The history of Slovenia chronicles the period of the Slovenian territory from the 5th century BC to the present. In the Early Bronze Age, Proto-Illyrian tribes settled an area stretching from present-day Albania to the city of Trieste. The Slovenian territory was part of the Roman Empire, and it was devastated by the Migration Period's incursions during late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. The main route from the Pannonian plain to Italy ran through present-day Slovenia. Alpine Slavs, ancestors of modern-day Slovenians, settled the area in the late 6th Century AD. The Holy Roman Empire controlled the land for nearly 1,000 years, and between the mid-14th century and 1918 most of Slovenia was under Habsburg rule. In 1918, Slovenes formed Yugoslavia along with Serbs and Croats, while a minority came under Italy. The state of Slovenia was created in 1945 as part of federal Yugoslavia. Slovenia gained its independence from Yugoslavia in June 1991, and is today a member of the European Union and NATO.
The Slovenes, also known as Slovenians, are a South Slavic ethnic group native to Slovenia, and adjacent regions in Italy, Austria and Hungary. Slovenes share a common ancestry, culture, history and speak Slovene as their native language.
United Slovenia is the name originally given to an unrealized political programme of the Slovene national movement, formulated during the Spring of Nations in 1848. The programme demanded (a) unification of all the Slovene-inhabited areas into one single kingdom under the rule of the Austrian Empire, (b) equal rights of Slovene in public, and (c) strongly opposed the planned integration of the Habsburg monarchy with the German Confederation. The programme failed to meet its main objectives, but it remained the common political program of all currents within the Slovene national movement until World War I.
Ljubo Sirc CBE was a British-Slovene economist and prominent dissident from Yugoslavia.
The Liberation Front of the Slovene Nation, or simply Liberation Front, originally called the Anti-Imperialist Front, was a Slovene anti-fascist political party. The Anti-Imperialist Front had ideological ties to the Soviet Union in its fight against the imperialistic tendencies of the United States and the United Kingdom, and it was led by the Communist Party of Slovenia. In May 1941, weeks into the German occupation of Yugoslavia, in the first wartime issue of the illegal newspaper Slovenski poročevalec, members of the organization criticized the German regime and described Germans as imperialists. They started raising money for a liberation fund via the second issue of the newspaper published on 8 June 1941. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the Anti-Imperialist Front was formally renamed and became the main anti-fascist Slovene civil resistance and political organization under the guidance and control of the Slovene communists. It was active in the Slovene Lands during World War II. Its military arm was the Slovene Partisans. The organisation was established in the Province of Ljubljana on 26 April 1941 in the house of the literary critic Josip Vidmar. Its leaders were Boris Kidrič and Edvard Kardelj.
Stane Dolanc was a Slovenian communist politician during SFR Yugoslavia. Dolanc was one of president Josip Broz Tito's closest collaborators and one of the most influential people in Yugoslav federal politics in the 1970s and 1980s. He was secretary of the Executive Bureau of the Presidency of the Central Committee (CC) of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) from 1971 to 1978, federal Secretary of the Interior from 1982 to 1984 and a member of the Presidency of Yugoslavia from 1984 to 1989. He was regularly appointed a member of the Federal Council for Protection of the Constitutional Order and was chairing the body in late 1980s.
The Slovene lands or Slovenian lands is the historical denomination for the territories in Central and Southern Europe where people primarily spoke Slovene. The Slovene lands were part of the Illyrian provinces, the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary. They encompassed Carniola, southern part of Carinthia, southern part of Styria, Istria, Gorizia and Gradisca, Trieste, and Prekmurje. Their territory more or less corresponds to modern Slovenia and the adjacent territories in Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia, where autochthonous Slovene minorities live. In the areas where present-day Slovenia borders to neighboring countries, they were never homogeneously ethnically Slovene.
Jože Javoršek was the pen name of Jože Brejc, a Slovenian playwright, writer, poet, translator and essayist. He is regarded as one of the greatest masters of style and language among Slovene authors. A complex thinker and controversial personality, Javoršek is frequently considered, together with the writer Vitomil Zupan, as the paradigmatic example of the World War II and postwar generation of Slovene intellectuals.
Alenka Puhar is a Slovenian journalist, author, translator, and historian. In 1982, she wrote a groundbreaking psychohistory-inspired book "The Primal Text of Life" about the 19th century social history of early childhood in Slovene Lands, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The book was in 2010 the subject of a television documentary that was in 2010 televised on the national RTV Slovenija. Her grandfather was the photographer and inventor Janez Puhar, who invented a process for photography on glass.
Bogumil Vošnjak, also known as Bogomil Vošnjak, was a Slovene and Yugoslav jurist, politician, diplomat, author, and legal historian. He often wrote under the pseudonym Illyricus.
Peter Štih is a Slovenian historian, specialising in medieval history.
Contributions to the Slovene National Program, also known as Nova revija 57 or 57th edition of Nova revija was a special issue of the Slovene opposition intellectual journal Nova revija, published in January 1987. It contained 16 articles by non-Communist and anti-Communist dissidents in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, discussing the possibilities and conditions for the democratization of Slovenia and the achievement of full sovereignty. It was issued as a reaction to the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and to the rising centralist aspirations within the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.
Angela Vode was a Slovenian pedagogue, feminist author and human rights activist. An early member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, she was expelled from the Party in 1939 because of criticism against the Hitler-Stalin Pact. During World War II, she joined the Liberation Front of the Slovenian People, but was expelled in 1942 because of disagreements with the Communist Party of Slovenia. In 1944, she was interned in a Nazi concentration camp. After the war, she was arrested by the Yugoslav communist authorities, trialed at the Nagode Trial and imprisoned for several years. After her release from prison she was excluded from public life for the rest of her life. In the 1990s, she became one of the foremost symbols of victims of totalitarian repression in Slovenia.
Mitja Ribičič was a Slovene Communist official and Yugoslav politician. He was the only Slovenian prime minister of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1969–1971).
Izidor Cankar was a Slovenian author, art historian, diplomat, journalist, translator, and liberal conservative politician. He was one of the most important Slovenian art historians of the first part of the 20th century, and one of the most influential cultural figures in interwar Slovenia.
Boris Furlan was a Slovenian jurist, philosopher of law, translator and liberal politician. During World War II, he worked as a speaker on Radio London, and was known as "London's Slovene voice". He served as a Minister in the Tito–Šubašić coalition government. In 1947, he was convicted by the Yugoslav Communist authorities at the Nagode Trial.
The Slovene Partisans, formally the National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Slovenia, were part of Europe's most effective anti-Nazi resistance movement led by Yugoslav revolutionary communists during World War II, the Yugoslav Partisans. Since a quarter of Slovene ethnic territory and approximately 327,000 out of total population of 1.3 million Slovenes were subjected to forced Italianization since the end of the First World War, the objective of the movement was the establishment of the state of Slovenes that would include the majority of Slovenes within a socialist Yugoslav federation in the postwar period.
The Slovene minority in Italy (1920–1947) was the indigenous Slovene population—approximately 327,000 out of a total population of 1.3 million ethnic Slovenes at the time—that was cut from the remaining three-quarters of the Slovene ethnic community after the First World War. According to the secret Treaty of London and the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920, the former Austrian Littoral and western part of the former Inner Carniola of defeated Austria-Hungary were annexed to the Kingdom of Italy. Whereas only a few thousand Italians were left in the new South Slavic state, a population of half a million Slavs, both Slovenes and Croats, was subjected to forced Italianization until the fall of Fascism in Italy. After the Second World War, most of the region known as the Slovenian Littoral was transferred to Yugoslavia under the terms of the Treaty of Peace with Italy, 1947.
Lambert Ehrlich was a Carinthian Slovene Roman Catholic priest, political figure, and ethnologist.
The Nagode Trial was a political show trial in Slovenia, Yugoslavia in 1947.
