Mūsų Lietuva: Krašto Vietovių Istoriniai, Geografiniai, Etnografiniai Bruožai. I Tomas

Mūsų Lietuva represents one of the most ambitious cultural preservation projects undertaken by the Lithuanian diaspora in the twentieth century. Compiled by Bronius Kviklys — himself an exile writing, as he notes in the preface, in evenings after physical labor — the work encodes in encyclopedic form the geography, history, and ethnography of a homeland that its authors could not visit and that Soviet occupation was actively working to transform. As a systematic record of Lithuanian place-names, local histories, demographic data, and folk traditions, the gazetteer constitutes a form of resistance through documentation: asserting the continuity and integrity of Lithuanian cultural geography against both Soviet erasure and the fading memory of diaspora generations.

For Lithuanian-American communities, Mūsų Lietuva functioned simultaneously as a scholarly reference, a family history resource, and an act of collective mourning and hope. Its combination of scholarly rigor — drawing on the Lietuvių Enciklopedija, archival sources, and contributions from hundreds of named informants — with an explicitly popular and patriotic address makes it a unique artifact of mid-century diaspora intellectual life. The photographs, hand-drawn maps, and detailed locality entries ensure that even readers who had never seen the places described could form a vivid mental map of the Lithuanian homeland.

Diaspora scholarly publishing. Compiled and printed in the United States by Lithuanian exile institutions while Lithuania was under Soviet occupation, this work served to document, preserve, and transmit knowledge of the Lithuanian homeland and its localities to diaspora communities and future generations.