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East European Quarterly, Vol. VI, No. 1

The studies that follow were originally presented, along with others, at an international symposium to commemorate the centenary of the death of František Palacký, organized by me and held at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in August, 1976. In all, twenty-five papers written by scholars from seven countries were presented, research papers and essays dealing with varied aspects of the life and career of the “Father of the Czech Nation.”

Commemorative volumes have been published on the anniversaries of Palacký’s birth and death in the past, notably in 1898, 1926, 1946 and 1968. The ten selections published here, however, comprise the first such cooperative effort ever published on Palacký outside the Czech lands. Some of the earlier collections included contributions by non-Czech authors-French, English, German, even American. Without exception, they were brief, general eulogies and reminiscences, quite unlike the serious scholarly treatments to be found here-in itself convincing evidence of how far the professional study of Czech history has come outside of the Czech lands, since Palacký himself launched the discipline. Like its predecessors, this anniversary work focuses on Palacký’s major roles–historian, statesman, mainspring of the Czech “National Awakening”–but it is more candid, I think, in evaluating his performance in them and in assessing the lasting worth of what he accomplished. Svejkovská’s detailed of the Czech and German versions of Palacký’s History is unique, and in the absence of a proper scholarly biography of the man in any language, the intimate treatments of his personality and private life