The JSTOR site requires that your browser allows JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org) to set and modify cookies. JSTOR uses cookies to maintain information that will enable access to the archive and improve the response time and performance of the system.

Yugoslavia means the state of the South Slavs. There were the following linguistic and religious groups within its borders: Serbs; Croats; Slovenes; Macedonians (these are all Slavs); Albanians; Hungarians, Romanians. The area owes its ethnic diversity to migrations of Slavs into territory formerly part of the Roman Empire, at that time occupied by the Illyrians (whose descendants are believed to be the Albanians).

The newly independent republic of Croatia is located on the Balkan peninsula in southeastern Europe. Throughout much of the twentieth century, Croatia was one of five republics within Yugoslavia, an amalgam of ethnicities and religions tenuously held together by dictatorship and economic feasibility.