Download or read book Orphans Of Versailles written by Richard Blanke and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The lands Germany ceded to Poland after World War I included more than one million ethnic Germans for whom the change meant a sharp reversal of roles. The Polish government now confronted a German minority in a region where power relationships had been the other way around for more than a century. Orphans of Versailles examines the complex psychological and political situation of Germans consigned to Poland, their treatment by the Polish government and society, their diverse strategies for survival, their place in international relations, and the impact of National Socialism. Not a one-sided study of victimization, this book treats the contributions of both the Polish state and the German minority to the conflict that culminated in their mutual destruction. Based largely on research in European archives, it sheds new light on a key aspect of German-Polish relations, one that was long overshadowed by concern over the German revanchist threat and the hostility that subsequently dominated the German-Polish relationship. Thanks to the new political situation in central Europe, however, this topic can finally be addressed evenhandedly.
Download or read book Spring Will Be Ours written by Andrzej Paczkowski and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Spring Will Be Ours focuses on the turbulent half century from the outbreak of World War II in 1939, which started the chain of events that would lead to the communist takeover of Poland, to 1989, when futile attempts to reform the communist system gave way to its total transformation. Andrzej Paczkowski shows how the communists captured and consolidated power, describes their use of terror and propaganda, and illuminates the changes that took place within the governing elite. He also documents the political opposition to the regime - both inside Poland and abroad - that resulted in upheavals in 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976, and 1980. His narrative makes evident the pressures that the elite felt from above, from Moscow, and from below, from the population and from within the party. The history of Poland and the Poles is of special interest because on numerous occasions in the twentieth century this relatively small country influenced developments on a global scale.
Download or read book Empowering Revolution written by Gregory F. Domber and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-10-06 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the most populous country in Eastern Europe as well as the birthplace of the largest anticommunist dissident movement, Poland is crucial in understanding the end of the Cold War. During the 1980s, both the United States and the Soviet Union vied for influence over Poland's politically tumultuous steps toward democratic revolution. In this groundbreaking history, Gregory F. Domber examines American policy toward Poland and its promotion of moderate voices within the opposition, while simultaneously addressing the Soviet and European influences on Poland's revolution in 1989. With a cast including Reagan, Gorbachev, and Pope John Paul II, Domber charts American support of anticommunist opposition groups--particularly Solidarity, the underground movement led by future president Lech Wa&322;&281;sa--and highlights the transnational network of Polish emigres and trade unionists that kept the opposition alive. Utilizing archival research and interviews with Polish and American government officials and opposition leaders, Domber argues that the United States empowered a specific segment of the Polish opposition and illustrates how Soviet leaders unwittingly fostered radical, pro-democratic change through their policies. The result is fresh insight into the global impact of the Polish pro-democracy movement.
Download or read book Poland 1939 written by Roger Moorhouse and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "chilling" and "expertly" written history of the 1939 September Campaign and the onset of World War II (Times of London). For Americans, World War II began in December of 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor; but for Poland, the war began on September 1, 1939, when Hitler's soldiers invaded, followed later that month by Stalin's Red Army. The conflict that followed saw the debut of many of the features that would come to define the later war-blitzkrieg, the targeting of civilians, ethnic cleansing, and indiscriminate aerial bombing-yet it is routinely overlooked by historians. In Poland 1939, Roger Moorhouse reexamines the least understood campaign of World War II, using original archival sources to provide a harrowing and very human account of the events that set the bloody tone for the conflict to come.
Download or read book From Solidarity to Sellout written by Tadeusz Kowalik and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1980s and 90s, renowned Polish economist Tadeusz Kowalik played a leading role in the Solidarity movement, struggling alongside workers for an alternative to "really-existing socialism" that was cooperative and controlled by the workers themselves. In the ensuing two decades, "really-existing" socialism has collapsed, capitalism has been restored, and Poland is now among the most unequal countries in the world. Kowalik asks, how could this happen in a country that once had the largest and most militant labor movement in Europe? This book takes readers inside the debates within Solidar
Download or read book Three Minutes in Poland written by Glenn Kurtz and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The author's search for the annihilated Polish community captured in his grandfather's 1938 home movie. Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome color film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community--an entire culture--that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four-year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; to archives, film preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, Kurtz locates seven living survivors from this lost town, including an eighty-six-year-old man who appears in the film as a thirteen-year-old boy. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the sole remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a riveting exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival--a monument to a lost world"--
Download or read book Books Are Weapons written by Siobahn Doucette and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2018-03-07 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much attention has been given to the role of intellectual dissidents, labor, and religion in the historic overthrow of communism in Poland during the 1980s. Books Are Weapons presents the first English-language study of that which connected them—the press. Siobhan Doucette provides a comprehensive examination of the Polish opposition’s independent, often underground, press and its crucial role in the events leading to the historic Round Table and popular elections of 1989. While other studies have emphasized the role that the Solidarity movement played in bringing about civil society in 1980-1981, Doucette instead argues that the independent press was the essential binding element in the establishment of a true civil society during the mid- to late 1980s. Based on a thorough investigation of underground publications and interviews with important activists of the period from 1976 to 1989, Doucette shows how the independent press, rooted in the long Polish tradition of well-organized resistance to foreign occupation, reshaped this tradition to embrace nonviolent civil resistance while creating a network that evolved from a small group of dissidents into a broad opposition movement with cross-national ties and millions of sympathizers. It was the galvanizing force in the resistance to communism and the rebuilding of Poland’s democratic society.
Download or read book Polish Revolution written by Timothy Garton Ash and published by . This book was released on 1998-09 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Timothy Garton Ash was with the strikers in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in August 1980 when the trade union Solidarity was born, in opposition to the Communist government. He witnessed their bravery and defiance and the emergence of an improbable leader and hero in the country's future president, Lech Walesa. This text recreates the ideals and terrors of that time, and exposes the mechanics of oppression of the communist regime.
Download or read book A Concise History of Poland written by Jerzy Lukowski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-07-06 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An updated and expanded second edition covering Polish history from medieval times to the present day.
Download or read book Poland in the Modern World written by Brian Porter-Szücs and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-03-17 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poland in the Modern World presents a history of the country from the late nineteenth century to the present, incorporating new perspectives from social and cultural history and positioning it in a broad global context Challenges traditional accounts Poland that tend to focus on national, political history, emphasizing the country's 'exceptionalism'. Presents a lively, multi-dimensional story, balancing coverage of high politics with discussion of social, cultural and economic changes, and their effects on individuals’ daily lives. Explores both the regional diversity within Poland and the country’s place within Europe and the wider world. Provides a new interpretive framework for understanding key historical events in Poland’s modern history, including the experiences of World War II and the postwar communist era.
Download or read book Polish Jews in the Soviet Union 1939 1959 written by Katharina Friedla and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2022 PIASA Anna M. Cienciala Award for the Best Edited Book in Polish StudiesThe majority of Poland’s prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.
Download or read book The Eagle Unbowed written by Halik Kochanski and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 911 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Second World War gripped Poland as it did no other country in Europe. Invaded by both Germany and the Soviet Union, it remained under occupation by foreign armies from the first day of the war to the last. The conflict was brutal, as Polish armies battled the enemy on four different fronts. It was on Polish soil that the architects of the Final Solution assembled their most elaborate network of extermination camps, culminating in the deliberate destruction of millions of lives, including three million Polish Jews. In The Eagle Unbowed, Halik Kochanski tells, for the first time, the story of Poland's war in its entirety, a story that captures both the diversity and the depth of the lives of those who endured its horrors. Most histories of the European war focus on the Allies' determination to liberate the continent from the fascist onslaught. Yet the "good war" looks quite different when viewed from Lodz or Krakow than from London or Washington, D.C. Poland emerged from the war trapped behind the Iron Curtain, and it would be nearly a half-century until Poland gained the freedom that its partners had secured with the defeat of Hitler. Rescuing the stories of those who died and those who vanished, those who fought and those who escaped, Kochanski deftly reconstructs the world of wartime Poland in all its complexity-from collaboration to resistance, from expulsion to exile, from Warsaw to Treblinka. The Eagle Unbowed provides in a single volume the first truly comprehensive account of one of the most harrowing periods in modern history.
Download or read book Poland s Solidarity Movement and the Global Politics of Human Rights written by Robert Brier and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-10 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a fresh perspective on recent human rights history by reconstructing debates around dissent and human rights across four countries.
Download or read book Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics written by Ronald Aminzade and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-17 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this book is to highlight and begin to give 'voice' to some of the notable 'silences' evident in recent years in the study of contentious politics. The seven co-authors take up seven specific topics in the volume: the relationship between emotions and contention; temporality in the study of contention; the spatial dimensions of contention; leadership in contention; the role of threat in contention; religion and contention; and contention in the context of demographic and life-course processes. The seven spent three years involved in an ongoing project designed to take stock, and attempt a partial synthesis, of various literatures that have grown up around the study of non-routine or contentious politics. As such, it is likely to be viewed as a groundbreaking volume that not only undermines conventional disciplinary understanding of contentious politics, but also lays out a number of provocative new research agendas.
Download or read book Europe s Growth Champion written by Marcin Piatkowski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes countries rich? What makes countries poor? Europe's Growth Champion: Insights from the Economic Rise of Poland seeks to answer these questions, and many more, through a study of one of the biggest, and least heard about, economic success stories. Over the last twenty-five years Poland has transitioned from a perennially backward, poor, and peripheral country to unexpectedly join the ranks of the world's high income countries. Europe's Growth Champion is about the lessons learned from Poland's remarkable experience, the conditions that keep countries poor, and the challenges that countries need to face in order to grow. It defines a new growth model that Poland and its Eastern European peers need to adopt to grow and catch up with their Western counterparts. Poland's economic rise emphasizes the importance of the fundamental sources of growth- institutions, culture, ideas, and leaders- in economic development. It demonstrates that a shift from an extractive society, where the few rule for the benefit of the few, to an inclusive society, where many rule for the benefit of many, can be the key to economic success. *IEurope's Growth Champion asserts that a newly emerged inclusive society will support further convergence of Poland and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe with the West, and help to sustain the region's Golden Age. It also acknowledges the future challenges that Poland faces, and that moving to the core of the European economy will require further reforms and changes in Poland's developmental character.
Download or read book The Geography and Map Division written by Library of Congress. Geography and Map Division and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book 1981 Mandate for Fightback written by Gus Hall and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
