Czechs
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Czechs. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
cheks, a western branch of the Slavonic race. The Czechs include the Moravians, the Slovacs of Hungary, and the Bohemians. They are allied to the Poles and to the Russians. In the day of John Huss and Jerome of Prague this element was one of the most prominent in central Europe, but persecution, exile, conquest, and oppression pretty effectually suppressed rising intellectuality. Of late the 6,000,000 Czechs in the Austrian Empire have been gaining influence. It may be predicted that they will one day rule the Austrians, or drive them out of the empire, or be themselves subjugated by the German Empire . The Czechs have a well developed language and quite a literature. The alphabet contains forty-two letters, and is more nearly phonetic than ours. Instead of borrowing, they make new words as they need them. They would be more apt for instance, to call a bicycle a two-wheel than to borrow a Greek word as we have done. A part of the instruction in the University of Prague is given in this tongue. Czech newspapers and books are multiplying. The literature is especially rich in folklore, song, and fiction. The Czech mind is gifted in scientific research. See Bohemia ; Moravia ; Austria-Hungary ; Prague ; Huss ; John
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the extreme W. branch of the great Slavonic family of races. The Czechs have their headquarters in Bohemia, where they arrived in the 5th century. The origin of the name is unknown . They speak a Slavonic dialect of great antiquity and of high scientific cultivation. The Czech language is distinguished as highly inflectional, with great facility for forming derivatives, frequentatives, inceptives, and diminutives of all kinds. Like the Greek it has a dual number, and its manifold declensions, tenses, and participial formations, with their subtle shades of distinction, give the language a complex grammatical structure. The alphabet consists of 42 letters, expressing a great variety of sounds. In musical value the Czech comes next to Italian. See CZECHO-SLOVAKIA.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 guess that the Czechs would "one day rule the Austrians, or drive them out of the empire, or be themselves subjugated by the German Empire" was answered within eight years: Austria-Hungary collapsed in 1918 and Czechoslovakia was declared on 28 October that year, with Tomáš Masaryk as its first president — which is why Collier's, writing in 1921, could already point the reader to "CZECHO-SLOVAKIA." That state was dismembered by Germany in 1938–39, restored, taken into the Soviet bloc in 1948, saw the Prague Spring crushed in 1968, and freed itself in the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Aiton's habit of counting "the Slovacs of Hungary" as Czechs no longer holds: the country divided peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia on 1 January 1993, and Czechs are now some 10 million people in an EU member state (since 2004) that adopted the short name Czechia in 2016. Collier's claim that Czech, "like the Greek, has a dual number" overstates matters — modern Czech keeps dual forms only in a few words for paired body parts.
Written for this edition, 2026.