Download Free Eastern Lithuania Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Eastern Lithuania and write the review.

This book, first published in 1994, studies the rise of a pagan state in late medieval Christendom against a background of crises in Europe.
For four centuries, the Polish�Lithuanian state encompassed a major geographic region comparable to present-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Estonia, and Romania. Governed by a constitutional monarchy that offered the numerous nobility extensive civil and political rights, it enjoyed unusual domestic tranquility, for its military strength kept most enemies at bay until the mid-seventeenth century and the country generally avoided civil wars. Selling grain and timber to western Europe helped make it exceptionally wealthy for much of the period. The Polish�Lithuanian State, 1386�1795 is the first account in English devoted specifically to this important era. It takes a regional rather than a national approach, considering the internal development of the Ukrainian, Jewish, Lithuanian, and Prussian German nations that coexisted with the Poles in this multinational state. Presenting Jewish history also clarifies urban history, because Jews lived in the unincorporated "private cities" and suburbs, which historians have overlooked in favor of incorporated "royal cities." In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the private cities and suburbs often thrived while the inner cities decayed. The book also traces the institutional development of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland�Lithuania, one of the few European states to escape bloody religious conflict during the Reformation and Counter Reformation. Both seasoned historians and general readers will appreciate the many excellent brief biographies that advance the narrative and illuminate the subject matter of this comprehensive and absorbing volume.
The book provides an innovatory internationally comparative causal analysis of the variation in political and economic outcomes of post-communist transformations after the first decade, using multi-value qualitative comparative analysis and TOSMANA software. This analysis includes a critical revision of received dichotomies (e.g. on gradualism versus "shock therapy") about post-communist transformation, a discussion of the counterfactual scripts of post-communist transformation, and contributes to current debates on the varieties of post-communist capitalism. This conceptual framework is applied in case studies of the transformation in the Baltic States, with special consideration given to the possibility of alternatives to the Lithuanian way and the challenges of populism in this country's politics. Book jacket.
At the start of the 20th century, little thought was given to Lithuania as important to the larger political arena. During the time between the two World Wars, Lithuania drew attention as it won--and then lost--independent statehood. The authors here reveal how this small country, caught at the intersection of Europe's great powers, was compelled to follow a foreign policy of survival.
This book argues that – contrary to contemporary Lithuanian nationalist rhetoric – Lithuanian nationalism was modern and socially constructed in the period from the emergence of the Lithuanian national movement in the late nineteenth century to the birth of an independent state in 1918. The book brings into sharp focus those aspects of the history of Lithuania that earlier commentators had not systematically explored: it shows how, in this period, the nascent political elite fashioned its own and the emerging nation’s identity. Moreover, factors such as the elite’s social isolation, educational experience, marital strategies and narrowly based, fragmented and uncoordinated political activities were crucial factors in shaping identity and nation-building. It demonstrates how the elite was often in conflict with the peasantry, the religious establishment and other ethnic groups, and how critical considerations such as class, religion, displacement and ethnicity – rather than national ideology – were. The book’s conclusion that Lithuanian nationalism is a construct emerging from modern social forces is highly significant for understanding nationalism and contemporary political developments in Eastern Europe more generally.
The Golden Age of the Lithuanian Yeshivas tells the story of the last chapter of Jewish rabbinical schools in Eastern Europe, from the eve of World War I to the outbreak of World War II. The Lithuanian yeshiva established a rigorous standard for religious education in the early 1800s that persisted for over a century and continues to this day. Although dramatically reduced and forced into exile in Russia and Ukraine during World War I, the yeshivas survived the war, with yeshiva heads and older students forming the nucleus of the institutions. These scholars rehabilitated the yeshivas in their original locations and quickly returned to their regular activities. Moreover, they soon began to expand into areas now empty of yeshivas in lands occupied by Hasidic populations in Poland and even into the lands that would soon become Israel. During the economic depression of the 1930s, students struggled for food and their leaders journeyed abroad in search for funding, but their determination and commitment to the yeshiva system continued. Despite the material difficulties that prevailed in the yeshivas, there was consistently a full occupancy of students, most of them in their twenties. Young men from all over the free world joined these yeshivas, which were considered the best training programs for the religious professions and rabbinical ordination. The outbreak of World War II and the Soviet occupation of first eastern Poland and then Lithuania marked the beginning of the end of the Yeshivas, however, and the Holocaust ensured the final destruction of the venerable institution. The Golden Age of the Lithuanian Yeshivas is the first book-length work on the modern history of the Lithuanian yeshivas published in English. Through exhaustive historical research of every yeshiva, Ben-Tsiyon Klibansky brings to light for the first time the stories, lives, and inner workings of this long-lost world.
"This gripping and well-documented account of the history of the town of Vilnius and its surrounding region from the Polish ultimatum of March 1938, which forced Lithuania to open diplomatic relations with Poland, to the incorporation of Lithuania into the Soviet Union in June 1940 is set against the evolution of Lithuania's relations with her neighbours during this crucial period. It is a major contribution to the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the subsequent evolution of Nazi Soviet relations. Prof. Liekis presents a remarkable history based on archival sources never before utilized in any English-language study. In revealing the geopolitical, ideological, economic, social and ethnic dimensions of an immense tragedy in the heart of Europe, the author provides a new perspective on the unraveling of a society and nation during the initial days of World War II as prelude to the most violent period in European history."--Publisher's description.
The history of eastern European is dominated by the story of the rise of the Russian empire, yet Russia only emerged as a major power after 1700. For 300 years the greatest power in Eastern Europe was the union between the kingdom of Poland and the grand duchy of Lithuania, one of the longest-lasting political unions in European history. Yet because it ended in the late-eighteenth century in what are misleadingly termed the Partitions of Poland, it barely features in standard accounts of European history. The Making of the Polish-Lithuanian Union 1385-1569 tells the story of the formation of a consensual, decentralised, multinational, and religiously plural state built from below as much as above, that was founded by peaceful negotiation, not war and conquest. From its inception in 1385-6, a vision of political union was developed that proved attractive to Poles, Lithuanians, Ruthenians, and Germans, a union which was extended to include Prussia in the 1450s and Livonia in the 1560s. Despite the often bitter disagreements over the nature of the union, these were nevertheless overcome by a republican vision of a union of peoples in one political community of citizens under an elected monarch. Robert Frost challenges interpretations of the union informed by the idea that the emergence of the sovereign nation state represents the essence of political modernity, and presents the Polish-Lithuanian union as a case study of a composite state. The modern history of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus cannot be understood without an understanding of the legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian union. This volume is the first detailed study of the making of that union ever published in English.
Appearing on the world stage in 1918, Lithuania suffered numerous invasions, border changes and large scale population displacements.The successive occupations of Stalin in 1940 and Hitler in 1941, mass deportations to the Gulag and the elimination of the Jewish community in the Holocaust gave the horrors of World War II a special ferocity. Moreover, the fighting continued after 1945 with the anti-Soviet insurrection, crushed through mass deportations and forced collectivization in 1948-1951. At no point, however, did the process of national consolidation take a pause, making Lithuania an improbably representative case study of successful nation-building in this troubled region. As postwar reconstruction gained pace, ethnic Lithuanians from the countryside – the only community to remain after the war in significant numbers – were mobilized to work in the cities. They streamed into factory and university alike, creating a modern urban society, with new elites who had a surprising degree of freedom to promote national culture. This book describes how the national cultural elites constructed a Soviet Lithuanian identity against a backdrop of forced modernization in the fifties and sixties, and how they subsequently took it apart by evoking the memory of traumatic displacement in the seventies and eighties, later emerging as prominent leaders of the popular movement against Soviet rule.