Beyond the Sea of Beer

About the Book

This is a comprehensive history of immigrants from the historic lands of the Bohemian Crown and its successor states, including Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, based on the painstaking lifetime research of the author. The reader will find lots of new information in this book that is not available elsewhere. The title of the book comes from a popular song of the famous Czech artistic duo, Voskovec and Werich, who described America in those words when they lived here, reflecting on their love for this country. It covers the period starting soon after the discovery of the New World to date. The emphasis is on the US, although Canada and Latin America are also covered. It covers the arrival and the settlement of the immigrants in various states and regions of America, their harsh beginnings, the establishment of their communities, and their organization. A separate section is devoted to the contributions of notable individuals in different areas of human endeavor, including Bohemians, Moravians, Bohemian Jews, and the Slovaks. These people excelled in just about every facet of human undertaking. Even though a total number of these immigrants were fewer than other ethnic groups, their accomplishments were phenomenal. Nothing like this has ever been published since the time Thomas Čapek wrote his classic The Čechs (Bohemians) in America some one hundred years ago.

About the Author

Míla Rechcigl, as he likes to be called, is a versatile person with many talents, a man of science and organization professionally, and Renaissance man by breadth of his knowledge and scholarly interests. Born in Czechoslovakia to a son of the youngest member of the Czechoslovak Parliament, he spent the War years under Nazi occupation and after the Communist’s coup d’état escaped to the West and immigrated to the US. He received training as biochemist at Cornell University and later served as a research biochemist at NIH. Following his additional training he became a science administrator, first at the DHEW and later at US Department of State and AID. Apart from his scientific and science administrative pursuits, he served as an editor of several scientific series and authored more than thirty books and handbooks. Beyond that, he is considered an authority on immigration history, on which subject he had written extensively. He was also one of the founders of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU) and for many years served as its President.