E. Boháč: František Palacký as the father of the Czech nation, picture postcard, published by J. Plichta, Prague, around 1920

The source material related to the problem of the nationalities in the Habsburg Monarchy often distinguishes between ‘historic’ peoples and ‘history-less’ peoples – peoples that possessed a history and peoples that supposedly did not. This is a somewhat confusing distinction to us today: after all, if an ethnic group has existed for centuries, how can it not have a history?

The Czech national evolution was shaped by the cultural pioneer achievements of the so-called “arousers” (Czech: buditelé). In the early nineteenth century a number of academics and scholars prepared the foundations of the modern Czech national consciousness from which the “rebirth” (národní obrození) of the Czech linguistic nation sprang.