The volumes in the Studies in Modern European History series focus upon aspects of the political, social, economic, cultural, and religious history of Europe from the Renaissance to the present, including the political and economic integration of the continent and the resurgence of Europe following the Cold War.

Liberal Forces in Twentieth Century Yugoslavia: Memoirs of Ladislav Bevc spans 80 years of his professional and political life: from the early years of his childhood in the large family of a civil servant, to his studies in Vienna and the interruption of his professional career by military service at the Eastern and Western front under the detested Austrian flag, to a flourishing career in the liberated homeland of Yugoslavia. Born in kocijan, Slovenia, he graduated as a civil engineer from the Technical University in Vienna. In World War I, he served on the front in Russia and France. Following the war, Ladislav Bevc focused his life on politics, civic organizations, and the engineering profession. In Ljubljana, he served as a city councilman and was active in civic and academic affairs. He helped establish a new University and resisted Communist subversion in the Sokol Patriotic Gymnast Association. Following the German invasion in World War II, he joined the resistance movement of General Dragoljub Mihajlovich, which led to encounters with the Gestapo and eventual political emigration. In 1949, he immigrated to California, where he remained active in the efforts to liberate Yugoslavia from the Communists and rescued his family, who had been held hostage. In the free world, he organized the Slovenian liberal émigrés in the Slovenian Democratic Party and was instrumental in rebuilding the Yugoslav Sokol in the Free World. He practiced civil engineering in the United States, where he was elected Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He died on November 29, 1988.

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The Editor: Vladislav Bevc received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Academy of Science and at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research at Oxford University, St. Catherine's College, England. He has conducted scientific research in the defense and aerospace industry, taught electrical engineering as associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and as lecturer at the University of Southern California and San Francisco State University. He was a senior staff member at the California Public Utilities Commission and a consultant to the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice as well as a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Dr. Bevc is the author of papers on applied physics and a contributor to the Reinhold Encyclopedia of Electronics and to the Wiley Encyclopedia of Environmental Cleanup. He has also published papers and book reviews on Yugoslav politics in The South Slav Journal and Canadian Review of Nationalism .