Věra Olivová

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Věra Olivová (born November 13, 1926 in Prague ; † March 7, 2015 there ) was a Czech professor of history , art history and the history of sports .

Life

After the end of the war, Olivová studied history, art history and geography at the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University in Prague from the winter semester 1945/46 . During her studies, she worked from 1950 to 1951 as an assistant in the political archive of the office of the President of the Republic. There she had the opportunity to study the documents from the personal archives of the second Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš , a topic that fascinated her all her life. After the state examination in 1949, she received her doctorate in 1951 at the chair of history at the University of Political and Economic Sciences in Beneš. After the university was dissolved in 1953, she moved to the chair for Czechoslovak history in the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University . There she completed her habilitation in 1962, and in 1964 she was appointed lecturer in the latest Czechoslovak history. She worked at this chair until autumn 1970. In the course of the political cleansing after the violent suppression of the Prague Spring , she was demoted to half a position at the Department of Ethnology. In 1989 she was returned to her professorship at the Institute for Czechoslovak History before she retired in 1991. In the same year she was elected President of the Edvard Beneš Society. She was married to the classical philologist Petr Oliva since 1949.

Scientific importance

In addition to her works on Beneš, she has written a trilogy on the history of sports that has been translated into several languages, namely People and Games , Sports and Games in Antiquity: A Cultural History and The Eternal Fascination of Sports . Even under the conditions of the Marxist sciences, she did not trace back the beginnings of sport as a labor-related activity of industrialization to the theories of Allen Guttmann , but showed that even in prehistory and in antiquity, the conditions were determined by the nature of man and culture the agon for a modern sport were fulfilled. The World Catalog has 146 works by her. She was a fellow of the European Committee for Sports History.

On October 28, 2014 she was awarded the "Za zásluhy" Medal of Merit.

Works (selection)

  • Československo-sovětské vztahy v letech 1918–1922 (Czechoslovak-Soviet relations 1918–1922), Praha, Naše Vojsko, 1957.
  • Politika československé buržoazie v letech 1921–1923 (The politics of the Czechoslovak bourgeoisie 1921–1923), Praha, Československá akademie věd, 1961.
  • Lidé a hry. Historická geneze sportu (People and Games), Praha: Olympia, 1979.
  • Sport a hry ve starověkém světě (Ancient sports and games: a cultural history), Praha, Artia, 1988.
  • Závěť Edvarda Beneše a osudy jeho archivu (Legacy of Eduard Beneš and the fate of his archive), Praha, Společnost Edvarda Beneše, 2008.
  • Československo a Německo 1918–1929 (Czechoslovakia and Germany 1918–1929), Praha, Společnost Edvarda Beneše, 2010.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Věra Olivová: The doomed democracy: Czechoslovakia in a disrupted Europe, 1914-38. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1972.
  2. ↑ John M. Carter & Arnd Krüger (eds.): Ritual and Record. Sport in Pre-Industrial Societies. Westport, Conn .: Greenwood 1990
  3. ↑ Results for 'vera olivova' in WorldCat.org
  4. ↑ www.cesh-site.eu

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Olivová, Věra
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Olivova, Vera
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech sports historian, cultural historian and historian
DATE OF BIRTH November 13, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague
DATE OF DEATH March 7, 2015
Place of death Prague