Notable Americans with Slovak Roots
Bibliography, Bio-Bibliography and Historiography
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About the Book
The two individuals featured on the front cover, no doubt, are among the most distinguished Slovak Americans: the physician Joseph Goldberger and the theologian Jaroslav Pelikan Jr. Joseph Goldberger (1874–1929) (on the left in uniform) was an American epidemiologist in the US Public Health Service. He discovered the cause of pellagra and stepped on a number of medical toes when his research experiments showed that diet and not germs caused the disease. Due to his important discoveries, he was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr. (1923–2006) was one of the world’s leading scholars in the history of Christianity, who authored more than thirty books. Pelikan was the Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University and dean of the graduate school. He was president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of over forty honorary doctorates all over the world.
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.