Domokos Kosáry ( b. 1913)
Born in Selmecbánya (now Banská Bystrica, Slovakia), Kosáry was the son of a secondary-school teacher. His mother was a writer of juvenile fiction. Having studied history and Latin at Budapest University, as a member of the prestigious Eötvös College, and received a doctorate in 1936, he continued his studies in Paris in 1936-7 and London and the United States in 1938-9. He taught at the Eötvös College from 1937 to 1949. From 1941 to 1945, he was deputy director of the history institute at the Pál Teleki Scientific Institute, where he was appointed director in 1949. During the war, he helped to hide people fleeing fr om persecution. In 1945, he became a reader in Gyula Szekfű' s department at Budapest University, and in 1946, a professor of modern Hungarian history there. He became a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, chairing its foreign-affairs sub-committee . He was dismissed from his posts in 1949. In 1951, he became responsible for university libraries at the National Library Centre. In the following year, he transferred to Gödöllő Agricultural University, initially as a group leader in its central library and later as its director, which he remained until his arrest. He took part in several of the meetings of the Petőfi Circle in the spring of 1956 and in the demonstration on October 23. On October 31, he was elected onto the revolutionary committee of Gödöllő Agricultural University. On the afternoon of November 3, he and about 40 historians, meeting at the Institute of History, founded the Revolutionary Committee of Hungarian Historians. This he headed along with István Bartha and Imre Wellmann, with Kálmán Benda serving as secretary. In November 1956, Kosáry began to gather and sort the documents of the revolution and draft an analytical study of the occurrences. At the beginning of 1957, he deposited the collected documents in the Ráday Archives, from where he transferred them to the Budapest University Library on November 14, 1957. Soon afterwards, he was arrested. He was convicted in 1958 of treachery and sentenced to four years' imprisonment, but freed from Budapest National Prison under the 1960 amnesty. He worked from 1960 to 1968 in the Pest County Archives, and then at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences until 1989. On March 5, 1990, the Budapest Military Court annulled his conviction in 1958. Kosáry served as president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 1990 to 1996, and as president of the Association of European Academies from 1996 to 1998. He is also a titular professor of the Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest. His research and publications have been concentrated mainly on 18th and 19th-century Hungarian history.
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