Earlier this year the great historian Stanley B. Winters died after a long and distinguished career, that included service in the American Third Army as it swept into Czechoslovakia in the last weeks of World War II, then a long career teaching history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and along the way the publication of several books and more articles than I can count about the history of the Czechs, Czechoslovakia, and the Czech Republic. He was a mentor and spiritual guide to more than one generation of Czech historians and I was proud to count him as a friend.
To my surprise and delight, he was also an artist and, it turns out, I was the beneficiary of at least one of his spurts of creativity. At the 2002 annual meeting of what was then known as the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Stan drew a sketch of a panel I chaired on Czechoslovakia a decade after the end of World War I. The most recent issue of the newsletter of the Czech Studies Association included this work of art. While I’m not sure it looks like me, I was delighted to see it and to remember Stan in one more way.