In responding to Sophie Johnson’s letter yesterday, I said that Vojvodina was ceded to Yugoslavia by the Treaty of Trianon (1920). A fellow historian wrote me yesterday to say that while this is technically correct, Serbia’s claim to this territory is even stronger: a popular assembly of Serbs – but also Slovaks, Ruthenians, Wallachs and others – living in areas of Baranja, Backa and Banat voted on 26 November 1918 to join the Kingdom of Serbia. Another area within today’s Vojvodina, Srem, had a similar assembly a day earlier. (Parts of Baranja and Srem were given to Croatia by the Communists after 1945). The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) – a union between the Kingdom of Serbia and the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs (teritories formerly ruled by Austria-Hungary, with the exception of Vojvodina) was established on 1 December 1918. Yugoslavia was therefore not created by the Treaty of Versailles, but recognized therein as an independent state. This is obvious from the text of the Treaty of Trianon, which explicitly mentions the “Kingdom of the Serbs, the Croats and the Slovenes.”