Join us for a lecture discussing “ The Velvet Revolution: Questions and Memories” presented by historian, David Chroust, PhD. from Texas A&M University.
Three decades have passed since the Velvet Revolution. In the Czech Republic, only three out of five people have any memory of it, because the other two are 34 years old or younger. 1 Among Americans of Czech descent, the Velvet Revolution is even more remote from personal experience and understanding. But it is an anchor of identity and pride here in America: the Czechs rose up, brought down the Communists, and rejoined the West, led by America, all without violence (hence “Velvet”). So goes our common understanding of what happened. It obscures more than it reveals because life and the past are full of surprises, sticky and interesting. It’s the historian’s job to show us that, and to help us question and reimagine. Can we understand the Velvet Revolution without everything else that it’s part of? What did it sweep away? Has its meaning changed in thirty years? We seem to be living in a time of revolutions, some of the technological, and the revolution in information technologies changes what we can learn about the world and how we connect with it.
About the speaker: David Chroust is a historian on the faculty of Texas A&M University Libraries, where he studies the global information revolution and how we could use it to become more open to the world. He went to first grade in Czechoslovakia days after the 1968 Soviet occupation and came to America via a refugee camp. In 1992, he came from northeast Ohio to Texas A& M, where he later wrote his dissertation about Czechs in America in the half-century to World War I. He speaks Czech, Russian and German.
