Geografie 1974, 79, 77-81
The 80th Anniversary of the Czechoslovak Geographical Society Attached to the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences
The Czechoslovak Geographical Society celebrates this outstanding anniversary at the time when all basic problems of the further socialist development of our Republic have been unambiguously solved and when it has found a place in its activity of how to aid this development. With reverence it remembers its traditions, the share of many generations of geographers, and, above all, the enthusiasm and devotion of the founders of the Society who met on 1 May, 1894 at the general constituting assembly and on 20 October of the same year elected the first regular committee of the Czech Geographical Society. The Society immediately established its Journal of the Czech Geographical Society, the first volume of which appeared as early as in 1895. After World War I, with the formation of the first independent state of the Czechs and Slovaks, the Society was renamed to the Czechoslovak Geographical Society and its activity was intensively developed. In 1924, an independent Section of the Czechoslovak Geographical Society in Brno was established; it celebrates its 50th anniversary as a branch Brno of the Czechoslovak Geographical Society this year. After the years of the Nazi occupation, which paralyzed the sphere of national science and culture, a new development of the Society started after the liberation. After the foundation of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences our Society was incorporated into the sphere of the Academy's activity. The national development of geography in Slovakia is taken care of by the Slovak Geographical Society, which is attached to the Slovak Academy of Sciences. The Society has its branches in all regions. At present the Society is the summit organisation of Czechoslovak geographers, enabling putting through the professional interests of the whole geographical communitv and carrying out their contacts with geographical societies abroad. To the main tasks of the Society belongs the prospective development of co-operation with geographical societies of socialist countries on integrated research, above all in those fields connected with the problems of environment, further in the problems of school geography and in ideological and theoretical problems of geography. This is also the target of the home activity of the Society according to the long-term plan of the ideological conception and popularising work, to which the Society aims by preparing suggestions for the improvement and modernisation of the status and teaching of secondary-scholl geography and by organising lectures and seminars for the secondary-scholl geography teachers; by he activity of professional groups it will gain interest in the work of geographers above all in those spheres of geography which are important for the entire development of our geography and the utilisation in practice. The development of the Czechoslovak Geographical Society and the content of its activity will be carried out in a close connection with the socialist development of our Republic.
