Robert W. Heingartner kept this diary during his two year service as American consul in Kaunas, the provisional capital of Lithuania, 1926-1928. First titling the work “Impressions of Kaunas,” he wanted to record all his impressions of this small city about which he actually knew very little. He started with negative impressions, but he soon came to like it. He watched its growth with considerable sympathy. The diary’s appeal lies in its picture of daily life in Kaunas as the “provisional capital” of a newly independent small state – the conditions of life in the city, the social life of the diplomats, and backstage episodes in the life of the foreign diplomats. The diary records some unusual details about the family of Antanas Smetona, the ruler of Lithuania from 1926 to 1940, and it abounds in interesting commentary on the attitudes of both Lithuanians and foreigners.

Robert W. Heingartner kept this diary during his two year service as American consul in Kaunas, the provisional capital of Lithuania, 1926-1928. First titling the work ¿Impressions of Kaunas,¿ he wanted to record all his impressions of this small city about which he actually knew very little. He started with negative impressions, but he soon came to like it. He watched its growth with considerable sympathy. The diary¿s appeal lies in its picture of daily life in Kaunas as the ¿provisional capitol¿ of a newly independent small state ¿ the conditions of life in the city, the social life of the diplomats, and backstage episodes in the life of the foreign diplomats. The diary records some unusual details about the family of Antanas Smetona, the ruler of Lithuania from 1926 to 1940, and it abounds in interesting commentary on the attitudes of both Lithuanians and foreigners. Alfred Erich Senn, the editor of the diary, is emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin ¿ Madison in the USA as well as Visiting Professor at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. He has written extensively on the history of Lithuania in the twentieth century. His father, Alfred Senn, was professor of Lithuanian language at the University of Lithuania in Kaunas at the time Heingartner was working there.

In this book, Tomas Balkelis explores how the Lithuanian state was created and shaped by the Great War from its onset in 1914 to the last waves of violence in 1923. As the very notion of independent Lithuania was constructed during the war, violence is seen as an essential part of the formation of Lithuanian state, nation, and identity. War was much more than simply the historical context in which the tectonic shift from empire to nation-state took place. It transformed people, policies, institutions, and modes of thought in ways that would continue to shape the nation for decades after the conflict subsided. In telling the story of the post-WWI conflict in Lithuania, War, Revolution, and Nation-Making in Lithuania, 1914-1923 focuses on the soldiers and civilians involved in the conflict, rather than the strategies and acts of politicians, generals, or diplomats. The volume's two main themes are the impact of military, social, and cultural mobilizations on the local population, and different types of violence that were so characteristic of the region throughout the period. The actors in this story are people displaced by war and mobilized for war: refugees, veterans, volunteers, peasant conscripts, POWs, paramilitary fighters, and others who took to guns, not diplomacy, to assert their power. This is the story of how their lives were changed by war and how they shaped the society that emerged after war.

Discusses the political cooperation between Jews and Lithuanians in the Tsarist Empire from the last decades of the 19th century until the early 1920s. These years saw the transformation of both Jewish and Lithuanian political life. Within the Jewish community, the previously dominant integrationists were now challenged both by those who believed that the Jews were not a religious but an ethnic or proto-nationalist group and those who believed that only with the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist state would Jewish integration be possible. Among the Lithuanians, the emergence of a modern national identity became increasingly prevalent.

The book focuses on peacekeeping as a device for maintaining international stability, and for remedying situations in which states are in conflict with each other. Alan James examines around fifty cases, explaining the background to each one, and analysing its political significance. There is also a detailed examination of the concept of peacemaking, and a look into its increasing importance in international affairs, emphasised by the fact that the United Nations won the Nobel Peace Prize for its peacekeeping activities.