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Published by: Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

 

Every Child According to Its Pace: School Maturity between Expertise, State Policies, and Parental Eigensinn in Socialist Hungary

Annina Gagyiova
Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 3  (2023):461–492 DOI 10.38145/2023.3.461

It is widely known that socialist states such as Hungary attempted to increase social mobility through a compulsory elementary school system. While the research on socialist education is vast, the relevance of school maturity to an egalitarian education system is still understudied. By the end of the 1950s, lack of preparedness for school among children had captured the attention of Hungarian experts in medicine, psychology, and pedagogy, who were hoping to ensure that first-year students would begin their schooling under roughly the same conditions. In response, in 1965, local initiatives started experimenting with corrective (remedial) classes. The aim of these initiatives was to overcome class differences by offering targeted support and helping children who were less prepared for institutional schooling catch up and transfer into the standard school system later. During the first half of the 1970s, the Hungarian Ministry of Education adopted this pedagogical experiment on a national level. In this article, I put two distinct methodological approaches into dialogue, the sociology of expertise on the one hand and Eigensinn on the other. By doing so, I shed light on the complex interplay of state policies, concepts of expertise, and parental agency. As I show, corrective classes reflected persisting social inequalities, thus children from the lower middle classes and the Roma minority were overrepresented in these classes. Ultimately, I explore how bottom-up initiatives had unintended consequences that were often disadvantageous for the children who were in principle the intended beneficiaries. These initiatives thus worked against rather than for the quest for social equality. In the discussion below, I show how pediatricians, psychologists, pedagogues, and parents shaped the school system, working within, taking advantage of, and thus limiting efforts for social transformation despite asymmetrical power relations.

Keywords: state socialism, socialist education, school maturity, remedial class, equality

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Between Public Health and Propaganda: Tuberculosis in Czechoslovakia in the First Decades of the Communist Regime

Šárka Caitlín Rábová
University of Pardubice
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 3  (2023):433–460 DOI 10.38145/2023.3.433

In early postwar Czechoslovakia, medical doctors identified the fight against tuberculosis as one of their fundamental tasks, since mortality and morbidity rates from this dreaded and hardly curable disease were still high. However, the country initially struggled with a lack of special institutions and trained staff. The situation became even more complicated in 1948, when the Communist Party seized power in Czechoslovakia and transformed the organization and practice of healthcare. Focusing on the first two decades of the postwar period, this article presents the strategies used by the socialist country against tuberculosis, stressing especially the importance placed, in the development of these strategies, on having a mass impact. The most significant shifts, which concerned not only tuberculosis but healthcare in general, involved changes to the legislation. The responsibility for the health of the population was transferred to the state, which declared that it would provide free treatment and care for all citizens, regardless of their social background. During this period, the first law to prevent and control the disease was passed, and mandatory vaccination and tuberculosis treatment were introduced. As was often the case, advances in medicine were used for political propaganda, and so, in the period after 1948, tuberculosis was labelled a “capitalist disease.” This label implied that the fault for the continued presence of the disease lay at the feet of the prewar capital system. Yet as I show in the discussion below, many of these basic pillars of the fight against tuberculosis had already been established in the interwar period, and it was first and foremost the growing availability of antibiotics that helped bring this disease under control in the 1960s.

Keywords: tuberculosis, vaccination, antibiotics, communist regime, Czechoslovakia, public healthcare

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“Separation is Required in Our Special Situation”:
Minority Public Health Programs in Interwar Transylvania

Zsuzsa Bokor
Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 3  (2023):395–432 DOI 10.38145/2023.3.395

This paper presents the distinctive manner in which the Hungarian public health system in Transylvania was built up, parallel to the state structures in the interwar period. In several policies and public health projects, the young medical generation of the 1930s formed the basis of the biologically based ethnic community of Hungarians in Transylvania. This process was presented by them as part of ethnic survival and made the presence of the doctor necessary. The paper discusses the foundation of minority health institutes and also the discourses around the formation of these.

Keywords: public health, interwar, Transylvania, Hungarian doctors, minority health protection, maternal and infant protection

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Social Class in the Czech Physicians’ Quest for Professional Authority and Social Acknowledgement, 1830s–1930s

Barbora Rambousková
University of Pardubice
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Darina Martykánová
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 3  (2023):363–394 DOI 10.38145/2023.3.363

In the mid-nineteenth century, physicians in the Czech lands could claim neither elite status as a professional group nor unquestioned authority in the medical field. Despite the legal protection granted by the Habsburg Monarchy, they did not have an efficient monopoly on medical authority and practice and had to face fierce competition from lay healers, male and female, and other medical professionals. This article examines how Czech-speaking physicians navigated social dynamics in nineteenth-century society in urban and rural areas and how they strove to strengthen their authority in the medical field both through appeals to their professional credentials and through class and gender discourses. We identify individual strategies of social ascension and collective efforts to boost the standing and authority of the whole professional group. Practices such as socializing in patriotic circles and authoring medical guidebooks for laymen proved as important as publications in the professional press and the work of professional associations in this complex effort, which was eventually crowned with success in interwar Czechoslovakia.

Keywords: social class, Czech physicians, professional authority, social mobility, individual strategies

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Religious Diversity: What or How? Towards a Praxeology of Early Modern Religious Ordering

Iryna Klymenko

Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 13 Issue 2 (2024):287-305 DOI 10.38145/2024.2.287

Scholars of the pre-modern history of religion have increasingly sought to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of religious diversity. Building on these advancements, this paper argues that our comprehension of this phenomenon is intricately linked to our presuppositions regarding religious groups and their boundaries. By challenging the conventional notion of groups as closed, authentic, and consistently coherent collectives, it advocates for a praxeological approach. Drawing on sociological theories and microhistorical studies, with a particular focus on early modern sources related to Jewish communities, it proposes a transition from inquiries about “what” the groups are to an examination of “how” they have been constructed in both temporal and spatial dimensions. Thus, by viewing religious groups and their ordering as dynamic and process-related, this approach aims to deepen our understanding of religious diversity in the early modern era as an analytical and empirical category.

Keywords: early modern history, religious diversity, praxeology

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Polish Immigrant Community Building in Brussels: The Role of the Polish Catholic Mission

Elżbieta Kuźma
Université Libre de Bruxelles
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Dorota Praszałowicz
Jagiellonian University in Kraków
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 4  (2023): 700-734 DOI 10.38145/2023.4.700

This paper provides the first outline of the history of the Polish Catholic Mission (PCM) in Belgium, focusing on its role in the Polish immigrant community from 1926 to 2023. It examines the transformation of the PCM and its impact on the Polish diaspora, considering the broader context of secularization and social changes. The study utilizes primary sources, interviews, and participant observations to explore the PCM’s influence on community building, cultural preservation, and social capital formation within the Polish immigrant population in Belgium.

Keywords: Polish diaspora, immigration, Catholic Mission, pastoral care, catholic community, history.

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The Evolution of Migrant Mobilization in One Polish Diaspora Community: A Case Study of the Polish Catholic Society Eindhoven

Adam Żaliński
Institute of Intercultural Studies, Jagiellonian University Kraków
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 12 Issue 4  (2023): 676-699 DOI 10.38145/2023.4.676

This research concerns the transformation of one migrant community. It is based on an analysis of selected documents presenting Polish migrant associations in the Netherlands from the beginning of 1950s until the 1990s. The study offers an analysis of the minority mobilization process, with a focus on migrant organizational agency. It is a case study devoted to the Polish community in Eindhoven and its association, which was a local branch of migrant organization operating at a national level. The main sources used in the study are archival records, including organizational statute, circulars, information leaflets, press releases, official and private correspondence, bulletins, protocols, organizational reports, official declarations, and minutes from meetings. In addition, interviews and biographical data are taken into account. Most of the written sources were obtained from the archive of Franciszek Łyskawa, a Polish migrant soldier who settled in Eindhoven shortly after World War II. Over the course of the following decades, he remained an active member of the diaspora while also integrating into the host society, and he became a Dutch citizen. The study shows the evolution of this Polish migrant community from the precarious situation of the early postwar years through the development of immigrants’ associations and institutions which emerged in parallel to efforts to integrate into the multicultural society in the 1960s and 1970s and eventually the gradual decline of activity among the members of this community as immigrants.

Keywords: migrants, refugees, Polish Catholic Society, Franciszek Łyskawa, the Netherlands, mobilization, immigrant community

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