Search

Vincenzo Virginio was born in 1752 in the city of Cuneo in Piedmont. He got a degree in ecclesiastical and civil law in Turin, as it was the tradition of his family. Agronomy, however, was his first choice and passion. A big altruist and philanthropist, he was deeply moved by the poverty and famine that often befell the population of Piedmont in the second half of the eighteenth century, so he decided to use his talent and financial resources to overcome prejudices against planting and consuming potatoes. His work made him famous, but it also completely drained his financial resources. Hence, in 1807 he accepted the invitation of Vincenzo Dandolo, general governor of Dalmatia, to come to Zadar and help him in his efforts to advance agriculture and provision supply of the people in Dalmatia. He stayed for a year in Zadar after which, due to ill health and family matters, he had to go back to Piedmont. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The organisation and the activities of the Croatian Parliament in the communist period (1945-1990) is not a fully researched topic. The paper gives a contribution to the knowledge of its organisation in the period from 1963 to 1974. Its branched structure and the activities of its councils and working bodies are described in detail, which is also illustrated by the number of held sessions. By the Yugoslavian constitution adopted in April 1963, also called "the charter of selfmanagement", the name of the state was changed from People's to Socialist, its socialist attributes were emphasized, and self-management was introduced in all segments of the society. By the new republican constitutions, such changes were also carried out in all then-existing Yugoslavian republics, including Croatia. In the forefront were placed ≫the sovereign rights of the working people and the Yugoslavian nations which they exercise≪, inter alia, as representatives of the working people in councils of federal and republican assemblies. It had affected the organisation of the highest formal political institutions of the government, including federal and republican assemblies, which were declared as ≫the highest state and self-government authorities, under the law and obligations≪ of federation, i.e. the republic. The declarative constitutional concept on the assemblies as the highest state and self-government authorities implied the shift in their organisation and activities from the traditional legislative bodies and ≫law factories≪ towards ≫the responsible policy holders≪. In other words, ≫becoming the working selfgovernment bodies≪, assemblies were meant to become the centres in which ≫the whole social practice and harmonised politics is gathered≪. Thus, for example, by the constitution of the Socialist Republic of Croatia from April 1963, it was declared that the Parliament (Sabor) can discuss and adopt declarations and resolutions ≫on all issues of common interest for the Republic [...] laying down values on politics in certain area and the means of its achievement≪. The Croatian Parliament's Rules of Procedure from 1965 provided the possibility of convening a General Croatian Conference (Opći sabor Hrvatske), i.e. joint sessions ≫on all issues of the common interest for the Republic≪ of all of Parliament's councils with the Central Committee of the Socialist League of Working People of Croatia and the Republican Committee for Croatia of the Association of Trade Unions in Yugoslavia. The main characteristic of the organisation of the Croatian Parliament in the period from 1963 to 1974 was its complex structure. In order to express its working character and central role in the political decision-making process in all spheres of life in Croatia, it was organised as a five-cameral institution. It was the highest number of its chambers in the whole socialist period: until 1953 it was unicameral, in the period 1953-1963 bicameral, and in the period 1974-1990 a three-cameral institution. Those five chambers were: the Republican Council, the Economic Council, the Educational and Cultural Council, the Social and Health Council and the Organisational and Political Council. The Republican Council had 120 representatives, directly elected by the municipal assemblies and citizens. The other four councils had 80 representatives each, elected by the municipal assemblies among the workers across the working areas within the competence of each council. Except the Presidency of Parliament and its five councils, during the whole period 110 different permanent or temporary working bodies were established. Of that total, there were 27 joint working bodies of Parliament as a whole; the Republican Council had 20, the Economic Council 14, the Educational and Cultural Council 15, the Social and Health Council 18, and the Organisational and Political Council 16 permanent or temporary working bodies. The Parliament's councils and working bodies held in total 3 960 sessions, i.e. 360 per year. By comparison, in the period 1947-1953 during which it was organised as a unicameral body, the Parliament and its working bodies held in total 220 sessions (around 30 per year). In the period 1953- 1963 during which it was organised as a bicameral body, the Parliament and its working bodies held in total 1224 sessions, i.e. around 120 per year. More detailed data on the number of sessions held in the analysed period are listed in the table at the end of this paper. The table also includes a systematic overview of all working bodies which were described earlier in this paper, illustrating at the same time the dynamics of changes in their establishment and elimination. Some authors describe the Parliamentary institutions in the communist states with the metaphor rubber stamp legislatures, meaning the institutions with small practical power in the political decisionmaking process, which automatically put a stamp on the legislative proposals of their governments, i.e. communist parties as the real owners of the political power. Some of the researches singled out as exceptions the Polish Sejm and the Yugoslavian Federal Assembly (in the frame of the political system established by the Yugoslavian constitution from 1974). That opens a new research topic about whether the Croatian Parliament in the period 1963-1974 was also "a paradoxical institution" or an exception. In other words, the relation between the formal (de iure) and the real (de facto) position of Croatian Parliament in the political system of that time should be more closely researched, as well as to find whether its position was weakened, in what way and to what extent by the comparison with other state political institutions (notably the Executive Council of Parliament of the Socialist Republic of Croatia), i.e. instrumentalized by the central bodies of the League of Communist of Yugoslavia/Croatia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archival public relations are defined as a complex communicational process (by focusing on the coordination of the public and private interests) whose purpose is supposed to manage the archives' public image and, depending on the possibilities, support its marketing (advertising) activities. The special emphasis within analysing possibilities of the applicability of public relations in the activities of contemporary archives is put on publications, since they are one of the best known and most popular archival programs. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the historical development of publishing activities of Croatian archives, as well as the contemporary managerial process of archival publishing as a promotional tool and in the context of the public relations. The analysis of the historical development of the publishing activities of Croatian archives had been based on the available literature, as well as documents of the individual archives and Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia. The research in the network of the state archives (regional archives and the Croatian State Archives) on managing the publishing activities had been conducted on a onetime basis via the questionnaire in the period from the 2nd to 7th March 2022. The main finding of the analysis is that the Croatian archives soon became aware of the techniques of early public relations' models and tried to implement them to the publishing activities. The strategic planning of their publishing activities, including the analysis of preferences of archival public based on the continuing interpersonal communication between archives and users, as well as the analysis of the communication with potential media and wider general public, can be considered as the important segment of public relations, whose purpose ought to be part of the archival management. The specified models imply a two-way symmetry of the public relations. Due to the fact that already in the mid-20th century the planning of publishing activities included interpersonal communication with actual users of archival services, it implies an early implementation of informational-communicational aspects in the strategic planning of archival program activities meant for their users i.e. the attempt of integration of the discipline of the public relations in archival project management. The publishing activities within the primary tasks of the archival network of state archives in independent Republic of Croatia formally kept continuity based on the existing Archives and Archival Institutions Act. Publishing of archival publications is stimulated by users' needs for better understanding and finding of archival records, as well as by archives' endeavours to increase as much as possible the sales of their services. According to the available information on the websites of the Croatian archives, and catalogues of the National and University Library in Zagreb on their publications from 1991 to 2022 (published on their own or co-published with other institutions), it can be concluded that archival publishing activities have gone into full swing after democratic changes. Still, the publishing policy did not undergo major changes compared to the earlier period. After 1991 the publishing activities are still mostly focused on publication of archival sources with the aim of increasing their availability. Apart from that, the results of research concerning the contemporary archival publishing activities in Croatia as promotional tools and in the context of the public relations indicate the need for their reorganisation, especially in the phase of strategic planning and evaluation, with additional stimulation of the development of digital versions of archival publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research on the history and culture of Roma in Croatia has always been a marginal topic in Croatian science, especially in historiography. Having this in mind, it is no wonder we can observe only sporadic fragments of the research activities in Romani studies of some Croatian scientists, who only occasionally covered the aforementioned topic. The end of the 19th century saw the growing interest in the research on Roma - it is then that the important results of research on Roma culture, language and customs were published. Emilij Laszowski was also among these scientists. He was one of the most prominent Croatian historiographers at the end of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century. Our research was based on the analysis of the part of his personal archival fonds - which is kept in the Croatian State Archives - related to the history of Roma. Laszowski's historiographic work encompassed numerous fields of social history; he rose to prominence mostly due to his papers on Croatian early modern cultural and economic history and historical topography. It is, though, less known fact that Laszowski researched the history and culture of the Roma population in Croatia and in Europe. The impulse for studying the Roma population came from Mara Čop Marlet, the first Croatian ethnographer, who was part of the wider European circle of scientists exploring the ethnography of the Romani population. In the last decade of the 19th century Laszowski started collecting and analyzing the relevant literature and documents pertaining to Roma in Croatian archives. He had published the results of a part of his researches in an article in the newspaper Narodne novine in 1894 - this article may be regarded as the first Croatian historiographical work on the topic of Roma. Laszowski continued researching the history of Roma after publishing the 1894 article, including the history of Roma during the Second World War, but the aforementioned article remained his only published paper on the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore the role of the archives in dealing with the communist past, that is, in regard to the public debates about the contested archival materials and the problems which researchers have been facing in Croatia over the last two decades. It will inquire into the past practice of Croatian historians in carrying out research on the communist period. The article examines the state of the archives in Croatia, especially with regard to the most critical archival fonds – the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia (CK SKH) and the files of the State Security Service (SDS) of the Republic Secretariat of Internal Affairs, which are kept in the Croatian State Archives in Zagreb. Since the independence of Croatia, those archival materials have been the subject of many debates in Croatian public and political life. Finally, this article will showcase the practical consequences of the newly adopted legal changes, especially in the case of the Horizon 2020 project “COURAGE – Cultural Opposition: Understanding the Cultural Heritage of Dissent” (2016-9). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although heraldry in Croatian and Bosnian and Herzegovinian historiography keeps important place, it is a field which is not systematically researched and evaluated. It means that continuous interest for helardry, as auxiliary historical science, doesn't exist in any of those two historiographies, equally on the side of historians and scientists from other disciplines, as on the side of amateurs, and oscilations are very discernible in its professional and scientific study. Despite all, heraldry in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina didn't disappear, from its beginnings to nowdays, mainly on the basis of individual efforts, and thanks to occasional appearance of new works or reprinting of older ones. Therefore authors bring exhaustive bibliography of Croatian and Bosnian and Herzegovinian works, as a contribution to future comprehensive heraldic bibliography of those two historical territories, with aim to present, at one place, everything published from the field of heraldry, taken as scientifically or professionally relevant and useful. Such a wide quantitative selection might be a basis for future qualitative analysis. Attached bibliography contains more than 900 bibliographic units - books, studies or articles - listed as a result of research work of the authors, but also as a result of consultation of different, printed or electronic, bibliographic catalogues. It is mostly created on the basis of direct insight into works (de visu), and partially through the insight of other sources. Bibliography is arranged alphabetically, according to descendant order of authors surnames, while works inside opus of particular author are arranged chronologically. Titles of books, papers, or collection of papers, same as of lexicons and encyclopedias, are written in italic letters. Works printed in periodical publications are listed with data on year, volume and/or number of publication, and finally, with spans of pages. All Croatian and Bosnian and Herzegovinian works are taken into account, same as those from neighbouring historiographies, Italian, Slovenian, Austrian, German, Hungarian, Serbian, Montenegrian etc., including also works from the fields of numismatics, sfragistics, genealogy, vexilology, and historiography in general, which might be useful for heraldic researchers in their own studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the scope, structure and the composition of the Presidium of Parliament of the People's Republic of Croatia (PRC) which was active as a political governmental body in Croatia from 1945 to 1953. According to the Yugoslav constitutional system of government, the same political body existed on the federal level as the Presidium of the People's Assembly of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (FPRY), as well as in every republic-member of the Yugoslav federation and the scope, organization and composition of the Presidium of Parliament are compared with the scope, organization and composition of those bodies. The foundations of the activities of the Presidium of Parliament, as well as other central governmental institutions in Croatia (namely, Parliament, Government, and Supreme Court) were laid in the work of the State Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Croatia (ZAVNOH) i.e. its Presidency, since until the end of the war they together performed the legislative, executive and judiciary government. During the 4th session that took place in Zagreb from 24 to 25 July 1945 ZAVNOH changed is title to the People's Parliament of Croatia and since then its Presidency worked as the Presidency of the People's Parliament of Croatia. In the period from 1945 to 1953 its activity can be divided into four mandate periods: the Presidency of the People's Parliament of Croatia/the Presidium of the Parliament of the PRC (25 July 1945-30 November 1946), the Presidium of the Constituent Parliament of the PRC (30 November 1946-20 January 1947), the Presidium of the 1st Session of the Parliament of the PRC (20 January 1947-4 December 1950) and the Presidium of the 2nd Session of the Parliament of the PRC (4 December 1950-6 February 1953). Its existence in the system of governmental power is the result of taking over the Soviet constitutional solutions about organizing the state and governmental institutions in the 1946 constitution of the FPRY and through it also in the constitutions of each federal unit. It was the main legislative body in the period until the constituting of the Constituent Parliament of the PRC, since the Parliament of the PRC only had a single short five-day session in late August 1946. This is confirmed by the information about 29 laws passed by the Presidium of Parliament in the period from 8 September 1945 to 20 November 1946. Besides legislative, it also performed other functions from the jurisdiction then belonging to the Parliament. The constitution of the PRC from 1946 bestowed upon it performing tasks that are usually given to the president of the state (representing in the country the people's and state sovereignty of the PRC, calling the general elections, granting pardons, awarding medals and recognitions), as well as other executive tasks partly closely linked to the legislative activities. The special function pertained to supervising the people's committees. The important difference in the scope in relation to the Presidium of the People's Assembly of the FPRY was that it did not have the authority in the area of foreign affairs. Even though the constitution of the PRC from January 1947 lists it together with the Parliament in the chapter on the highest bodies of the governmental power in Croatia, the sources and constitutional-legal texts of the time, in accordance with the principle of unity of power, define it as a body which "stems from the Parliament" and is subordinated to it. Also, despite being formally constitutionally defined as one of the highest bodies of governmental power in Croatia, in reality it was the Party's transmission, since the actual power and monopoly in decisionmaking was in the hands of the bodies of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia/the League of Communists of Yugoslavia i.e. the Communist Party of Croatia/the League of Communists of Croatia. It was a collegiate body comprised of members of the Parliament. The decision of its composition was formally passed by the Parliament, but based on the conclusions reached during sessions of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia. It was elected for the same term as the Parliament, but it continued to perform its duties after the dissolution of the Parliament, until the election of the new Presidium of Parliament. From 1945 to 1953 the total of 45 MPs were included in its activities. 13 of them were members during all four mandate terms, 11 during two and 14 during only one. The structure and the way of work were determined by the Rulebook dated from 7 August 1947. They were the exact copy of the structure and the way of work of the Presidium of the People's Assembly of the FPRY, with differences deriving from different jurisdictions (federal, republic) of these two bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]