Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948 in the context of Third Czechoslovak Republic

From the Communist coup d'état in February 1948 to the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Czechoslovakia was ruled by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Czech: Komunistická strana Československa, KSČ). The country belonged to the Eastern Bloc and was a member of the Warsaw Pact and of Comecon. During the era of Communist Party rule, thousands of Czechoslovaks faced political persecution for various offences, such as trying to emigrate across the Iron Curtain.

The 1993 Act on Lawlessness of the Communist Regime and on Resistance Against It determined that the communist government was illegal and that the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was a criminal organisation.

The Ninth-of-May (1948) Constitution (Czech: Ústava Československé republiky; Slovak: Ústava Československej republiky) was a communist state constitution and the second constitution of Czechoslovakia, in force from 1948 to 1960. It came into force on 9 May, shortly after the communist seizure of power in the country on 25 February 1948. It replaced the 1920 Constitution.

Work on the new document had been underway since the summer of 1946. As a result, it was not a fully Communist constitution. It was superficially similar to its predecessor; indeed, several provisions were directly carried over from the earlier document. However, it contained a number of elements borrowed from the "Stalin Constitution" of the Soviet Union. The Soviet imprint on the final document was strong enough that President Edvard Beneš refused to sign it and later resigned. It was flagrantly violated by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), the government and many individuals throughout the period of its being in force, especially regarding the provisions on private ownership and human rights.

General elections were held in Italy on 18 April 1948 to elect the first Parliament of the Italian Republic.

After the Soviet-backed coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, the U.S. became alarmed about Soviet intentions in Central Europe and feared that Italy would be drawn into the Soviet sphere of influence if the leftist Popular Democratic Front (Italian abbr.: FDP), which consisted of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), were to win the 1948 general election. As the last month of the election campaign began, Time magazine published an article which argued that an FDP victory would push Italy to "the brink of catastrophe".

The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle is a language and literature society. It started in 1926 as a group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis and a theory of the standard language and of language cultivation from 1928 to 1939. The linguistic circle was founded in the Café Derby in Prague, which is also where meetings took place during its first years.

The Prague School has had a significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics. After the Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948, the circle was disbanded in 1952, but the Prague School continued as a major force in linguistic functionalism (distinct from the Copenhagen school or English Firthian – later Hallidean – linguistics). The American scholar Dell Hymes cites his 1962 paper "The Ethnography of Speaking" as the formal introduction of Prague functionalism to American linguistic anthropology. The Prague structuralists also had a significant influence on structuralist film theory, especially through the introduction of the ostensive sign.