Memorial sites, monuments, and museums are a natural element of the surrounding landscape and an important tool for shaping collective memory. They refer both to what a given community wants to celebrate and to difficult and painful events. In the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we observed the changing languages of…
In the mid sixteenth century, there were many parallels between the political cultures of Poland-Lithuania and the kingdoms of the British Isles. Both saw thinkers, inspired by the ideals of Renaissance civic humanism, challenge more traditional currents of thought deriving from scholasticism and pride in ancient constitutions. Across the British Isles and Poland-Lithuania there were…
Should politics be a way of overseeing economic growth and social processes, or should it also be a life lived within communities concentrated around the idea of freedom? Does freedom spread in the structures of the post-modern world all by itself as a vital function of social life, or does it require constant civic care,…
Jan Matejko’s ‘Astronomer Copernicus’ (1873) was, in some ways, the dying star of history painting. While the painting was and remains iconic, the genre waned in the decades following its creation. Yet, Matejko’s star burns bright to this day and the legacy of history painting continues in some contemporary art. Christopher Riopelle, curator of ‘Conversations with…
In 1940, Witold Pilecki, a Polish Army officer and member of the Polish underground resistance, volunteered to be captured by the Gestapo. There were rumours that Auschwitz was a place of shocking brutality, but the Polish underground leadership needed someone on the ground to find out the real extent of the horrors taking place. Leaving…
As an instrument of political power, disinformation is as old as mankind but it has reached a different stage with the evolution of digital media and the intensification of global exchange. Infamous examples include the denial of historical events such as the Holocaust, the Gulag system, or the secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, as…
