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The first annotated English edition of a classic early-twentieth-century Yiddish memoir that vividly describes Jewish life in a small Eastern European town. Originally published in Warsaw in 1913, this beautifully written memoir offers a panoramic description of the author’s experiences growing up in Kamieniec Litewski, a Polish shtetl connected with many important events in the history of nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewry. Although the way of life portrayed in this memoir has disappeared, the historical, cultural, and folkoric material it contains will be of major interest to historians and general readers alike. Kotik’s story is the saga of a wealthy and influential family thro...
In Yankel's Tavern, Glenn Dynner investigates the role of Jews in tavern-keeping in the Kingdom of Poland between 1815 and the uprising of 1863-4 and its aftermath.
This book sets out to present the Polish-Russian conflict the way the elite of Russian society saw it. One of its chief research topics is the interaction between Russian public opinion, the policy the Empire pursued on its uncompliant subjects, and the impact the Polish conflict had on the evolution of Russian political ideas and movements. A major issue it addresses is the reaction of Russian society, its diverse political factions and social and philosophical trends and their relationship to the Polish national movement, and the effect of the Polish question on their evolution. Research in numerous archives and manuscript collections in Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, played a fundamental role in the work for this book. This book was originally published in Polish as Fatalna sprawa: Kwestia polska w rosyjskiej mysli politycznej (Kraków: Arcana, 2000). It was awarded the Klio Prize, a prestigious Polish award for the best monograph on a historical subject. This English translation is an abridged version (about 1/3 of the book's original size).
History and collective memories influence a nation, its culture, and institutions; hence, its domestic politics and foreign policy. That is the case in the Intermarium, the land between the Baltic and Black Seas in Eastern Europe. The area is the last unabashed rampart of Western Civilization in the East, and a point of convergence of disparate cultures. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz focuses on the Intermarium for several reasons. Most importantly because, as the inheritor of the freedom and rights stemming from the legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian/Ruthenian Commonwealth, it is culturally and ideologically compatible with American national interests. It is also a gateway to both East and West. Since...
From the Baltic to the Black Sea, four major empires with ethnically and religiously diverse populations encountered each other along often changing and contested borders. Examining this geographically vast, multicultural region through a variety of methodological lenses, this volume offers informed and dispassionate analyses of how the many populations of these borderlands managed to coexist in a previous era and why the areas eventually descended into violence. An understanding of this region will help readers grasp the preconditions of interethnic coexistence and the causes of ethnic violence and war in many of the world's other borderlands both past and present.
This book elucidates the complicated relationship between religion and national consciousness in the modern world, highlighting various cases within Central and Eastern Europe. Through these analyses, contributors demonstrate how religion, far from disappearing, strongly impacted the emerging national consciousness. Starting with the pre-modern era, essays examine the long-term transformation of religious, political, and social situations of the region. In addition, the book considers the impact of imperial powers, which tended to be linked with a universal religion. Light is also shed on the multifaceted nature of nations, which contribute to a new vision of the historical transformation of the region that enriches the general theories of nationalism.
The simplest purpose of a map is a rational one: to educate, to solve a problem, to point someone in the right direction. Maps shape and communicate information, for the sake of improved orientation. But maps exist for states as well as individuals, and they need to be interpreted as expressions of power and knowledge, as Steven Seegel makes clear in his impressive and important new book. Mapping Europe’s Borderlands takes the familiar problems of state and nation building in eastern Europe and presents them through an entirely new prism, that of cartography and cartographers. Drawing from sources in eleven languages, including military, historical-pedagogical, and ethnographic maps, as we...
The conflict between Haskalah and hasidism shaped the world of Polish Jewry for almost two centuries. This award-winning study, a synthesis that offers both breadth and depth, is based on source materials in Polish and five other languages. Its subject matter is successfully contextualized within the broader domains of the European Enlightenment and Polish culture, tsarist policy and Polish history, hasidism and rabbinic culture, as well as the ins and outs of the Haskalah itself.
The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795-1918 comprehensively covers an important, complex, and controversial period in the history of Poland and East Central Europe, beginning in 1795 when the remnanst of the Polish Commonwealth were distributed among Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and culminating in 1918 with the re-establishment of an independent Polish state. Until this thorough and authoritative study, literature on the subject in English has been limited to a few chapters in multiauthored works. Chronologically, Wandycz traces the histories of the lands under Prussian, Austrian, and Russian rule, pointing out their divergent evolution as well as the threads that bound them together. The result is a balanced, comprehensive picture of the social, political, economic, and cultural developments of all nationalities inhabiting the land of the old commonwealth, rather than a limited history of one state (Poland) and one people (the Poles).
This volume, as well as East Central European Society in the Era of Revolutions, focus on the military aspects of the historic evolution of East Central Europe from the French Revolution to the Unification of Germany, consist of a series of studies by distinguished historians of East Central Europe.