Jusaitis Antanas (comp.) The history of the Lithuanian nation and its present national aspirations

Translated from the Lithuanian. — The Lithuanian Catholic Truth Society, 1918. — x, 156 p.The Lithuanians are among the smaller nations of Europe. In the latter part of the nineteenth century this nation was so humiliated by the Polonization of its higher classes and by suppression of its nationality by the Russian Government that even its name has been denied a place among the nations of the world. Yet there was a time, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Lithuania was one of the largest empires in Europe. In speaking of Lithuania one must consider it in these three aspects: First, the mighty Lithuanian state of the fifteenth century, the historical Lithuania, which extended from the Baltic Sea at Polangen and the mouth of the Niemen River to the Black Sea between the Dnieper and Dniester rivers, where now is situated the city of Odessa, and from the Bug River in the west to the river Oka in the east. Second, Lithuania taken as a territory populated with descendants of the Lithuanian race, where now a part of them use the White Russian language and a few, who live in scattered groups, use the Polish, but where in the earlier centuries the people were of the same Lithuanian blood, the same Lithuanian language, and of the same Lithuanian religion and customs peculiar to themselves — such is Lithuania in a wide ethnographical sense. It embraces the former Russian governments of Kovno, Vilna, Suvalki, and Grodno, and East Prussia to the River Alle and the city of Labiau on the Baltic coast.