New member of the SVU, native of Washington DC, an American historian living in Europe for two decades, with a teaching experience at University of Maryland, University of Illinois, and Slovakia’s Prešov University. Thomas has also worked as aid to a number of U.S. legislators, as research staff at the Library of Congress and at the American Bar Foundation. He lives and writes in Belgium and Italy.
His second book Czechoslovakia Behind the Curtain – Life, Work and Culture in the Communist Era, was just recently published.
During the Cold War, the West–especially in the popular media–tended to view communism as a monolithic phenomenon, with little variation throughout the Eastern Bloc. Yet culture and geography contributed to social diversity among and within communist systems. Drawing on interviews with approximately 100 Czechs and Slovaks, the author provides new perspective on day-to-day life in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Their recollections paint a more complex picture of the life on the other side of the Iron Curtain, from the Sputnik era reforms of the early 1960s, through the tumult of the 1968 Prague Spring and subsequent Soviet invasion, to the Velvet Revolution, the collapse of the Communist regime and the formation of Democratic Czechoslovakia in 1989. McFarland & Co., August 2018.Paperback at Amazon.com
E-book formats also available at online stores like FNAC.com
