In October 1966, a conference of Czech, Slovak, and Magyar historians discussed in Bratislava (Czechoslovakia) the characteristics of Fascism in their respective countries. The nature of Slovak nationalism caught the attention of the participants. While mainly analysing Slovak-Magyar relations, the scholars touched only slightly on some of the other ethnic groups living in Slovakia, Germans, Ukrainians, Poles, Gypsies, and Jews. In order to study and understand Slovak nationalism during the Second World War, problems and conditions of each of the above-metnioned groups should be studied. A mutual comparison might assist in the creation of a substantive summary. Yet even a most thoroughgoing analysis of the relations between a dominant nation and the subjected minorities would not provide us with a comprehensive definition of Slovak nationalism.

Most of the one and one-half million Poles who immigrated to the United States before World War II were people of rural, Catholic, Slavic stock in search of greater economic and social opportunities. They settled in urban centers primarily in the middle Atlantic, mid-Western, and New England states where they formed communities (Polonias) around the steel mills, coal and iron mines, slaughter houses and meat packing plants, oil refineries, shoe and textile factories, granaries and milling plants. Their labor was an important element in the industrialization of America. They were among the millions of unknown persons from eastern and southern Europe, as Michael Novak put it, “who have strengthened family and neighborhood life in America, and from 1930's to the present have made possible the longest strides in the nation's history in economic matters and civil rights.” Very few scholars and intellectuals, however, could be found among these Polish immigrants. When Polish scholars, intellectuals, or artists emigrated from partitioned Poland, usually after unsuccessful revolutions, they settled in France or some other European country.

In the eighteenth century, prior to the partitioning of the Polish Commonwealth by its neighbors, the Polish szlachta or gentry constituted the Polish “nation.” Then, of course, the term did not have an ethnic connotation but rather a political one: the gentry alone had all the rights that came with full citizenship in the Polish state. The existence of such a privileged ruling class or estate was not uncommon in Europe. The szlachta, however, differed in two important respects from the gentry of most other European states. First of all, the Polish gentry included an unusually large portion of the total population: 9–10 per cent (25 per cent of the Polish-speaking population). Secondly, in theory all members of the szlachta had equal political rights whether they were magnates or completely landless. Consequently, when in the nineteenth century economic forces gradually transformed Polish society from a feudal social structure into a more modern one, individuals of gentry origin acted as a leaven bringing their consciousness of membership in the nation to the new classes of society that they joined. Some of the szlachta, influenced by the Enlightenment and the “Democratic Revolution” as well as by the obvious need for internal reform, sought to broaden the concept of the nation to include the other social classes even before Poland lost its independence. They, however, still conceived of the nation in terms of citizenship in the state. It is therefore ironic that this social broadening of the concept of the Polish nation actually occurred in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the Polish state did not exist.

Ukranian scholars in the United States pursue a broad range of disciplines, making significant contributions to such fields of inquiry as literature, linguistics, political studies, and economics. This paper will review the contributions to the study of Ukrainian history. It will examine some of the practical problems affecting the development of the Ukrainian historical studies in the United States and then review the work of a few selected scholars, whose research and publications typify the tenor and the direction of the Ukrainian historiography outside the Soviet Union.

George Y. Shevelov, known as a capable Slavist, is also praised as a very influential critic of modern Ukrainian literature. In this paper, however, we shall concern ourselves with Shevelov's linguistic interest only, and in particular with his contributions to the prehistory of Slavic: the historical phonology of Common Slavic.

I first heard of Pitirim A. Sorokin some twenty years ago as an undergraduate student. Although his name was frequently invoked by my sociology professors, it was just as frequently dismissed. Sorokin, I quickly learned, was outdated and irrelevant as far as sociology was concerned, and indeed, did not merit any of my serious reading attention. I must shamefacedly confess that I readily accepted this judgment. Its utterance admitted me into the ranks of the sociological cognoscenti of that time in one bold stroke, and simultaneously relieved me of the necessity of plowing through some thousands of pages of print which constituted the formidable quantity of Sorokin's publications. Hence, there is some degree of irony and more than an ordinary degree of pleasure in accepting the task of assessing Sorokin's contribution to American sociology. For as I have since learned, Sorokin made an enormous contribution to the development of the discipline–and his works will continue to do so in the future.