introduction and appendices in Czech

This paper is based on a survey among 435 Czech households caring for a dependent senior in the family to inquire into the conditions and circumstances of caring for seniors in the family. The concept of 'care as a labour of love' (Graham) is contrasted with the concept of the 'defamilisation of care' (Glenn) and 'social rights for elderly care' (Fine). The author finds that more demanding family care, measured as the level of IADL or BADL, is reflected in a growing number of hours spent on family care. The author shows the significant differences in the psychological and financial burden experienced by primary caregivers in relation to how demanding the level of care required is. The article presents evidence of the existence of 'collective family care' in situations where demanding personal care for a senior is required. The participation of other family members in providing care for a senior in situations of demanding personal care demonstrates some features of family cohesion.

The article deals with the 1938 treatise History of the All- Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), abbreviated AUCP(b) - an official treatise from the Stalin era of the USSR which was published on a mass scale. The author puts his reflections in two contexts: 1. the internal Marxist dispute over "orthodoxy", which Stalin resolved by publishing (and co-authoring) this "canonical book", and 2. the myth-forming context, which shows how totalitarian regimes present themselves with their "canonical books". He considers publications preceding the analyzed book, which after Lenin's death included texts by Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin and Leon Trotsky. Then he considers the actual book, focusing in more detail on the absence of two topics and concepts - the state and culture. He pays particular attention to the chapter on dialectic and historical materialism written by Stalin, which completes the simplistic interpretations in the so-called Stalinist Marxism. Like L. Kolakowski, he concludes that the entire Stalinist concept is naturalistic (meaning the naive naturalism of the late 19th century: Marxism guarantees a "scientific world view") and naively nomothetic (all fundamental claims have the form of unquestionable laws).

The United States have been an important actor in the debate on the nature of the European integration process since the beginning of the process. Washington's policy, however, has always seemed equivocal: on one hand it actively supported and encouraged the process, but on the other hand it tried to contain some specific European ambitions and steer the process in a desirable direction. The objective of this article is to offer a possible explanation of the long-term US policy towards the European integration process. In the first part, it presents the theoretical concept of the US "regional hegemony strategy" and identifies four goals of the grand strategy within the limits of the concept. In the second part, it tests the validity of the concept on six historical case studies by confronting the intentions of the US policy in each case with the four identified strategic goals. The analysis shows that even though the focus of the American policy towards the European integration changes according to different historical context, the American policy follows the general tenets of the regional hegemony strategy. Adapted from the source document.

The aim of this article is to explain educational reproduction in the Czech Lands between 1906 and 2003 from the perspective of educational mobility. Mobility trends in the intergenerational transmission of educational status identified in an analysis are presented in the context of findings on odds ratios in education and in a historical context. The analysis is based on observations of the intergenerational transmission of educational status, i.e. educational mobility, in two educational transitions between three educational levels (lower secondary, upper secondary, and higher education). Mobility tables and their log-linear analysis are used to help explain what mobility processes shape the educational inequalities that have proved stable over the long term and also odds ratios between the main levels of education. The article helps fill in the gap in knowledge about the long-term development of the educational structure in the historical Czech Lands and Czechoslovakia and provides information about typical mobility trajectories and varying mobility patterns in periods before 1948, between 1948 and 1989, and after 1989. An understanding of these structural contexts helps clarify what occurred in the past and what is occurring now in the area of unequal access to education and to explain one of the main findings from the analysis – that in Czech society the transmission of a family's educational status from one generation to the next continuously follows the same patterns.

During both occasions of the 1st anniversary of the German Grand Coalition government CDU/CSU & SPD (2005/2006) & of the 10th anniversary of the Czech-German Declaration on reconciliation (1997) the author analysis the recent German foreign policy, especially the role of past burdens in the bilateral relations. Gradually, although they faced many complications, both a legal & political solution was found, & instilled, creating a prevision for, & to a certain degree institutionalizing "the culture of historical controversy." The rhetoric of historical guilt & responsibility slowly disappears in Germany's relationships to the states of Central & East Central Europe, it relates also to the reconciliation rituals. On the other hand the new German government (with the CDU-chancellorship) has accepted all declarations & treaties made by preceding governments, including those which deal with property issues between the F.R.G. & Poland/Czech Republics respectively. The main dash is not drawn between any single political camps; rather nowadays, it is drawn right across the German society & their political elites. Especially the topic of World War II & its victims has become a conventional subject & one of public historical memory. This appeared shortly after the new government was appointed into office, as well as the idea that the moral-historical dimension of the Czech-German, Polish-German (and any other neighbors to Germany) relations will not disappear, but instead achieve a new quality. Only the role of moderator will be given to the governments & to the political sphere. Parallel to the departure of the last generation of contemporaries, the theme will be changed, & there will be only one of many reference frameworks in German relations to its neighbor states & their societies. This will, however, not be a linear process: relapsing is not excluded & it will depend on the responsibility & maturity of the political elites as well as the quality of the Czech-German "community of interests" (including the constituting role of European Security & Energy policies), as to how they will be managed. Adapted from the source document.