Poland in the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom

This timely account of Poland’s modern history, from the end of the 19 th century to the present day, positions the country within the context of Europe, using the events of Poland’s past to illustrate and illuminate the global forces that have transformed the world over the last century.  Challenging traditional, nationalistic accounts of heroism and tragedy, the author sets the major political events in Polish history alongside broader developments within society.  He provides particular insight into the regional, cultural and economic diversity of the country, and focusses on the experience of individuals’ daily lives.  For instance, readers learn of the day–to–day relations between people of differing religion and language between the two world wars, the realities of life in the Warsaw ghetto; what Stalin’s industrial expansion meant for the peasants who took up factory jobs in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the effects of changing concepts of masculinity and femininity over time. The result is a lively and nuanced historical overview that recognizes both the particularities and the universality of modern Poland’s story.

Brian Porter–Szûcs is Professor of History at the University of Michigan, where he has taught since 1994. He is the author of Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland (2011) and When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth–Century Poland (2000). He is also the co–editor, with Bruce Berglund, of Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe (2010).