Hungary's Historical Legacies [antikvár]

In Honor of Steven Béla Várdy: An Editor's Preface It is with great pleasure that I join my co-editor R. William Weisberger, Agnes Huszár Várdy, our publisher Stephen Fischer-Galati, and all of the contributing authors in dedicating this volume to the honor of Steven Béla Várdy, McAnulty Distinguished Professor of European History at Duquesne University, prolific and internationally renowned scholar, and consummate educator. I personally can think of no living historian working in the field of East European studies here in America who is more deserving. Born in Hungary, Steven Béla Várdy received his secondary education in Passau, Germany, before arriving in the United States in the 1950s. After a brief stint as a part-time student at Western Reserve University (1954-56), he entered John Carroll University, in Cleveland, Ohio, where he earned a BA degree in history and English (1959). On completion of undergraduate work, Várdy was accepted into the graduate program at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he received the MA degree in history and political science in 1961. There followed a period of study at the University of Vienna (1962-63) before he returned to Indiana University to complete his doctoral studies in Eastern European history, with a concentration in the history of his native Hungary. While working on his doctoral thesis, which focused on Joseph Eötvös, the nineteenth-century Hungarian liberal statesman, Várdy also succeeded in securing a professional teaching position at the university level. Following a year as an instructor of history at Washburn University, in 1964 he landed a tenure-tract assistant professorship at Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The association with Duquesne begun at that time proved permanent in the career of the gifted young scholar. With his professional position secure, Várdy completed and successfully defended his doctoral dissertation—"Baron Joseph Eötvös: The Political Profile of a Liberal Hungarian Thinker and Statesman" (later revised and published [1987] by Social Sciences Monographs, Boulder, CO, as Baron Joseph Eötvös: A Literary Biography)—to earn his PhD from Indiana University in 1967. With his wife Agnes (a scholar, educator, and writer in her own right, who currently is on the communications faculty of Robert Morris College), Várdy settled into an active family, community, and professional life fed by the rich academic and diverse multiethnic environment of Pittsburgh. At their homes in the Squirrel Hill section of the city, they raised a family of bright, intelligent