SASW Speakers’ Series: Six Events that Made Milan Štefánik a Founding Father of Czecho-Slovakia – May 4, 2019

The Slovak American Society of Washington, D.C.
&
Friends of Slovakia present:

“Six Events that Made Milan Štefánik a Founding
Father of Czecho-Slovakia”

by Kevin McNamara
Foreign Policy Research Institute

Saturday, May 4th, 1:30 pm

Arlington Central Library
Bluemont Room (2nd Floor)
1015 N Quincy Street, Arlington, VA

Free admission, but RSVP is required by
Wednesday, May 1st to rsvp@dcslovaks.org

As the only wholly Slovak leader of the independence movement and government-in-exile led by Tomáš G. Masaryk, Milan R. Štefánik played as significant a role in the founding of Czecho-Slovakia as did Edvard Beneš, the aide to Masaryk who succeeded him as president of Czecho-Slovakia. Masaryk and Beneš became well-known names in Europe and North America, and are still recalled by historians. The worldwide reputations of Masaryk, the first president of Czecho-Slovakia, and Beneš, its first Foreign Minister, began to spread across the globe mostly after 1918, as they took power in Prague, while Štefánik died far too young, killed in a plane crash on May 4, 1919, on his final journey home. Author Kevin J. McNamara will explain why Štefánik deserves credit for six major contributions to the independence movement that finally liberated the Czechs and Slovaks in 1918.

Kevin McNamara is the author of “Dreams of a Great Small Nation: The Mutinous Army that Threatened a Revolution, Destroyed an Empire, Founded a Republic, and Remade the Map of Europe (New York: Public Affairs, 2016). McNamara’s narrative history focuses on the exploits of the Czecho-Slovak Legion in revolutionary Russia and its role in the founding of Czecho-Slovakia. He is an Associate Scholar of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia, PA, and a former contributing editor of its quarterly journal, Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs.