Nepriklausoma Lietuva

Rapolas Skipitis occupies a distinctive position in Lithuanian diaspora historiography: a trained jurist who served in interwar Lithuania's highest courts and as a key organizer of Lithuanian diaspora outreach, he wrote from direct experience rather than archival reconstruction. This second volume of his memoirs preserves granular detail about interwar Lithuanian governance — including party politics, legislative sessions, the 1926 coup, judicial structures, agricultural reform, and the network of organizations linking independent Lithuania to diaspora communities — that is not readily recoverable from other sources accessible to English-language researchers or to Lithuanians cut off from diaspora publications during the Soviet period.

For the Detroit and broader American Lithuanian community, the book also functions as a community document: the Draugas press that printed it was the institutional voice of Lithuanian Catholic America, and the DULR that Skipitis led was one of the principal bridges between the Republic and its diaspora. Holding this volume, readers encounter not only history but the living organizational memory of a community that refused to accept the permanence of occupation. The photograph of the DULR central board — with Skipitis, Biržiška, Merkys, and others identified by name — makes the collective leadership of interwar Lithuanian civic life visually present in a way that purely textual records cannot replicate.

Diaspora memoir publishing. By documenting the institutions, leaders, and lived experience of independent Lithuania in Lithuanian-language book form from Chicago, Skipitis and the Draugas press sustained collective memory of Lithuanian statehood among the émigré community during the Soviet occupation period.