In 1853, Ignacy Łukasiewicz was the first to distill kerosene from crude oil and use it to illuminate a pharmacy and then an operating theater in a hospital in Lwów. A year later, Łukasiewicz established an oil company and began extracting it from Bóbrka near Krosno, from what is now the oldest industrial crude oil...
Ewa Zientara: Why was the Bar Confederation formed? Dorota Dukwicz: This question is only seemingly easy. In 1767 the Radom Confederates hoped that Russia would help them depose the hated King Stanisław II Augustus and move away the spectre of the demands made by the non-Catholic nobility, that is, dissenters, or dissidents, as they were...
Bronisław Geremek was a man of many passions: history and politics were the most important among them. His political achievements are much more noticeable because of their social impact and significance for the Polish state. Geremek embodied the successes of the foreign policy of post-1989 Poland: the country’s accession to NATO and the European Union....
The 18th century was a time of enormous cultural, political and societal upheaval for the West. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it was a period of decline that was completed by the partitions. However, reducing the 18th-century history of the Polish-Lithuanian state to a mere falling into political non-existence would be a simplified and thus false...
