What Were Daniel Rapants Contributions To Slovak Historiography?
Daniel Rapant was Slovakia’s first professional historian and he was perhaps best known for rejecting the idea of a Czechoslovak nation. Rapant began his work in the discipline during the interwar period. One of his most important contributions was his argument, which claimed that the area known today as Slovakia was already inhabited by Slovaks during the 9th century. This was the opposite of Czechoslovak historian Alexander Huscava’s claim that Slovakia was almost entirely uninhabited until the 14th century. Daniel Rapant became a full professor at Slovak University (Comenius University) after the formation of the first Slovak Republic in 1939. He later became chairman of the history department and educated an entire generation of Slovak historians. In 1946, Rapant was elected president of the Slovak Historical Society. Nevertheless, Rapant’s career was to come to a rapid end when he was removed from his post by Czechoslovak Communists in 1949. Rapant’s most important contribution to
