In the formal sense, studies and courses in the Slavic languages, cultures and history began to appear in American colleges and universities at the end of the nineteenth century, largely through individual interest and effort. Until World War I, these courses developed slowly and aroused little interest. We can say the same of the formation of libraries and of collections of other materials. If then we should treat the history of Slavic studies in this narrow sense, we would secure a creditable but small list of courses and publications multiplying on a large scale only since World War II began. Yet, this picture would be incomplete. It fails to consider certain factors which have greatly influenced American life and thinking and which will in the future exert still more influence. It likewise ignores significant achievements of earlier periods. It ignores certain individuals who, though only tenuously connected with universities and colleges, influenced the course of events. It ignores also that one phenomenon that sharply differentiates the scope of Slavic and East European studies in the United States from such studies anywhere else in the world. That is the presence in the United States of millions of Slavic immigrants and their descendants. These have played a hitherto unrecognized part in the country’s development and at the same time have given it some unusual aspects. Slavic studies in the United States can never be as important as in those countries where the dominant language is Slavic, and where a knowledge of the language is a necessity for daily life. There the Slavic tradition, even under external pressure, is still alive. It expresses itself in every form of culture, every study of the local environment, natural or artificial. Thus, from late in the eighteenth century, the universities of Austria-Hungary, especially the University of Vienna, and those in such Slavic centers as Prague, Krakow, Lwow and Zagreb developed flourishing centers of Slavic studies. The universities in the Russian Empire also concentrated not only on Russian, but on all the other tongues. It was in these countries that Slavic languages came earliest and most completely into their own, as they later did in the independent Slavic countries.