New Books in Military History · Marshall Poe

Claire Morelon, "Streetscapes of War and Revolution: Prague, 1914–1920" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

·43 min·2 clips

By 1917 and 1918, black marketeers outrank legal citizens in Prague’s wartime food economy.

1. New Books Network’s episode on Claire Morelon’s Streetscapes of War and Revolution: Prague, 1914–1920 centers on Prague from 1914 to 1920. 2. Host Dr. Miranda Melcher interviews Dr. Claire Morelon, a cultural and social historian of East Central Europe, about her Cambridge University Press book from 2024. 3. The episode asks what Prague looked and felt like to ordinary people during World War I and after the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918. 4. Morelon says she began the project because the First World War in the east of Europe had left a large gap in the historiography when she started. 5. She also questions textbook-style chronologies that treat 1918 as a clean new beginning for East Central Europe. 6. Prague matters in her argument because it lets her study a city as a shared space rather than reducing Austria-Hungary to Czech, German, or Hungarian national groups. 7. She says cities make wartime crisis visible through food shortages, refugees, and protests. 8. Prague also matters because it became one of the new capital cities of the post-1918 order and a model of Czechoslovakia’s emergence. 9. Morelon defines “streetscape” as the appearance of streets, including buildings, signs, posters, traffic, gatherings, and demonstrations. 10. She says people in wartime Prague read the street to understand war, loyalty, revolution, and continuity. 11. She describes mobilization posters as a public scene where people gathered, read, and discussed who would be drafted. 12. She says uniforms quickly changed the visual hierarchy between civilians and soldiers in the city. 13. The wartime atmosphere also included reduced entertainment and earlier closing times for cafes and pubs. 14. Morelon argues that Austro-Hungarian patriotism remained real in Prague through low-key acts such as war relief and charity. 15. She cites the Czech Sokol organization, which was banned in late 1915, as a case where Czech nationalism and support for the imperial war effort overlapped. 16. Censorship, denunciations, and rumor made speech and writing feel risky, while letters were sometimes hidden inside nuts or other objects. 17. Prague also received wounded soldiers and refugees from the eastern front, which brought the war’s realities into a home-front city that was never itself on the front line. 18. Food shortages reshaped the city through queues, black markets, soup kitchens, balcony gardens, and trips to the countryside for potatoes. 19. Morelon’s style is analytical and interview-driven, with a steady focus on concrete street-level evidence rather than abstract political summary. 20. Listeners interested in urban history, wartime society, and East Central Europe will likely want this episode, while those wanting battlefield-focused military history may skip it.

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