Publications

Seven centuries of extraordinary women! Though often overlooked in conventional accounts, women with myriad backgrounds and countless talents have made an impact on Polish and Polish American history. John J. Bukowczyk gathers articles from the journals Polish Review and Polish American Studies to offer a fascinating cross-section of readings about the lives and experiences of...

By 1942 the Nazi leadership had decided that the Jewish ghettos across occupied Poland should be liquidated, with Warsaw’s being the largest , processed in phases. In response the left-wing Jewish Combat Organisation (ZOB) and right-wing Jewish Military Union (ZZW) formed and began training, preparing defences and smuggling in arms and explosives. The first Warsaw...

In a normal country, the rights of labour unions render it possible for the demands of workers to be met peacefully. But in a place where there is no right to strike, where legislation imposed on workers annuls with one fell swoop a hundred years of labour union achievements, where the government lowers the workers’...

In May 1719, the rescue and escape of Princess Maria Clementina Sobieska from her detention in Innsbruck was celebrated throughout Catholic Europe. It was a feat of painstaking planning, daring execution, and steel-nerved improvisation. Masterminded by Kildareman Charles Wogan, he and his Irish and French companions influenced the course of international relations, shocking King George...

The Katyn Massacre of 22,000 Polish prisoners of war is a crime to which there are no witnesses. Committed in utmost secrecy in April-May 1940 by the NKVD on the direct orders of Joseph Stalin, for nearly fifty years the Soviet regime succeeded in maintaining the fiction that Katyn was a Nazi atrocity, their story...

The subject matter of the present batch of articles is focused along a number of topical axes. The authors of the articles mention such issues as the genesis of the British guarantees for Poland of March 1939 and British-Polish co-operation during the war, also in the field of special operations. Relatively much space in the...

August 2019 marks the 75th anniversary of the Wola Massacre – a mass murder committed against the civilian population of Warsaw in the first days of the Warsaw Uprising. To this day, many circumstances of this crime remain unclear, and its perpetrators unpunished. Were the events in Wola inconsistent with the policies of the German...

Queens of Poland are conspicuously absent from the study of European queenship—an absence which, together with early modern Poland’s marginal place in the historiography, results in a picture of European royal culture that can only be lopsided and incomplete. Katarzyna Kosior cuts through persistent stereotypes of an East-West dichotomy and a culturally isolated early modern...

This book envisions Łódź, a city in present-day central Poland, the region’s textile industrial hub, to have been the capital of the Polish 19th century. Its history is a tale of struggle with modern change in Eastern Europe. The authors boldly challenge the romantic and noble-based Polish cultural imaginary, offering instead a revolutionary path to...

The structure and content of the volume references the fundamental research and historiographical problems with which the Witold Pilecki Center has been involved since its inception. These encompass the very specific nature of Polish society’s encounter with the two totalitarianisms – and in particular with German occupation policy – as well as the key challenges...