Foreword

The Czechs are not one of Europe’s unknown nations, but in spite of their central position on the continent, they are hardly among the most familiar European nations. This work will help remedy that situation. Twentieth-century events only brought Czechoslovakia to public attention episodically, if dramatically, from Tomáš G. Masaryk’s visit to the United States in 1918 to Václav Havel’s apotheosis at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York in 1990. On a grimmer note, the Munich Conference of 1938 paved the way for World War II, and Jan Masaryk’s death in 1948 marked a new nadir in the chill of the Cold War in Europe. The Prague Spring of 1968 made Czechoslovakia and its peoples front-page news once more, for a time, and by 1988 coverage of the tottering communist system returned Czechoslovakia to the newspapers and television screens. Now, as the Czech Republic joins the European Union and thousands of American tourists flock to Prague, a reader interested in getting beyond the headlines and tourist destinations to learn more about this people and their land would do well to pick up this book. The author follows the historical development of the Czechs and their lands from the emergence of a Bohemian duchy under the Slavic