Little contemporary scholarship on Slovak history exists in English. This title fills an important gap in historiography about events throughout Central Europe over the last fourteen centuries. It presents the history of Slovakia in terms of the latest scholarship and in the context of on-going historical debate about Slovak history and its presentation in post-socialist world. Extensive footnotes by scholars, 350 color illustrations, Index, Bibliography, Foreword and Epilogue.

Until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, Slovakia's identity seemed inextricably linked with that of the former state. This book explores the key moments and themes in the history of Slovakia from the Duchy of Nitra's ninth-century origins to the establishment of independent Slovakia at midnight 1992–3. Leading scholars chart the gradual ethnic awakening of the Slovaks during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and examine how Slovak national identity took shape with the codification of standard literary Slovak in 1843 and the subsequent development of the Slovak national movement. They show how, after a thousand years of Magyar-Slovak coexistence, Slovakia became part of the new Czechoslovak state from 1918–39, and shed new light on its role as a Nazi client state as well as on the postwar developments leading up to full statehood in the aftermath of the collapse of communism in 1989. There is no comparable book in English on the subject.

A chronology of Slovak history from the earliest times through the end of 2000.

This book takes you on an emotional journey deep into the Slovak and Slavic inner world. Follow the trail that opens your eyes to the magical realm guarded by the Linden tree and its sacred heart-shaped leaf. It is a code that carries the story of the people born at the crossroads of worlds.

In this groundbreaking work, Stanislav Kirschbaum examines the Slovak contribution to European civilization in the Middle Ages, the development of a specifically Slovak consciousness in the nineteenth century, the Slovak struggle for autonomy in Czech-dominated Czechoslovakia created by the Treaty of Versailles, the problems that the first Slovak Republic faced in a Nazi-controlled Europe, and the Slovak reaction to the communist regime. Kirschbaum completes this fascinating history by examining the debate about the future of Slovakia and the events that led to independence.

Bohemia and Moravia, today part of the Czech Republic, was the first territory with a majority of non-German speakers occupied by Hitler’s Third Reich on the eve of the World War II. Tens of thousands of Jewish inhabitants in the so called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia soon felt the tragic consequences of Nazi racial politics. Not all Czechs, however, remained passive bystanders during the genocide. After the destruction of Czechoslovakia in 1938-39, Slovakia became a formally independent but fully subordinate satellite of Germany. Despite the fact it was not occupied until 1944, Slovakia paid Germany to deport its own Jewish citizens to extermination camps. About 270,000 out of the 360,000 Czech and Slovak casualties of World War II were victims of the Holocaust. Despite these statistics, the Holocaust vanished almost entirely from post-war Czechoslovak, and later Czech and Slovak, historical cultures. The communist dictatorship carried the main responsibility for this disappearance, yet the situation has not changed much since the fall of the communist regime. The main questions of this study are how and why the Holocaust was excluded from the Czech and Slovak history.