Download or read book God s Playground A History of Poland written by Norman Davies and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-24 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The History of Poland written by M. B. B. Biskupski and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-09-07 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an engaging explanation of the complicated history of Poland, one of the least well-known countries in Europe. Poland, which has one of the strongest economies in the European Union, has faced significant turmoil throughout the years. Encapsulating centuries of development, this book distills Poland's historical evolution into patterns, including those that have developed since the first edition was published nearly 20 years ago. The book begins with an overview of contemporary Poland, providing both basic information about the geography, culture, and current political climate of the country while tying these to major contemporary issues. This introduction is followed by chapters discussing Poland's long history, starting with the 10th century. The second half of the book presents a history of Poland in the 20th and 21st centuries, covering the major issues affecting the country and offering possible interpretations of them. This updated and revised edition accounts for recent events in Poland and examines the effects of the Polish diaspora globally.
Download or read book European Dictatorships 1918 1945 written by Stephen J. Lee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-12 with total page 495 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: European Dictatorships 1918–1945 surveys the extraordinary circumstances leading to, and arising from, the transformation of over half of Europe’s states to dictatorships between the first and the second world wars. From the notorious dictatorships of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin to less well-known states and leaders, Stephen J. Lee scrutinizes the experiences of Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Central and Eastern European states. This fourth edition has been fully revised and updated throughout. New material for this edition includes: the most recent research on individual dictatorships a new chapter on the experiences of Europe’s democracies at the hands of Germany, Italy and Russia an expanded chapter on Spain a new section on dictatorships beyond Europe, exploring the European and indigenous roots of dictatorships in Latin America, Asia and Africa. Extensively illustrated with images, maps, tables and a comparative timeline, and supported by a companion website providing further resources for study (www.routledge.com/cw/lee), European Dictatorships 1918–1945 is a clear, detailed and highly accessible analysis of the tumultuous events of early twentieth-century Europe.
Download or read book Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires written by Aviel Roshwald and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-01-04 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires is a wide-ranging comparative study of the origins of today's ethnic politics in East Central Europe, the former Russian empire and the Middle East. Centred on the First World War Era, Ethnic Nationalism highlights the roles of historical contingency and the ordeal of total war in shaping the states and institutions that supplanted the great multinational empires after 1918. It explores how the fixing of new political boundaries and the complex interplay of nationalist elites and popular forces set in motion bitter ethnic conflicts and political disputes, many of which are still with us today. Topics discussed include: * the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian empire * the ethnic dimension of the Russian Revolution and Soviet state building * Nationality issues in the late Ottoman empire * the origins of Arab nationalism * ethnic politics in zones of military occupation * the construction of Czechoslovak and Yugoslav identities Ethnic Nationalism is an invaluable survey of the origins of twentieth-century ethnic politics. It is essential reading for those interested in the politics of ethnicity and nationalism in modern European and Middle Eastern history.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Poland 1945 1996 written by Piotr Wróbel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-27 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Located between the former Soviet Union and eastern Germany, Poland has the potential to become a political and economic bridge between the East and West. It is crucial to European security and stabilization; yet the list of reference books on recent Polish history is very short. This book fills that gap, providing information on Polish political, economic, and cultural history since 1945.
Download or read book Reluctant Socialists Rural Entrepreneurs written by Carole Nagengast and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PREDOMINANTLY A RURAL NATION, Poland is most often depicted with urban scenes: steelworkers, trade unions, Communist party members, and Solidarity meetings. In contrast to this industrial vision, Reluctant Socialists, Rural Entrepreneurs views historical and recent changes and their agrarian consequences.During her many years in the Polish countryside, Dr. Nagengast has observed,studied, and worked side by side with farmers and other members of the agrarian class. Here she provides a first-hand perspective on the monumental failures of the Polish version of socialism, which were largely due to decisions that led the nation-state down a distinctly capitalist path to agrarian development. On the basis of her extensive research, Nagengast makes chilling forecasts about the impact of the accelerating development of capitalism on the culture, politics, and economy of Poland.This book will be useful to anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars interested in Eastern European and socialist studies.
Download or read book The Crosses of Auschwitz written by Geneviève Zubrzycki and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-10-15 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer and fall of 1998, ultranationalist Polish Catholics erected hundreds of crosses outside Auschwitz, setting off a fierce debate that pitted Catholics and Jews against one another. While this controversy had ramifications that extended well beyond Poland’s borders, Geneviève Zubrzycki sees it as a particularly crucial moment in the development of post-Communist Poland’s statehood and its changing relationship to Catholicism. In The Crosses of Auschwitz, Zubrzycki skillfully demonstrates how this episode crystallized latent social conflicts regarding the significance of Catholicism in defining “Polishness” and the role of anti-Semitism in the construction of a new Polish identity. Since the fall of Communism, the binding that has held Polish identity and Catholicism together has begun to erode, creating unease among ultranationalists. Within their construction of Polish identity also exists pride in the Polish people’s long history of suffering. For the ultranationalists, then, the crosses at Auschwitz were not only symbols of their ethno-Catholic vision, but also an attempt to lay claim to what they perceived was a Jewish monopoly over martyrdom. This gripping account of the emotional and aesthetic aspects of the scene of the crosses at Auschwitz offers profound insights into what Polishness is today and what it may become.
Download or read book Survival on the Margins written by Eliyana R. Adler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Co-winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research The forgotten story of 200,000 Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust as refugees stranded in remote corners of the USSR. Between 1940 and 1946, about 200,000 Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, and extreme deprivation. But out of reach of the Nazis, they escaped the fate of millions of their coreligionists in the Holocaust. Survival on the Margins is the first comprehensive account in English of their experiences. The refugees fled Poland after the German invasion in 1939 and settled in the Soviet territories newly annexed under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Facing hardship, and trusting little in Stalin, most spurned the offer of Soviet citizenship and were deported to labor camps in unoccupied areas of the east. They were on their own, in a forbidding wilderness thousands of miles from home. But they inadvertently escaped Hitler’s 1941 advance into the Soviet Union. While war raged and Europe’s Jews faced genocide, the refugees were permitted to leave their settlements after the Soviet government agreed to an amnesty. Most spent the remainder of the war coping with hunger and disease in Soviet Central Asia. When they were finally allowed to return to Poland in 1946, they encountered the devastation of the Holocaust, and many stopped talking about their own ordeals, their stories eventually subsumed within the central Holocaust narrative. Drawing on untapped memoirs and testimonies of the survivors, Eliyana Adler rescues these important stories of determination and suffering on behalf of new generations.
Download or read book Genocides by the Oppressed written by Nicholas A. Robins and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last two decades, the field of comparative genocide studies has produced an increasingly rich literature on the targeting of various groups for extermination and other atrocities, throughout history and around the contemporary world. However, the phenomenon of "genocides by the oppressed," that is, retributive genocidal actions carried out by subaltern actors, has received almost no attention. The prominence in such genocides of non-state actors, combined with the perceived moral ambiguities of retributive genocide that arise in analyzing genocidal acts "from below," have so far eluded serious investigation. Genocides by the Oppressed addresses this oversight, opening the subject of subaltern genocide for exploration by scholars of genocide, ethnic conflict, and human rights. Focusing on case studies of such genocide, the contributors explore its sociological, anthropological, psychological, symbolic, and normative dimensions.
Download or read book The Routledge History of the Holocaust written by Jonathan C. Friedman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 719 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The genocide of Jewish and non-Jewish civilians perpetrated by the German regime during World War Two continues to confront scholars with elusive questions even after nearly seventy years and hundreds of studies. This multi-contributory work is a landmark publication that sees experts renowned in their field addressing these questions in light of current research. A comprehensive introduction to the history of the Holocaust, this volume has 42 chapters which add important depth to the academic study of the Holocaust, both geographically and topically. The chapters address such diverse issues as: continuities in German and European history with respect to genocide prior to 1939 the eugenic roots of Nazi anti-Semitism the response of Europe's Jewish Communities to persecution and destruction the Final Solution as the German occupation instituted it across Europe rescue and rescuer motivations the problem of prosecuting war crimes gender and Holocaust experience the persecution of non-Jewish victims the Holocaust in postwar cultural venues. This important collection will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of the Holocaust.
Download or read book The House at Ujazdowskie 16 written by Karen Auerbach and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-13 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The compelling history of ten Jewish families rebuilding their lives in Warsaw after the Holocaust—“amply illustrated . . . the book reverberates with hope” (Jewish Book Council). Warsaw, Poland, once described as the “Paris of the East,” had been transformed into a landscape of ruin by the ravages of World War II. Among the few areas of the city center that escaped Nazi decimation was Ujazdowskie Avenue, where German officials lived during the occupation. In the late 1940s, while most surviving Polish Jews were making their homes in new countries, ten Jewish families reclaimed a once elegant building at 16 Ujazdowskie Avenue and began reconstructing their lives. These families rebuilt on the rubble of the Polish capital and created new communities as they sought to distance themselves from the memory of a painful past. Based on interviews with family members, extensive archival research, and the families’ personal papers and correspondence, Karen Auerbach presents an engrossing story of loss and rebirth, political faith and disillusionment, and the persistence of Jewishness.
Download or read book Bondage to the Dead written by Michael C. Steinlauf and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1997-03-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the Poles' memory of the Holocaust, which amounted to mass psychic and moral trauma unprecedented in history.
Download or read book The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy written by M. B. B. Biskupski and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy is a series of closely integrated essays that traces the idea of democracy in Polish thought and practice. It begins with the transformative events of the mid-nineteenth century, which witnessed revolutionary developments in the socioeconomic and demographic structure of Poland, and continues through changes that marked the postcommunist era of free Poland. The idea of democracy survived in Poland through long periods of foreign occupation, the trials of two world wars, and years of Communist subjugation. Whether in Poland itself or among exiles, Polish speculation about the creation of a liberal-democratic Poland has been central to modern Polish political thought. This volume is unique in that is traces the evolution of the idea of democracy, both during the periods when Poland was an independent country—1918-1939—and during the periods of foreign occupation before 1918 through World War II and the Communist era. For those periods when Poland was not free, the volume discusses how the idea of democracy evolved among exile and underground Polish circles. This important work is the only single-volume English-language history of modern Polish democratic thought and parliamentary systems and represents the latest scholarly research by leading specialists from Europe and North America.
Download or read book Liberalism Fascism Or Social Democracy written by Gregory M. Luebbert and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1991 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of the political development of Western Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which argues that the evolution of nations into liberal democracies, social democracies or fascist regimes was attributable to a set of social and class alliances within the individual nations.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust written by Jack R. Fischel and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with the roots of anti-Semitism in early Christian Europe, this book traces the evolution of the Jewish stereotype as the evil “other,” which culminated in Adolf Hitler’s war against the Jews, wherein he sought to eliminate through mass murder every Jewish man, woman and child. It includes most recent scholarship on the Holocaust which reflects the recent rise of Neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia throughout the West, including the United States. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 600 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, issues, and events that led to the murder of six-million Jews, and millions of other groups by Nazi Germany. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Holocaust.
Download or read book Beyond Versailles written by Marcus M. Payk and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-29 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ten essays analyzing the history and effects of the Paris Peace Conference following World War I. The settlement of Versailles was more than a failed peace. What was debated at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919–1920 hugely influenced how nations and empires, sovereignty, and the international order were understood after the Great War?and into the present. Beyond Versailles argues thatthis transformation of ideas was not the work of the treaty makers alone, but emerged in interaction with nationalist groups, anti-colonial movements, and regional elites who took up the rhetoric of Paris and made it their own. In shifting the spotlight from the palace of Versailles to the peripheries of Europe, Beyond Versailles turns to the treaties’ resonance on the ground and shows why the principles of the peace settlement meant different things in different locales. It was in places a long way from Paris?in Polish borderlands and in Portuguese colonies, in contested spaces like Silesia, Teschen, and Danzig, and in states emerging from imperial collapse like Austria, Egypt, and Iran?that notions of nation and sovereignty, legitimacy, and citizenship were negotiated and contested. “This is an excellent collected volume, well-conceived and very well written. . . . This is not at all a top-down history of the diffusion of ideas about national self-determination. Rather, it is an examination of the ways in which these ideas were taken up, re-fashioned, and reasserted at many levels to serve local and regional agendas, while at the same time influencing international debates about the meanings and possible implementations of self-determination.” —Pieter M. Judson, author of The Habsburg Empire: A New History
Download or read book The Forgers written by Roger Moorhouse and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2023-10-17 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The secret history of one of the largest—and least-known—rescue operations of World War II Between 1940 and 1943, a group of Polish diplomats in Switzerland engaged in a wholly remarkable—and until now, completely unknown—humanitarian operation. In concert with Jewish activists, they masterminded a systematic program of forging passports and identity documents for Latin American countries, which were then smuggled into German-occupied Europe to save the lives of thousands of Jews facing extermination in the Holocaust. With the international community failing to act, the operation was one of the largest actions to aid Jews of the entire war. The Forgers tells this extraordinary story for the first time. We follow the desperate bids of Jews to obtain these lifesaving documents as the Nazi death machine draws ever closer. And we witness the quiet heroism of a group of ordinary men who decided to do something rather than nothing and saved thousands of lives.
