Czech and Slovak History: An American Bibliography

In the opening decades of this century, Anglo-American historians paid scant attention to the Czechs and Slovaks. That is, until the Scotsman Robert W. Seton-Watson and the American S. Harrison Thomson, independently of each other in 1943, published broad surveys of Czechoslovakia's history. Their books paid tribute to a fledgling republic, most of whose people were living under Nazi occupation as they wrote. ¹ In his Foreword, Seton-Watson urged his readers to study Czechoslovakia's history so as to dispel "many misconceptions and calumnies" about it. No doubt he was mindful of Neville Chamberlain's broadcast speech during the diplomatic crisis of September 1938 that culminated in the Munich Agreement to partition Czechoslovakia. In a phrase that still resounds, the British Prime Minister lamented that the English were "digging trenches and trying on gas masks because of a quarrel in a far- away country between people of whom we know nothing." ²

A similar confession of ignorance could have been made by the great majority of American historians. Most were far more conversant with classical Greece and Rome and medieval Western Europe than with Czechoslovakia. A sprinkling of university course offerings on the Slavs emphasized the history and culture of Russia, not that of the small states that lay between Russia and Germany; but even Russian history was hardly taught on any level.

In the fifty years since Seton-Watson and Thomson wrote their books, an abundant scholarly literature has appeared in English on the Czechs, the Slovaks, and their German, Jewish, and other countrymen. This transformation in knowledge occurred neither smoothly nor rapidly. Americans usually become aware of the Czechs and Slovaks in time of war or revolution. "Munich 1938" and "appeasement" are still catchwords for betrayal and cowardice. The communications media drenched the country with their coverage of the Soviet-Warsaw Pact invasion of August 1968 that ended the "Prague Spring," and likewise with the overthrow of communist rule in November 1989. But Czechoslovakia's place in the spotlight was short-lived. Despite its talented composers and musicians, noted writers and scientists, and outstanding tennis players, it is a lesser actor on the world stage. The now sperate Czech and Slovak republics are undergoing badly needed modernization of their laws and economics. Transport and communications were neglected for decades, while today education and culture are badly pinched by governmental parsimony. While politics is democratized, the market economy and free enterprise have widened class differences and stirred envy. The young generation adapts to the computer age, but nostalgia for communist paternalism holds the minds of those who benefited under it and others hurt by the rising cost of living and changing moral standards.

The two republics lack direct access to the seas. Combined, their areas equal 49,370 square miles, comparable merely to that of New York State, which ranks thirtieth amount the fifty states. Millions of Americans are descended from Czech and Slovak immigrants or from other nationalities of the former pre-1918 Austro-Hungarian empire. Their ancestral homelands have recorded histories that date back 1,000 years. The release of Eastern Europe from communism has sparked interest among Americans of all backgrounds in visiting Prague, Bratislava, Cracow, and Budapest, for their historic districts and period architecture. About 20,000 American businessmen, professionals, students, and expatriates now live in Prague.

Early Specialists on the Czechs and Slovaks

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, historians of the Slavs of Central and Eastern Europe have faced professional and intellectual problems that slowed the development of their field. Surely no members of the American Historical Association knew Czech and Slovak when it was founded in 1884 to disseminate the findings of historical research and promote historical studies. Most were gentlemen scholars and university professors from well- to-do families of Anglo-Protestant persuasion. Their knowledge of the Slavs, such as it was, came through works published in England, France, and Germany. Post-secondary instruction in Czech was first offered in 1885 at Oberlin College to facilitate religious and charitable outreach among immigrants. Instruction in Slovak commenced in 1909 at the Evangelical Lutheran Seminary in Springfield, Illinois. By 1930, nine colleges and universities were conducting classes in the two languages and their literatures. ³ Between the World Wars, St. Procopius College and Columbia University also taught Slovak, but no other post-secondary institution did so until the 1970s. ⁴ The lack of public demand and institutional interest had several causes: few job opportunities for those fluent in Czech and Slovak, the grammatical and phonetic differences of the two languages from English, and negative images of Slavs in textbooks, the mass media, and the popular culture. ⁵ The pressure on first-generation immigrants to "Americanize" and on their children to conform to the majority culture also worked against the perpetuation on the native tongues.

Among a handful of informed writers about the 800,000 Czech and Slovak immigrants in the United States before World War I were sociologist Emily Greene Balch and businessman-publicist Thomas Capek. ⁶ Professor Robert J. Kerner, the son of a Chicago editor and publisher of Czech origin, completed a doctoral dissertation on Bohemian history at Harvard University in 1914. His was the first work with such a geographical and topical focus out of 600 dissertations in history completed since the Ph.D. degree was inaugurated in the 1870s. Others of that genre followed slowly, however. By 1920, only eighteen doctorates had been awarded for studies on Central and Eastern Europe and Russia. Another dissertation on Czech history did not appear until 1930. One on Moravia, the region east of Bohemia, was completed in 1957, and the first on Slovakia in 1961. ⁷

Trends after World War I

The study of Czech and Slovak history made slight headway within an emerging overall field of Slavic studies after World War I. ⁸ During the war, Allied and emigre propagandists had hailed the strivings of liberal nationalists among the Austro-Hungarian Slavs to be free of the Habsburg dynasty and its faithful supporters among the German and Magyar nationalities. Several of President Woodrow Wilson's famous Fourteen Points - the peace program presented to Congress in January 1918 and accepted by other Allied leaders - advocated the right to a free and autonomous development for the peoples of Austria-Hungary and Eastern Europe according to the principle of self-determination. In some regions, the diverse nationalities lived so closely together that no perfect boundaries could be drawn. As a result, self-determination was embodied imperfectly in the post-war peace treaties; Slavs became dominant majorities in the newly independent states of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia. As United States troops returned home, the attention of the American public shifted from Europe toward domestic concerns. The main exception was news about the dramatic and brutal changes that occurred in revolutionary Bolshevik Russia.

Czech and Slovak immigration to the United States in the 1920s dwindled sharply. Restrictive laws here and fresh job opportunities in Europe, as it recovered from war and revolution, worked in tandem to cut the flow of Slavic newcomers. The restlessness of the post-war era was manifest in a nativist, anti-foreign mood with racial overtones. School children were admonished to disregard their parents' native languages and master English. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the National Origins Act of 1924 were specifically aimed at reducing the number of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, with the total not to exceed 150,000 annually, and also barred all East Asians. Czech and Slovak studies must have seemed a quaint sideline to the historical profession. Its most passionate scholarly debates concerned who was responsible for starting the World War (the "war guilt" question) whether "objectivity" or "relevance" was more vital to scholarship and teaching. ⁹ For advanced research in the Slavic countries, one needed funds to travel overseas and the leisure for extended study in archives, many of which were disorganized after the post-war changes in boundary and regime. The teams of historians and geographers that had advised State Department officials at the Paris Peace Conference, including the most influential one called the Inquiry, were disbanded. Those who were on leave from their academic positions returned to their campuses, and others to private life. Despite these conditions, the dawn of a new age for Slavic studies was on the horizon.

R. W. Seton-Watson at the AHA Meeting

An address by Professor Robert W. Seton-Watson at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) became a major catalyst for the promotion of Slavic studies in the United States. For the first time since the AHA was founded, the Slavs were to be the sole topic at one of its sessions, this time in Richmond, Virginia, December 1924. An overflow crowd attended a "Slavonic lunch" to hear Seton-Watson, holder of the Masaryk Chair of Central European History in London University and the English-speaking world's premier authority on the Czechs and Slovaks. Breathing optimism and goodwill, he proposed a transatlantic partnership between the scholars of the two English-speaking peoples to encourage teaching, research, and publication on the Slavs. He suggested new grammars and dictionaries and improved instruction for the training of qualified graduates. On behalf of the British Slavists, several of whom had accompanied him to Richmond, he offered the Americans full and equal participation on The Slavonic Review, a learned journal whose contents and circulation the School of Slavonic Studies wished to expand.

Seton-Watson conceded that a special problem confronted American Slavists: enormous physical distances that separated them from each other and from the Slavs in Europe. He observed, however, that the Americans had "one immense advantage, in the presence of very large Slav colonies" in American cities. These provided researchers with the opportunity to study their cultures and win their support for scholarship on the Slavs. He predicted the field would attract some university students to whom making money was secondary to love of learning. The six-year old Czechoslovak republic earned his special praise for its "remarkable experiment" in educating young exiles from Russia who might someday return to lead "a really free Russia." ¹⁰ He prophesied an era when Anglo-Saxon- Slav cooperation would be a decisive force for world peace and progress.

The AHA luncheon session was chaired by Professor Archibald Cary Coolidge of Harvard University, the pioneer and foremost advocate of Slavic studies in the United States. ¹¹ The session had been arranged by historians who once were his students or had served with him on The Inquiry and other diplomatic missions he undertook for American officials at Paris. These men included Professors Arthur I. Andrews (Tufts), Robert H. Lord (Harvard), and Robert J. Kerner (Missouri). None was more conscious than Coolidge of the difficulties in implementing Seton-Watson's far-reaching proposals. Coolidge knew the conservatism of university administrators toward increased budgets for innovative curriculums and research. For years he had spent his personal funds to introduce courses, hire faculty, and acquire books for the Harvard libraries. Besides, the Slavists were struggling for a place in the academic sun at a time when the American historical profession was struggling to define its specific role in higher education. Since the 1880s, it had evolved from a group of learned amateurs and undergraduate instructors into a nationwide guild of trained scholars with specific criteria for membership, of which the doctoral degree was primary. ¹² Measured against the historians of the United States and specialists in Greece, Rome, and Western Europe, the Slavists were a tiny fraction. In numbers they were comparable to the handful who promoted other new fields such as intellectual history and Asian studies.

Primary source materials on the Czech, Slovaks, and other nationalities were little known and widely scattered, forming a major obstacle to Slavic studies. Professor Kerner had detailed the problems of bibliography in two trail-blazing works published during the war. ¹³ Similarly, Professor Arthur P. Coleman (Columbia) warned that "whoever engages in Slavic research is obliged to be his own bibliographer." ¹⁴ Systematic collection building of Slavic materials was gathering momentum at the Library of Congress, the Hoover Institution, Harvard University, and especially the New York Public Library, but hardly elsewhere. ¹⁵ In 1917, the Slavonic Division of the New York Public Library contained 24,485 volumes in Slavic and Baltic languages, of which 21,395 were in Russian, 2,080 in Polish, and only 280 in Czech and Slovak. ¹⁶ Its separate Webster Branch, on Manhattan's East Side however, held about 15,000 works in Czech and Slovak, making it the largest vernacular-language collections outside of Czechoslovakia. ¹⁷ At Harvard, Professor Coolidge singlehandedly began the Slavic collection years before he became Library Director in 1910. His timely acquisition of rare books and pamphlets on Slovakia, for instance, had no counterpart in North America. ¹⁸ No great advance in library holdings of Slavica was to occur until after 1945, however, when private foundations and the Federal Government, prompted by fear of the Soviet Union and by imperatives of the Cold War in Eastern Europe, supplied ample funds for large-scale acquisitions.

The American Response

Seton-Watson realized that Coolidge was reacting to his proposals for Anglo-American cooperation with "all the caution of a real diplomatist." ¹⁹ Indeed, Coolidge believed the Americans were unprepared to share equal responsibility for The Slavonic Review or to found their own journal, and definitely incapable of opening a specialized center like the London School of Slavonic Studies. "Like so many things in America," Coolidge conceded, "the history of Slavonic studies has until recently been sporadic and casual." ²⁰

Professor Arthur Andrews explained the restrained American response as due to the lack of acquaintanceship among the Slavic historians at Richmond, many of whom were meeting each other for the first time. He endorsed London, "the Anglo-Saxon-Slavic capitol," as the logical headquarters for transatlantic cooperation. ²¹ Kerner echoed his colleagues' reticence but was more optimistic than they about the future. Slavic scholarship was undoubtedly meager, he wrote, but instruction in the history and languages of the Slavs was growing so rapidly that no university could proclaim itself to be first- class unless it offered some courses in the Slavic field. ²²

One concrete result of Seton-Watson's speech was that Kerner, Lord, and Samuel N. Harper (Chicago) agreed to become contributing editors on The Slavonic Review and to solicit manuscripts in the United States. "The American end," as Seton- Watson dubbed them, also named a publications committee to screen book-length submissions. ²³ Beyond that the Americans would not commit themselves. For example, they ignored Seton-Watson's suggestion that they make contact with the "Slav colonies" in the United States. That kind of community involvement was alien to the historical profession as it was then conceived. The prevailing view was that a scholar's individual quest for truth was in itself sufficient justification for research as a contribution to learning and ultimately to society. This view also prevailed at the universities in Central and Eastern Europe. Humanistic scholars who were civically and politically active were regarded with suspicion by their peers as demeaning their "calling" and allowing personal biases to enter into their methodologies. The upper-middle-class and patrician family backgrounds of most American historians of that era, and their status as privileged intellectuals, may also have deterred them from approaching the self-made immigrants in the ethnic "colonies" for financial and moral support. ²⁴ Not until the maturation of the fields of immigration history and social history in the 1960s and 1970s, and of other special fields that viewed history from "the underside," were these reservations to dissolve.

The most effective emissary to the Slavic communities in the United States turned out to be Seton-Watson himself. In three weeks of hectic travel after the Richmond session, he preached the gospels of expanded Slavic studies and Anglo-American-Slavic cooperation to groups in Chicago, Cleveland, and New York. They welcomed him as a longtime loyal friend of the Czechs, Slovaks, and Yugoslavs from before the war. His path was eased by the spadework of his illustrious friend, Czechoslovakia's president Thomas G. Masaryk, who, first as a visiting lecturer, then as a wartime exile activist, rallied Americans of Slavic descent to the cause of liberating the small nations of Central and Eastern Europe. ²⁵ Seton-Watson's appeals resulted in some new subscriptions to The Slavonic Review, but not the several hundred he needed to cover the journal's rising expenses and support issuance of an added number annually. He saw "the mobilization" of the ethnic communities to be the most specific result of his visit to the United States, but he did not neglect the academic intelligentsia. He lectured to the Council on Foreign Relations and at eight university campuses, from Chicago to Princeton, on the origins of the World War and the aims of the Little Entente. ²⁶

Before he had embarked from England for the AHA meeting, Seton- Watson had written to Stefan Osusky, the Czechoslovak Minister in Paris. He blithely predicted, on the basis of previous correspondence with his American colleagues, the The Slavonic Review is to become henceforth the joint organ of Britain and America, and we shall start a joint publication fund, and I hope other lines of communication." ²⁷ The caution and relative backwardness of most American Slavists became clear to him only after he had met them in person. He was disappointed by the reluctance of Coolidge and the others to accept his most important suggestions; he understood their reasons, but he refused to abandon his hopes. As he wrote to his wife in England, the Americans had taken "the first plunge" and they could never turn back. ²⁸

Between the Two World Wars

There was no turning back, but neither was there a great leap forward for Slavic studies or Czech and Slovak history. Instruction in the Russian language grew steadily, if modestly, into the 1930s, bolstered by the arrival in the United States of numerous Russian emigres and the acceptance of Russian culture as a legitimate part of the curriculum. Soviet Russia's stubborn resistance, against almost all predictions, to the German invasion of June 1941, provided added impetus. After the United states entered World War II in December 1941, hundreds of soldiers were taught Russian and other foreign languages in the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), and many continued their studies after 1945. To meet a growing demand, Slavic and Russian institutes, modeled after pioneer programs at Berkeley and Cornell, were established at Columbia, Harvard, and other institutions. The launching of the Soviet space satellite Sputnik in October 1957 further convinced Congress and the Executive Branch that America's basic interests were being challenged. Government and foundation grants fueled the expansion of library holdings and programs of interdisciplinary area studies on many campuses. ²⁹

While Russian studies gained ground, the Czech and Slovak fields had special problems. One was their complexity. Much of Czech and Slovak history lay within the frameworks of Austrian, Hungarian, German, and sometimes Polish history; but South Slav, Russian, and Ukrainian influences also existed. Between the wars, American historians evaluated the defunct Austro-Hungarian empire disdainfully. Coolidge and Lord saw it as an anachronistic, even artificial structure built on fallacious principles that had survived until 1918 only through tyranny and the indulgence of the Great Powers. ³⁰ Their interpretation dovetailed with that of Czech, Slovak, and other patriots fighting for their nation's independence and of politicians and patriotic historians in the new Czechoslovak state. This onesidedly negative evaluation clouded Habsburg, and therefore Czech and Slovak, studies into the 1960s. ³¹ Further, the concept of an "Atlantic civilization" that was current after World War II excluded Central and Eastern Europe as the seedbeds of antiliberal ideas, great wars, and arch-conservative regimes that foreshadowed Communist and Nazi totalitarianism.

Another problem was the dearth of institutions willing to commit themselves to Czech and Slovak studies. Coe College in Iowa, a state with a large immigrant population, was almost a lone pioneer. A campaign among Czech emigres in the 1920s to found Komensky College, named after the renowned seventeenth-century Moravian humanist and educator, was unsuccessful. ³² In the late 1920s, Professor Clarence Manning of Columbia University sought to establish an Institute of Czechoslovak Studies along lines resembling the university's institutes of French, Romanian, Italian, and Spanish culture. He wanted the new institute to assemble a library, publish articles and books, and bring "distinguished representatives of Czechoslovak culture in touch with corresponding American circles, especially in the University world." ³³

Manning's project was endorsed by Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia, and Zdenek Fierlinger, the Czechoslovak Minister in Washington, D.C. President Thomas G. Masaryk of Czechoslovakia agreed to be the Institute's patron. A list of thirty-five Honorary and Advisory Members included persons notable in scholarship and public affairs. ³⁴ The idea of one state of two closely related peoples and cultures that were gradually converging in their essences - an idea known as Czechoslovakism - pervaded the enterprise, although later developments were to show it was antihistorical and unrealistic. Nevertheless, had Manning's institute come to fruition, it would have fulfilled Seton- Watson's dream of transatlantic cooperation magnificently. For reasons unclear, it never began operations. ³⁵ Columbia's interest in Czechoslovakia was, however, justified in 1946, when the Thomas G. Masaryk Chair of Czechoslovak Studies was created with the financial support of the post-war Prague government. The distinguished philologist and literary scholar Roman Jakobson, co-founder of the Prague Linguistic Circle, served as its first incumbent. Still, the failure of Manning's project of twenty years earlier was emblematic of basic weaknesses that afflicted the field.

Weaknesses and Strengths

The foremost weakness was that the study of Czech and Slovak history lacked the organization and leadership necessary to overcome its peripheral status both in Slavic studies and in the historical profession. Neither Czech nor Slovak historians were ever sufficiently numerous and concentrated in one department of a major American research university for it to have emerged as the pacesetter in the field. The members of such a department might have published enough significant literature to consolidate the field and reinforce "the sense of identity of its practitioners." ³⁶ No university had the incentive, the interested advanced students, and the funds to staff such a department. No private benefactor came forward to endow Czech and Slovak studies, as was sometimes the case with other nationality groups.

The field also lacked a "towering figure" or two who might have shaped "an intellectual consensus of what was true and important" that would be accepted as valid, or as a working model, by their peers. ³⁷ The ingredients for such a consensus already existed in Russian history through the works of such historians as Michael T. Florinsky, Frank Golder, Paul N. Miliukov, B. H. Sumner, and George Vernadsky. Professor Kerner, who could have played a decisive role, revised and published his doctoral dissertation in 1932, but thereafter emphasized Russia and the Balkans. An approach to a consensus was achieved in a volume edited by Kerner in 1940, when Bohemia and Moravia lay under German armed occupation and Slovakia was a separate state. The volume, titled Czechoslovakia: Twenty Years of Independence, blended mourning with celebration, and the Czechs got much more attention than the Slovaks from its twenty co-authors. ³⁸ But it presented the republic's history in essentials and, with Seton-Watson's and Thomson's surveys that appeared three years later, formed a triad of reliable narratives. The implicit mainstream view was that the interwar republic, with Masaryk as its embodiment, was a logical culmination of more than a century of national renaissance and persistent struggle for freedom. The absence of an ideological division among Anglo-American specialists on Czechoslovakia at that time ruled out the type of contentious debates over "the meaning of Czech history" that had raged among Czech historians since Masaryk's Ceska otazka (The Czech Question) appeared in 1895. ³⁹

Estimable service to Czech scholarship was rendered by S. Harrison Thomson, a medieval scholar and Bohemist at the University of Colorado, who founded, edited, and financed the Journal of Central European Affairs (JCEA) from 1942 to 1964. The JCEA became the leading American periodical on the region between Germany and Russia. While excluding Russia and the Soviet Union, it did not slight the Germans, whose settlers and culture permeated "the lands between." Apart from Thomson, the sole expert on Czechoslovakia on the JCEA's editorial board was Otakar Odlozilik. He was a friend of Thomson's, had visited the United States in the 1930s, and emigrated from Prague, where he was a professor of history at Charles University. In 1948, he succeeded Roman Jakobson in the Masaryk Chair at Columbia University. In erudition, Odlozilik was unsurpassed. He generously counseled students, colleagues, and fellow emigres, but he deplored distractions from his research and writing, and he had no appetite for organizational leadership in the profession. Until 1955, when he joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, he lacked the security and peace of mind necessary for productive scholarship. ⁴⁰

There were talented scholars among the American specialists on the Czechs and Slovaks, but no "towering figure" in a class, for example with John K. Fairbank (Harvard) in Chinese history or Arthur O. Lovejoy (Johns Hopkins) in the history of ideas. Both were prime movers in training students and bringing their nascent fields into the core of historical studies by the 1940s. Similarly, research on Austria-Hungary benefited from respected works of synthesis by Arthur J. May (Rochester), Robert A. Kann (Rutgers), and Carlisle A. Macartney (Oxford) that were completed after World War II. Even as Thomson was terminating his journal, Professor R. John Rath and the United States Committee to Promote Studies of the Habsburg monarchy launched the Austrian History Yearbook in 1965. It covered the same regions and peoples as the JCEA, while setting a high standard of editorial quality.

The long running Slavic Review, journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), which emphasizes Russia and the former Soviet Union, also publishes articles on Central and Eastern Europe. Its first issue was originally planned for 1940, but Sir Bernard Pares in London requested that it be postponed. He asked the American Slavists to publish material intended for The Slavonic Review, which could not appear in England because of the war. ⁴¹

In a consummation of one of Seton-Watson's hopes, the American agreed. They issued Slavonic Year-book, then The Slavonic and East European Review in an "American Series" until 1944. A year later, The American Slavic and East European Review began publication with an Editorial Committee that included Roman Jakobson, Robert J. Kerner, S. Harrison Thomson, and George Vernadsky among its sixteen members. It was renamed Slavic Review in 1961. In recognition of changed world conditions, its Winter 1993 issue added a review subtitle: "American Quarterly of Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies."

A Labor of Love

In the 1990s, over one-hundred American historians, social scientists, and literary scholars publish on the history and culture of the Czechs, the Slovaks, and the other nationalities that have lived among them. Their numbers are minuscule compared with the 3,500 members of the AAASS, the foremost body of American Slavists, but as this bibliography attests, their research is impressive.

Given the problems facing these scholars, one surmises that they consider their specialty to be a labor of love. They must know Czech or Slovak, of course German, sometimes Hungarian and Latin. French is helpful, and occasionally Russian. They ponder the meanings of obscure documents in the quietude of secluded archives. American-born historians are committed because of family roots or fascination with Czech and Slovak pasts, or perhaps admiration for an inspiring teacher. Some are attracted by rural landscapes ornamented with baroque monuments, stucco homes, and village shrines, now facing up to modernity. Emigre scholars may seek to clarify the record of events and personages they knew firsthand.

These are the bonds uniting a small but vigorous community of historians that began to take shape in the 1920s. In this admirable volume, Czech and Slovak History: An American Bibliography by George J. Kovtun, the European Division of the Library of Congress provides them and the broad public with a guide to lands and peoples that no longer seem far-away.

STANLEY B. WINTERS

² Chamberlain's speech of Sept. 27, 1938, as quoted in R.G.D. Laffan, The Crisis over Czechoslovakia, January - September 1938, Vol. 2, Survey of International Affairs (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 13.  Back to text.

³ Arthur I. Andrews, "University Courses given in the United States of America on Slavic and other Eastern European History, Languages and Literatures," The Slavonic Review, 9, 27 (1930): i-xvi. By 1937, the totals were similar. Ibid., The Slavonic and East European Review, 15, 45 (1937): 1-24 [formerly The Slavonic Review].  Back to text.

⁴ Ibid., p. 11. George Dolak, A History of the Slovak Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States of America, 1902-1927 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1955), pp. 76-77, 146- 149. M. Mark Stolarik, "A Historical perspective on the Declining Use of the Slovak Language Over Three Generations in the United States of America," Kalendar-Almanac for the Year 1990 (Pittsburgh: National Slovak Society, 1990), pp. 65-67. By 1957, 5 American and 2 Canadian institutions offered instruction in Slovak; Jacob Ornstein, "The Development and Status of Slavic and East European Studies in America since World War II," The American Slavic and East European Review, 16, 3 (1957): pp. 369- 388, here p. 377.  Back to text.

⁵ Ronald Smelser, "Czechoslovakia in American Public Consciousness: Public Awareness and Political Discourse," in Grossbritannien, die USA und die bohmischen Lander 1848-1938, Ed. Eva Schmidt-Hartmann and Stanley B. Winters (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1991), pp. 285-297.  Back to text.

⁶ Emily Greene Balch, Our Slavic Fellow Citizens (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910), pp. 63-119. Thomas Capek, The Slovaks of Hungary: Slavs and Panslavism (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1906). Idem, The Cechs (Bohemians) in America: A Study of Their National, Cultural, and Political, Social, Economic and Religious Life (New York, 1912; 2nd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920).  Back to text.

⁷ Robert J. Kerner, "Bohemia under Leopold II, 1790-1792" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1914). Livingstone Porter, "A History of the University of Prague, 1348- 1622" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1930). For others, see Warren F. Kuehl, Dissertations in History. An Index to Dissertations Completed in History Departments of United States and Canadian Universities, 1873 - June 1970, 2 vols. (Lexington, KY: The University press of Kentucky, 1965-1972). Titles of dissertations on Czechoslovakia have been compiled by Josef Anderle, "American Doctoral Dissertations on Czechoslovak History and Related Subjects, 1914-1974," Czechoslovak History Newsletter, 1 (1976): 5-18. Ibid., 6, 1 (1983): pp. 3-4. Ibid., 11, 1 (1988): pp. 7-9.  Back to text.

⁸ On the early history of Slavic Studies, see Robert J. Kerner, "Slavonic Studies in America," The Slavonic Review, 3 (1924): pp. 243-258. George J. Vaskovic, "O slovanskych studiich ve Spojenych Statech" [Slavonic studies in the United States], Slovansky prehled 1914-1924. K sedesatym narozeninam Adolfa Cerneho, Ed. A. Frinta and A. Tichy (Prague: Orbis, 1925): 137-140. Arthur P. Coleman, "Slavonic Studies in the United States, 1918-1938," The Slavonic and East European Review, 17 (1938): 372-388. Robert F. Byrnes, A History of Russian and East European Studies in the United States: Selected Essays (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994).  Back to text.

⁹ Peter Novich, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Ch. 7-9.  Back to text.

¹⁰ R. W. Seton-Watson, "The Future of Slavonic Studies. Lecture at the American Historical Association Meeting, December 30, 1924," Private Papers of R. W. Seton- Watson, School of Slavonic Studies, University of London, Box 14/4, 13 pp. typescript, provided by Dr. Christopher Seton- Watson. Robert J. Kerner, "The Slavonic Conference at Richmond (VA)," The Slavonic Review, 3 (1924): 684-693. Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1924 (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1929), p. 40.  Back to text.

¹¹ Harold Jefferson Coolidge, Archibald Cary Coolidge: Life and Letters, 1866-1928 (New York: Books for Libraries, 1971 [reprint]). Robert F. Byrnes, Awakening American Education to the World: The Role of Archibald Cary Coolidge, 1866-1928 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame press, 1982).  Back to text.

¹² John Higham with Leonard Krieger and Felix Gilbert, History: The Development of Historical Studies in the United States (Englewood, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 52- 67. David D. van Tassel, "From Learned Society to Professional Organization: The American Historical Association, 1884-1900," American Historical Review, 89, 4 (1984): 929-956. Arthur S. Link, "The American Historical Association, 1884-1984: Retrospect and Prospect," American Historical Review, 90, 1 (1985): 1-17.  Back to text.

¹³ Robert Joseph Kerner, Slavic Europe: A Selected Bibliography in Western European Languages, Comprising History, Languages and Literatures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918), pp. viii-xi. The volume was dedicated to Coolidge. Idem, "The Foundations of Slavic Bibliography," The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 10, 1 (January 1916): 3-39.  Back to text.

14 Coleman, "Slavonic Studies in the United States, 1918-1939," p. 378.  Back to text.

15 Lad[islav] J. Zivny, "Slavica v katalogu americke knihovni associace [Slavica in the Catalog of the American Library Association], Slovansky prehled, 8, 8 (1906): 369-373. Jacob Ornstein, "Facilities and Activities of the Library of Congress in the Slavic and East European Field," The American Slavic and East European Review, 12, 4 (1953): 549-554. Robert H. Davis, Jr., "'Indispensable to Students in the Field': A First History of the Development of the Slavic, Baltic, and East European Collections of the Research Libraries, the New York Public Library," L' idea dell' unita e della reciprocita slava e il suo ruolo nello sviluppo della slavistica, Ed. Sergio Bonazza and Giovanna Brogi Bercoff (Rome: La Fenice Edizioni, 1992).  Back to text.

16 By 1935, Czech and Slovak holdings totalled 2,844 volumes; by 1945, 3,539; by 1966, 12,124. The New York Public Library. Slavonic Division (n.p., c. 1975 [brochure]), p. 3.  Back to text.

17 Information on the Webster Branch Library was provided from a draft of a forthcoming article by Robert H. Davis, Jr.  Back to text .

18 Byrnes, Awakening American Education to the World, p. 123.  Back to text.

19 R. W. Seton-Watson, "Private. Notes on Visit to America (December 1924-January 1925)," 5 pp. typescript, Private Papers of R. W. Seton-Watson.  Back to text.

20 Archibald Cary Coolidge, "American Slavonic Studies," The Slavonic Review, 3 (1924): 242.  Back to text.

21 Letter of Arthur I. Andrews to Sir Bernard Pares, January 8, 1925. Private papers of Sir Bernard Pares, CAY, University of London.  Back to text.

22 Kerner, "Slavonic Studies in America," pp. 246-248.  Back to text.

23 Seton-Watson, "Private. Notes on a Visit to America," p. 2.  Back to text.

24 John S. Bassett, secretary to the AHA in 1920, is quoted as having said: "Historical writing has never been a poor man's pursuit, but always a pursuit of the well-to-do or well endowed." See Lawrence Neysey, "The Plural Organized World of the Humanities," in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920, Ed. Alexandra Oleson and John Voss (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 77. Also William E. Leuchtenberg, "The Historian and the Public Realm: Presidential Address," American Historical Association Annual Report 1991 (City of Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, c. 1992), pp. 17-38.  Back to text.

25 Thomas G. Masaryk, The Making of a State: Memories and Observations, 1914-1918 (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1927), pp. 84-87," where Masaryk uses the phrases "Czech colonies" and "American colonies." For Masaryk's campaigns in the United States, see George J. Kovtun, Masaryk & America: Testimony of a Relationship (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1988). Also Jiri [George] Kovtun, Masarykuv triumf: Pribeh konce velke valky [Masaryk's Triumph: The Story of the End of the Great War] (Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1987), esp. Ch. 9-12.  Back to text.

26 Seton-Watson, "Private. Notes on a Visit to America," p. 5.  Back to text.

27 Letter of Seton-Watson to Stefan Osusky, November 17, 1924.  Back to text.

28 Letter of Seton-Watson to his wife, December 31, 1924.  Back to text.

29 On the wartime and postwar expansion in Slavic studies, see Oleg A. Maslenikov, "Slavic Studies in America, 1939-1946," The Slavonic and East European Review, 25 (1947): 528-537. Robert F. Byrnes, "American Publications on East Central Europe, 1945-1957," in Bibliography of American Publications on East Central Europe 1945-1957, Ed. Robert F. Byrnes (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Publications, c. 1958, xv-xxx. William B. Edgerton, "The History of Slavistic Scholarship in the United States," in Beitrage zur Geschichte der Slawistik in nichtslawischen Landern, Ed. Josef Hamm and Gunther Wytrzens (Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1985), pp. 491-528. Also the critical comments on Edgerton's essay by Horace G. Lunt, "On the History of Slavic Studies in the United States," Slavic Review, 46, 2 (1987): 294- 301.  Back to text.

30 R. John Rath, "Das Amerikanische Schriftum uber den Untergang der Monarchie," in Die Auflosung des Habsburgerreiches: Zusammenbruch und Neuorientierung im Donaraum, Ed. Richard G. Plaschka and Karlheinz Mack (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1970), pp. 236-248. Idem, "Three Score and Fifteen Years of Habsburg and Austrian Historiography and a Quarter- Century of Editing the Austrian History Yearbook," Austrian History Yearbook, 22 (1991): 1-20.  Back to text.

31 David S. Luft, "Austrian History as a Field of Study in the United States," Modern Austrian Literature, 20, 3-4 (1987): 1-15.  Back to text.

32 Kerner, "Slavonic Studies in America," p. 249. A Komensky Chair of Education was founded at Coe College in 1923. Robert J. Kerner, "Slavonic Studies in America," The Slavonic Review, 3 (1924): 1-16, here p. 5.  Back to text.

33 Letter of Clarence A. Manning to R. W. Seton-Watson, November 29, 1926, Columbia University, Central Files.  Back to text.

34 Among the Honorary Members listed by Manning were President Nicholas Murray Butler, Edward Benes, Charles and Richard Crane, Jan Masaryk, R.W. Seton-Watson, Ales Hrdlicka, Robert J. Kerner, Michael I. Pupin, James T. Shotwell, and Leo Wiener. "The Institute of Czechoslovak Studies," 3 pp. undated typescript probably for November 1926, Columbia University, Central Files.  Back to text .

35 Letter to the author, August 18, 1992, from Manager of University Records, Columbia University. A parallel American institute proposed to function in Czechoslovakia at about the same time did not materialize. Robert F. Byrnes, "The American Institute for Slavic Studies in Prague: A Dream of the 1920s," in Russland-Deutschland-America: Festschrift fur Fritz T. Epstein zum 80. Geburtstag, Ed. Alexander Fischer et al. (Wiesbaden: Otto Harassowitz, 1978), pp. 257-266.  Back to text.

36 Edward Shils, "The Order of Learning in the United States: The Ascendancy of the University," in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920, p. 38. See also Donald W. Treadgold, "Editorial Note," American Slavic and East European Review, 20, 1 (1961): 1-5.  Back to text .

37 Shils, "The Order of Learning in the United States," p. 38. Lunt, On the "History of Slavic Studies in the United States," p. 299, where he uses the term "towering figure." Kerner identified the "towering figure" problem for American scholarship on Russian history and Slavic philology when he wrote sixty years earlier that it "has no yet produced a Klyuchevsky or a Jagic, nor yet a Mackenzie Wallace or a Leroy- Beaulieu." See Kerner, "Slavonic Studies in America," The Slavonic Review, 3 (1924): 7.  Back to text.

38 Czechoslovakia: Twenty Years of Independence, Ed. Robert J. Kerner (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1940). On Kerner's career, see Wayne S. Vucinich, "Professor Robert J. Kerner," California Monthly, 61, 3 (1950): 12, 37, Bancroft Library C-B 1057, Carton 18, University of California, Berkeley. Joseph F. Zacek, "Introduction," in Robert J. Kerner, Bohemia in the Eighteenth Century (Orono, ME: Academic International, 1969 [reprint]), pp. vii-xv.  Back to text.

39 Rene Wellek, "Introduction" in Tomas G. Masaryk, The Meaning of Czech History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1974), vii-xxiii. Milan Hauner, "The Meaning of Czech History: Masaryk versus Pekar," in T. G. Masaryk (1850-1937), Vol. 3: Statesman and Cultural Force, Ed. Harry Hanak (London: Macmillan, 1990, in association with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, 1990), pp. 24-42.  Back to text.

40 R. John Rath, "S. Harrison Thomson," Austrian History Yearbook, XI (1975): 382-383. Gerald Stone, "Roman Jakobson," Times Literary Supplement (London), March 2, 1984. Stanley B. Winters, "Otakar Odlozilik's American Career: The Uneasy Self-Exile of a Czech Historian, 1948-1973," in Grossbritannien, die USA und die bohmischen Lander 1848-1938, pp. 153-169.  Back to text.

41 I. W. Roberts, History of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies 1915-1990 (London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, 1991), p. 42. The Slavonic Year-Book (American Series I) in 1941; then as The Slavonic and East European Review (American Series, II and III) in 1942-1944.  Back to text.