This new edition of Norman Davies's classic study of the history of Poland has been revised and fully updated with two new chapters to bring the story to the end of the twentieth century. The writing of Polish history, like Poland itself, has frequently fallen prey to interested parties. Professor Norman Davies adopts a sceptical stance towards all existing interpretations and attempts to bring a strong dose of common sense to his theme. He presents the most comprehensive survey in English of this frequently maligned and usually misunderstood country.

This new edition of Norman Davies's classic study of the history of Poland has been revised and fully updated with two new chapters to bring the story to the end of the twentieth century. The writing of Polish history, like Poland itself, has frequently fallen prey to interested parties. Professor Norman Davies adopts a sceptical stance towards all existing interpretations and attempts to bring a strong dose of common sense to his theme. He presents the most comprehensive survey in English of this frequently maligned and usually misunderstood country.

Regional development strategies are becoming more similar all around Europe, even though regional differences are more pronounced than ever and many European regions have become more autonomous actors. This thesis of a peculiar standardized diversification of sub-national space in the modern European Union is the point of departure of this book. Based upon the analytical premises of Stanford School Sociological Institutionalism, Sebastian M. Büttner studies regional mobilization in contemporary Europe from a new and innovative perspective. He highlights the importance of scientific expertise and global scientific models in contemporary regional development practice, and exemplifies their significance with the example of region-building in Poland in the course of EU integration. This new wave of regional mobilization is not just conceived as an effect of local, national or European politics, but as an expression of a larger conceptual shift in governing society and space. This well researched and clearly argued book not only provides fresh insights into region-building and regionalization in contemporary European space, but also contributes to the new sociology of Europeanization. It will be an illuminating read for scholars and students in Sociology, European and EU studies, International Relations, Cultural Studies, Geography, Regional Science, Polish Studies and related subject areas.

This book surveys Poland’s move from being a post-feudal, backward, peripheral country to being a modern, capitalist, European state: from the partition of the commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania to the abolishment of ‘second serfdom’; late industrialization to state socialism; post-partition fragmentation to post-Second World War westward dislocation; and from the ‘Solidarność’ movement to accession into the European Union. Could Poland really be considered an ‘underdeveloped’ nation throughout the last 200 years? What factors contributed to its ‘backwardness’? Has Poland yet managed to catch up with the West? This book, the first overview of the modern economic history of Poland to be published in English, addresses these and many other questions crucial for developing our understanding of the economic history of modern Central-Eastern Europe. The economic development of Poland is analyzed through data and statistics, as well as through analysis of the ideas that paved the way for the politics of economic and social modernization.

Cynthia Grant Bowman is a professor of law at Cornell Law School in Ithaca, New York. She met the subject of this biography, Maria Chudzinski, while teaching at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, where Maria worked in the international section of the law library. Maria was born in Poland before the German invasion and the Second World War and joined the underground resistance, or Home Army, as a teenager. She fought during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and was taken prisoner by the Germans when the city fell. In 1945 Maria moved to England, where she was a member of the Polish Air Force, ultimately settling in Chicago in 1952. She has been very active in the Polish-American community in Chicago since that time. Intrigued by Marias past, Professor Bowman asked her to tell her story. This book is the result.

This book discusses the ongoing revolution of dignity in human history as the work of ‘humanist outliers’: small groups and individuals dedicated to compassionate social emancipation. It argues that anti-authoritarian revolutions like 1989’s ‘Autumn of the Nations’ succeeded in large part due to cultural and political innovations springing from such small groups. The author explores the often ingenious ways in which these maladapted and liminal ‘outliers’ forged a cooperative and dialogic mindset among previously resentful and divided communities. Their strategies warrant closer scrutiny in the context of the ongoing 21st century revolution of dignity and efforts to (re)unite an ever more troubled and divided world.

Concepts of migration and displacement are all too often separated from ideas of international humanitarianism and occupations; and yet, between 1945 and 1951, victims of war became the joint responsibility of humanitarian workers and military officials in occupied Germany. In this innovative study, Samantha K. Knapton focuses on the lives of Polish displaced persons (DPs) – one of the largest groups in occupied Germany – to shine a spotlight on this interaction for the first time. From the everyday experience of clothing, feeding and sheltering to governmental policies and military actions, Occupiers, Humanitarian Workers and the Polish Displaced Persons in British-Occupied Germany investigates the impact of occupation on post-war refugees and explores how the birth of state-driven international humanitarianism played a vital role in both the identity of the Polish people and the reconstruction of Germany. To do so, Knapton fuses together archival material and personal collections such as memoirs, letters and diaries to present an account which considers both the macro and micro issues of displacement, occupation and humanitarianism. The result is a sophisticated analysis of Anglo-Polish-German relations in post-war Europe which will be of immense value to all scholars of modern Europe, Polish history, and displacement studies more generally.

This book is the first to connect global labor history and the history of human rights: By focusing on democratic labor oppositions in Spain and Poland between 1960 and 1990, it shows how workers in authoritarian regimes addressed repression and whether they developed a language of rights in the light of a globally dynamic human rights discourse. The study argues that the democratic labor oppositions in Spain and Poland were both variants of emancipatory and democracy-oriented social movements with global interconnections that emerged in the 1960s. It reveals that the demands for free and independent trade unions, which in both countries became a flashpoint in the fight for broader democratic demands, was not always discussed in rights terms, but rather presented as an inevitable necessity. At the same time, these labor movements and their intellectual allies morally delegitimized state repression against workers and thereby employed the concepts of democracy, participation, solidarity, progress and eventually, rights. Integrating the history of two European semi-peripheric societies into a broader narrative, this book is relevant for readers interested in global labor history, human rights history and the history of democratization in Europe in the late twentieth century.

The Reformation was the seismic event in European history over the past 1000 years, and one which tore the medieval world apart. Not just European religion, but thought, culture, society, state systems, personal relations - everything - was turned upside down. Just about everything which followed in European history can be traced back in some way to the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation which it provoked. The Reformation is where the modern world painfully and dramatically began, and MacCulloch's great history of it is recognised as the best modern account.

Drawing on multi-archival research in Korean, Russian and English, this book looks at the complexity and changes in Stalin's policy toward Korea for answers about the division of Korea in 1945 and the failure of reunification between 1945 and 1948. Lee argues that the trusteeship decision is key to the division's origins and permanency.