A Concise History Of Poland

Poland is a country which sporadically hits the headlines of the Anglo-Saxon world. It has suffered the dubious distinction of being wiped off the political map in 1795 to be resurrected after the First World War only to suffer apparent annihilation during the Second, with reduction to satellite status of the Soviet Union only to emerge in the van of resistance to Soviet domination during the 1980s. Yet the history of Poland remains comparatively little known. This book offers a brief, non-specialist introduction to Polish history, from medieval times to the present day, and is the only short history of Poland available in English. It concentrates essentially on political development which, particularly for the pre-nineteenth-century period, still remains little known to English readers. The book also includes much material on relations with Germany, Russia, the Ukraine, Lithuania, and other neighbouring states.

An updated and expanded second edition covering Polish history from medieval times to the present day.

Biskupski (history, St. John Fisher College) offers a critical account of the historical developments of the last century in Poland, with an emphasis on the last several decades. Intended for high school and college students, as well as the general reader. Includes a chronology.Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

The second edition of this guide to Poland has been updated to take account of the years from 1989–2005. This period marked its liberation from the Soviet Union, the birth of Poland's 'Third Republic' and, recently, its accession to the European Union in 2004. Poland's history has been marked by its resilience. Once a dominant force in central and eastern Europe and home to a remarkable experiment in consensual politics, it was excised from the map by its neighbours in 1795. Resurrected in 1918, partitioned afresh during the Second World War, it survived to become a satellite of the Soviet Union. Yet in the 1980s, it was Poland which blazed the trail in casting off communism, and was finally able to reassert its Christian heritage. With its updated bibliography and new chronology, the book is the ideal companion for all looking for a comprehensive survey of this fascinating country.

Margaret Conrad's history of Canada begins with a challenge to its readers. What is Canada? What makes up this diverse, complex and often contested nation-state? What was its founding moment? And who are its people? Drawing on her many years of experience as a scholar, writer and teacher of Canadian history, Conrad offers astute answers to these difficult questions. Beginning in Canada's deep past with the arrival of its Aboriginal peoples, she traces its history through the conquest by Europeans, the American Revolutionary War and the industrialization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its prosperous present. Despite its successes and its popularity as a destination for immigrants from across the world, Canada remains a curiously reluctant player on the international stage. This intelligent, concise and lucid book explains just why that is.

Being Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland's return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland's cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland's modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, rifts, and restorations that swept through Poland in this period, Polish literature and film reveal a multitude of perspectives. Addressing romantic perceptions of the Polish immigrant, the politics of post-war cinema, poetry, and mass media, Being Poland is a comprehensive reference work written with the intention of exposing an international audience to the explosion of Polish literature and film that emerged in the twentieth century.

Accessible to students, tourists and general readers alike, this book provides a broad overview of Russian history since the ninth century. Paul Bushkovitch emphasizes the enormous changes in the understanding of Russian history resulting from the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, new material has come to light on the history of the Soviet era, providing new conceptions of Russia's pre-revolutionary past. The book traces not only the political history of Russia, but also developments in its literature, art and science. Bushkovitch describes well-known cultural figures, such as Chekhov, Tolstoy and Mendeleev, in their institutional and historical contexts. Though the 1917 revolution, the resulting Soviet system and the Cold War were a crucial part of Russian and world history, Bushkovitch presents earlier developments as more than just a prelude to Bolshevik power.

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.