The Balts or Baltic peoples are a group of peoples inhabiting the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea who speak Baltic languages. Among the Baltic peoples are modern-day Lithuanians and Latvians — all East Balts — as well as the Old Prussians, Curonians, Sudovians, Skalvians, Yotvingians and Galindians — the West Balts — whose languages and cultures are now extinct.
The history of Lithuania dates back to settlements founded about 10,000 years ago, but the first written record of the name for the country dates back to 1009 AD. Lithuanians, one of the Baltic peoples, later conquered neighboring lands and established the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 13th century. The Grand Duchy was a successful and lasting warrior state. It remained fiercely independent and was one of the last areas of Europe to adopt Christianity. A formidable power, it became the largest state in Europe in the 15th century spread from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, through the conquest of large groups of East Slavs who resided in Ruthenia.
Lithuanian is an East Baltic language belonging to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is the language of Lithuanians and the official language of Lithuania as well as one of the official languages of the European Union. There are approximately 2.8 million native Lithuanian speakers in Lithuania and about 1 million speakers elsewhere. Around half a million inhabitants of Lithuania of non-Lithuanian background speak Lithuanian daily as a second language.
Kaunas is the second-largest city in Lithuania after Vilnius, the fourth largest city in the Baltic States and an important centre of Lithuanian economic, academic, and cultural life. Kaunas was the largest city and the centre of a county in the Duchy of Trakai of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Trakai Palatinate since 1413. In the Russian Empire, it was the capital of the Kaunas Governorate from 1843 to 1915.
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a sovereign state in northeastern Europe that existed from the 13th century, succeeding the Kingdom of Lithuania, to the late 18th century, when the territory was suppressed during the 1795 partitions of Poland–Lithuania. The state was founded by Lithuanians, who were at the time a polytheistic nation of several united Baltic tribes from Aukštaitija, which by 1440, became the largest European state controlling an area from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south.
Vytautas Magnus University (VMU) is a public university in Kaunas, Lithuania. The university was founded in 1922 during the interwar period as an alternate national university.
Jurgis Baltrušaitis was a Lithuanian symbolist poet and translator, who wrote his works in Lithuanian and Russian. In addition to his important contributions to Lithuanian literature, he was noted as a political activist and diplomat. Himself one of the foremost exponents of iconology, he was the father of art historian and critic Jurgis Baltrušaitis Jr.
Sąjūdis, initially known as the Reform Movement of Lithuania, is a political organisation which led the struggle for Lithuanian independence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was established on 3 June 1988 as the first opposition party in Soviet Lithuania, and was led by Vytautas Landsbergis. Its goal was to seek the return of independent status for Lithuania.
The Provisional Government of Lithuania was an attempted provisional government to form an independent Lithuanian state in the last days of the first Soviet occupation and the first weeks of the German occupation of Lithuania during World War II in 1941.
Open Astronomy is a peer-reviewed fully open access scientific journal, and currently published by De Gruyter Open. The journal was established in 1992 by the Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astronomy as Baltic Astronomy, obtaining its current title in 2017 when it converted to open access. The journal is devoted to publishing research, reviews and news spanning all aspects of astronomy and astrophysics. The editor in chief is Prof. Beatriz Barbuy.
The Kaunas University of Technology is a public research university located in Kaunas, Lithuania. Established in 1922, KTU has been seen as one of Lithuania's top science education centers. KTU was the second-best university in Lithuania.
Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ) is an English-language academic journal devoted to Arabist studies. It was established in 1979 by the Professors Edward Said and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. They envisioned the journal to be a platform for academic research to counter anti-Arab propaganda veiled by academic jargon. Since its inception, ASQ has been a refereed academic journal that publishes articles on the Arabs, their history and social and political institutions.
Zigmas Zinkevičius was a Lithuanian academician, Baltist, linguist, linguistic historian, dialectologist, politician, and the former Minister of Education and Science of Lithuania (1996–1998). Zinkevičius authored over a hundred books, including the popular six-volume "History of the Lithuanian language" (1984–1994), and over a thousand articles, both in Lithuanian and other languages. He was an academician of the Lithuanian Catholic Academy of Science since 1991 and a full member of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences from 1990 to 2011, when he became an emeritus member.
Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania is a national cultural institution which collects, organizes and preserves Lithuania's written cultural heritage content, develops the collection of Lithuanian and foreign documents relevant to research, educational and cultural needs of Lithuania, and provides library information services to the public.
Vytautas Juozapas Mažiulis was a highly distinguished Lithuanian Balticist, an expert on the Old Prussian language and Indo-European languages.
The Case for Latvia. Disinformation Campaigns Against a Small Nation. Fourteen Hard Questions and Straight Answers about a Baltic Country is a non-fiction book on the history of Latvia by the awarded Finnish author Jukka Rislakki. The book was first published 2007 in the Finnish language. It was translated to English by Richard Impola and published by the Rodopi publishing house 2008. An expanded second edition was published January 2014. The Case for Latvia is part of the series On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics.
Walter Carl Clemens, Jr. is an American political scientist known for advancing complexity science as an approach to the study of international relations and for arms control and U.S. relations with communist and post-communist countries.
The Lithuanian Helsinki Group was a dissident organization active in the Lithuanian SSR, one of the republics of the Soviet Union, in 1975–83. Established to monitor the implementation of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, better known as Helsinki Accords, it was the first human rights organization in Lithuania. The group published over 30 documents that exposed religious repressions, limitations on freedom of movement, political abuse of psychiatry, discrimination of minorities, persecution of human right activists, and other violations of human rights in the Soviet Union. Most of the documents reached the West and were published by other human rights groups. Members of the group were persecuted by the Soviet authorities. Its activities diminished after it lost members due to deaths, emigration, or imprisonment, though it was never formally disbanded. Some of the group's functions were taken over by the Catholic Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Believers, founded by five priests in 1978. Upon his release from prison, Viktoras Petkus reestablished the Lithuanian Helsinki Group in 1988.
The Lithuanian Crusade was a series of campaigns by the Teutonic Order and the Livonian Order under the pretext of forcibly Christianizing the pagan Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Livonian Order occupied Riga in 1202 and in the 1230s they settled in Chełmno Land, a fief of Poland. They first conquered other neighboring Baltic tribes—Curonians, Semigallians, Latgalians, Selonians, and Old Prussians—in the Livonian Crusade and Prussian Crusade.
Antanas Klimas was a prominent Lithuanian doctor of sciences, onomastician and comparative linguist specializing in the relationships between Baltic, Slavic and Germanic language groups as well as the history of Lithuanian language. He also created Lithuanian textbooks and dictionaries, was the editor for the language journal Lituanus, published academic articles on the Lithuanian and Indo-European linguistics. Klimas has written more than 130 publications on linguistics and has made significant contributions to the comparative linguistics of Baltic, Slavic and Germanic languages. He also researched Lithuanian anthroponymy, word formation, phonology and morphology.
