Telegraf (Baltimore, Md.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
1,774 issues from 1917 to 1951, published in Baltimore, Maryland, digitised for Chronicling America.
Vaclav Joseph Shimek established the weekly Telegraf newspaper in 1907 to serve the more than 15,000 Czech-speaking residents of Baltimore, Maryland. Shimek was a local Democratic politician and businessperson known as the Mayor of Little Bohemia. As the owner of Bohemia Hall in East Baltimore, Shimek fostered organizations in a community that the Baltimore Sun described as “orderly, industrious, congenial and brave.” The Telegraf editorially supported women’s suffrage and urged its readers to buy liberty bonds during World War I. The emergence of an independent Czechoslovakia as an outcome of the Treaty of Versailles ending the war was a source of great pride to the local community. Beginning in 1929, the Telegraf‘s long-term editor was the Reverend Frank Novak of the Moravian Presbyterian Church. In addition to his congregants, the Telegraf was read by members of St. Wenceslaus Church, the fourth largest Catholic parish in the city. The publisher, August Klecka, was a Baltimore City Council member and Democratic Party leader.
The Telegraf chronicled the maturation of Baltimore’s Czech community as it moved beyond the status of recent immigrants. The garment industry was the initial employer of many Czech men and women. In the late 1930s, World War II production industries in Baltimore attracted Czech coal miners from Pennsylvania, many of whom settled in the Curtis Bay neighborhood. Germany’s seizure of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in 1938 caused an outpouring of…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Baltimore, Maryland, United States
- Language
- Czech
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress