From the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, several thousand peasants from the borderlands of Moravia and Slovakia and peripheral regions of eastern Bohemia and northeastern Moravia emigrated to the fertile blackland of Central Texas. Until the end of World War II they and their descendants inhabited the triangle between Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, where they lived for generations as a distinct community in settlements centered around churches and sustained by religious faith and a vibrant Czech-language press. Today most of these once thriving communities with their tidy farms and schools, churches, and Czech fraternal societies exist only in memory--and in the tombstones of cemeteries scattered across the Texas prairie.
The language of the tombstones encapsulates the history of Czech immigrants in Texas, a story of migration and acculturation never before told in its entirety, from its beginnings in the social and economic upheavals of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Bohemia and Moravia to its end in the era of opportunity and mobility that followed World War II. Throughout the book the linguistic and material data of tombstones are interwoven with records of the Texas Czech community provided by its press as well as with historical accounts of life in the homeland. Three appendices provide sample texts illustrating the process of linguistic attrition and change among the Czechs of Texas.
Analysis of tombstone texts and newspapers reveals a wealth of ethnographic information and presents a window onto the life and death of the community. The Czech Texas of the pre-World War I era was a self-centered community that wrote for and about itself and memorialized its European past. Over the years, it developed alongside the American majority into a community with a new Texas Czech identity. During the interwar years, Texas Czechs negotiated this new identity, as Czech speakers switched between Czech and English in tombstone inscriptions, and increasingly aligned newspaper editorials with the American reality in the way they responded to American and Texan developments. The Texas Czech community grew ever more distant from the concerns of European Czechs. Finally, after World War II, the Czech community disintegrated.
Rich in primary sources, many of them unpublished or unavailable in English, meticulously researched and sweeping in its scope, Stones on the Prairie will be a valuable resource to sociolinguists, scholars in the field of immigration studies, and all those interested in the history of Texas and its Czech heritage.
Eva Eckert is Professor of linguistics, Russian, and Czech at Connecticut College, and a Czech native with degrees from Charles University in Prague, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Kameny na prerii: Cesti vystehovalci v Texasu [Stones on the Prairie: Czech Immigrants in Texas], published in 2005 in the Czech Republic; Varieties of Czech: Studies in Czech Sociolinguistics, and a number of articles on Slavic verbal aspect, standard and colloquial languages, and American Czech language change and loss that have appeared in the Journal of Slavic Linguistics, Brown Slavic Contributions, Dejiny a soucasnost [History and the Present], Festschrift for Charles Townsend, Cesky lid [Czech People], Kosmas, Markers, Nase rec, Casopis pro moderni filologii [Journal of Modern Philology], and others.
