Encyclopedia of Bohemian and Czech-American Biography

About the Book

As the Czech ambassador to the United States, H. E. Petr Gandalovič noted in his foreword to this book that Míla Rechcígl has written a monumental work representing a culmination of his life achievement as a historian of Czech America. The Encyclopedia of Bohemian and Czech American Biography is a unique and unparalleled publication. The enormity of this undertaking is reflected in the fact that it covers a universe, starting a few decades after the discovery of the New World, through the escapades and significant contributions of Bohemian Jesuits and Moravian brethren in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the mass migration of the Czechs after the revolutionary year of 1848, and up to the early years of the twentieth century and the influx of refugees from Nazism and communism. The encyclopedia has been planned as a representative, a comprehensive and authoritative reference tool, encompassing over 7,500 biographies. This prodigious and unparalleled encyclopedic vade mecum, reflecting enduring contributions of notable Americans with Czech roots, is not only an invaluable tool for all researchers and students of Czech American history but is also a carte blanche for the Czech Republic, which considers Czech Americans as their own and as a part of its magnificent cultural history.

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 the 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 communists’ coup d'état, escaped to the West and immigrated to the United States. 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 the 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.