What is East-Central Europe?
We want to avoid defining the geographical limits of "East-Central Europe" too neatly, because one of the characteristics of the region is the fluctuation of its internal and external boundaries. But the core area covered by this website corresponds roughly to the current states of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania. Because the empires and states of earlier historical periods—e.g., the Habsburg Monarchy, Imperial Russia, the Prussian Kingdom, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ottoman Empire—sprawled across these current state boundaries, some documents will also be drawn from and deal with lands that are now part of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Greece, Austria, Germany, Italy, Turkey, and Russia. In general, however, we do not plan on this website being a major repository for documents dealing with larger nation-states and drawn from better-known languages (e.g., German, Russian), since such sources are not as underrepresented as those drawn from the "core" regions and languages noted above.
