In 1906 the ethnic Romanian Austro-Hungarian lawyer and politician Aurel Popovici unsuccessfully proposed the reorganization of Austria-Hungary as the United States of Greater Austria.
Smith attended Walt Whitman High School, and played club soccer for BW Gottschee, leading team to State Cup titles at U-14 and U-15 level, before going on to play four years of college soccer at American University.
In May 1945, under the direction of Aleksandar Ranković, the Yugoslav secret police (OZNA) established a concentration camp at the site to collect ethnic Germans from across Slovenia, especially from Lower Styria and Gottschee.
This area, known in German as Gottschee, was settled in the late 14th century by the Carinthian Counts of Ortenburg initially with colonists from the Ortenburg estates in Carinthia and Tyrol, and by other settlers who came from Austrian and German Dioceses of Salzburg, Brixen and Freising.
Mashriqi attended Flushing High School and from the age of nine played for the famed Blau Weiss Gottschee club in New York, winning four State Cup championships.
Although majority of the Gottschee ethnic Germans obeyed the Nazi Germany which issued an order that all of them should relocate from Province of Ljubljana, which was occupied by the Fascist Italy, to the "Ranner Dreieck" or Brežice Triangle, which was in the German occupation zone, some of them (fifty six) refused to leave their homes and, instead, decided to join Slovene Partisans fighting against Italians together with their Slovene neighbours.
The speech area historically included the former linguistic enclaves in Carniola (present-day Slovenia) around Gottschee (Gottscheerish in the Gottschee region), Sorica (Zarz) and Nemški Rovt (Deutsch Ruth).