At the COP28 Climate Summit in Dubai, the U.S., Czech Republic, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Iceland, Kosovo and Norway in formally joining the alliance, which was launched in 2017 by the U.K. and Canada. The new members have committed to not developing new unabated coal power plants and phasing out existing unabated coal plants.
The Velvet Revolution swept through Czechoslovakia in November 1989, ending 41 years of Communist rule in just 11 days without a shot fired. After riot police beat student marchers in Prague on November 17, crowds swelled to half a million within days. Playwright Václav Havel was president by year’s end.
Czechoslovakia independence arrived on October 28, 1918, as the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire gave way to a new democratic state in the heart of Europe. Philosopher-statesman Tomáš Masaryk, who had spent the war years lobbying Allied governments abroad, became its first president weeks later. The country would remain Central Europe’s lone democracy by the mid-1930s — an imperfect but real experiment in self-determination.
The Jagiellonian dynasty began in February 1386, when Lithuanian duke Jogaila was baptized in Kraków, married the young Queen Hedwig of Poland, and took the crown as Ladislaus II. Over the next 150 years, his descendants would hold thrones in Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, and Bohemia — a quiet architecture of alliance that reshaped central Europe.
The Huns reshaped Eurasia in 434 C.E., when Attila and his brother Bleda took joint rule of a confederation that had crossed the Volga only six decades earlier. From the Danube, they extracted tribute from Rome and pushed Goths, Vandals, and Alans westward. Their pressure helped clear the ground on which medieval Europe would later rise.
Around 25,000 B.C.E., someone in what is now the Czech Republic carved lines into a mammoth tusk — markings some researchers read as hills, rivers, and routes of the surrounding landscape. If that interpretation holds, the Pavlov tusk is among the earliest known attempts to turn the world into a symbol another person could follow.
