The present article is actually a book review of a highly significant book on the Intendance Branch of the Romanian Army.The conclusions of the History Service of the General Staff upon the paper show that “this is a highly valuable book and its publishing would be of great use and interest, not only for professional military personnel – be they combatants or non-combatants – but also for the leadership bodies called upon to run the country’s affairs to the public benefit of everyone”.We considered it necessary to initiate this process of reviewing the book, as next year (2017) there have been 160 years since the special service of Romanian military management was founded.
The Private Middle School for Girls owned by Anna Rachalska, operating between 1911 and 1920, was the first successful attempt to create a school in Przemyśl enabling women to pursue university studies, which also provided an impetus for establishing further local forms of education for Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian women. The school premises were far from suitable, the teachers o­en changed and the institution’s significance in the public sphere of the city was limited. However, it is worth noting that the school mostly operated under harsh war conditions that were not conducive to high activity or consistent promotion policy. It was more of a typical private educational institution for women dependent on a variety of local factors, than one of the top High School in Galicia. Its complicated and short history shows the problems of a running private establishment in the di¯cult years of WW1.
Marcia Williams, later known as lady Falkender, was a key adviser to the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. She began working for him as a secretary and over time became his main associate. During her career when she was both a positive and a negative influence on the Prime Minister. Shehelped Wilson to become the Labour Party leader and the Prime Minister, she was a loyal counseland manager of his office. Her personality led to the fact, that over time she became a liability. Especially during second Wilson’s term in office, when she became a centre of several scandals, which damaged her reputation and Prime Minister’s legacy. Lady Falkender therefore remains a controversialindividual of the British political history.
The author seeks to reconstruct “breakthroughs, revivals, and collapses” in The Annals of Jan Długosz. Although the chronicler did not specify turning points in the history of Poland, but it seems to be possible to find these breakthrough events by analysing the narrative and referring to the knowledge about Długosz’s writing method and way of thinking. It is also necessary to remember that the chronicle’s conceptual framework did not extend beyond a medieval mental frame, and for this reason it is difficult to expect him to formulate opinions and ideas corresponding to the contemporary understanding of individual problems.
The industrialization of the 1975–1989 period brought changes in spatial development and transformations in the human natural environment. New industrial investments required space for their implementation. As a result, the size of green areas near the cities gradually decreased. In addition, the activity of the “old” plants, as well as those under development, posed a serious threat to the environment. These problems were also evident in the province of Kielce. In the middle of the Gierek’s decade the region ranked fifth in the country in terms of the amount of pollution emitted into the atmosphere. In the area of “White Basin”, where many cement and lime factories were concentrated, dust fallout production standards were exceeded even several times. Results of the analyses on the problem of environmental threats may become an important part of the debate on socio-economic processes taking place in Poland during the postwar period. Hitherto studies of industrialization in the years 1944/1945–1989 focused mainly on its social consequences. However, they almost completely ignore the issue of degradation of the ecosystem, which is also closely associated with the industrialization pursued.
Pendant les années 1842-1843, dans le cadre de la collectivité monacale de l’ermitage Orgoetii Noi, subordonné au grand monastère de Neamţ une „révolte” de la majorité des moines contre l’archimandrite Chiril Cazamir a eu lieu. En apparence, cette „révolte” était provoquée par des mécontentements déterminés par l’indifférence manifestée par le prieur vis-à-vis du respect des règles monacales et de l’administration des biens de l’ermitage. Une analyse plus approfondie des événements conduit pourtant à la conclusion que „la révolte” semble avoir été organisée par le monastère de Neam en vue de regagner la position qu’il avait eue vis-à-vis l’ermitage, position dont l’évêque métropolitain de la Moldavie l’avait dépourvu en faveur de l’archimandrite Chiril.
Using an anthropological construct of relationships with a place to stay on the axisof “place – no place” by M. Auge and a systemic approach by S. Minuchin in the article basic dimensions were examined, significant for the effectiveness of the strategies of acculturation: patterns of family closeness and external contacts (which are a functionof borders of the family system) and the kind of relationship with the place of 60 immigrants (30 women and 30 men), compared with 30 women and men living permanently in Poland. The study uses Semantic Differential For Family Structure Diagnosis, constructedin accordance with the methodological principles for the construction of this type of method.The results indicate that immigrational families have tendencies to create closer internal relations, and even sometimes tangled internal relations (merger or triangulation)and clearly defined external contacts as not entirely safe, necessary or useful which distinguishes them from non-immigrant families. The country of current residence seemsnot to become for immigrants ‘place’ – because of their tendency to spend time only in the family environment and the low attachment to the place of the current residence. These facts point to the placement rather in the area of separation and relativism space, rather than the integration of the immigrant families, which is an example of in effective acculturation strategy.
In his recent book, “L’histoire est une literature contemporaine”, the French historian Ivan Jablonka turns the history scholar’s art of writing into “the very condition of the truth” of his account. Thus endorsing history as a veridictive discipline “because” of its literary nature, he repudiates fiction which is assimilated to “counterfeiting.” On the one hand, fiction is described as a fraudulent recreation likely to prove itself heuristic on its own terms but certainly not to produce truth “per se”. On the other hand, historians’ scientific method of writing, exhibiting the scholars’ process of inquiry to account for their rendering of the past, is able to elaborate a discourse of truth. Strikingly though, contemporary fictional narratives of fraud challenge the conception of veridicity as an ethical guarantee of the truth of a given account and suggest that fiction, precisely because of its lack of pretense to scientific objectivity, may offer an efficient ethics of truth. By destabilizing their reader through a blurring of facts and fiction simultaneously signalled as such and yet arduous to disentangle, contemporary historical novels assign their readers the very role of a detective, giving him both agentivity and responsibility. Such a conception of literature can perhaps best be analyzed in two contemporary Italian accounts of the life of Sicilian counterfeiter Paolo Ciulla, which two accounts – “Il falsario di Caltagirone” and “Ciulla, il grande malfattore” – turn counterfeiting into a touchstone for a fictional ethics of historical truth. Forged banknotes are in both novels the prism through which Italian economic mutations and their cultural and social consequences are questioned. A political activist and a marginalized homosexual, Ciulla the forger becomes the crucial, albeit ambiguous, epitome of a past characterised by economic and political crises that go back to the beginning of the 19th century but are still shaping Italy. Such narratives, apparently factual but provided with unreliable narrators, hesitate constantly between a concern for documentary truth and the transmission of a forgotten political history, and the fictional recreation of obscure aspects of the counterfeiter’s life for hermeneutical or even comical purposes. Their reader is faced with a complex merging of referential and fictional reading pacts that leaves him with the ethical and epistemological responsibility of sorting out, as best he can, the meanders of Italy’s marginal history. Prancūzų istorikas Ivanas Jablonka neseniai parašytoje knygoje „L’histoire est une literature contemporaine“ [„Istorija yra šiuolaikinė literatūra“] istoriko rašymo meną paverčia savo pasakojimo „tiesos sąlyga“. Šitaip patvirtindamas istoriografiją kaip tikrovę atitinkančią discipliną „būtent dėl“ jos literatūrinio pobūdžio, jis atmeta beletristiką kaip supanašintą su „klastojimu“. Viena vertus, beletristika apibūdinama kaip apgaulingas perkūrimas, galintis vesti prie trumpalaikio sprendimo, tačiau tikrai ne prie tiesos „kaip tokios“. Kita vertus, istorikų mokslinis rašymo metodas, parodantis mokslininkų tyrimo procesą tam, kad būtų pagrįstas jų būdas vaizduoti praeitį, pajėgia išplėtoti tiesos diskursą. Nuostabu, kad šiuolaikiniai beletristiniai apgavystės naratyvai kelia iššūkį tiesos sakymui kaip etinei tiesos garantijai ir sugestijuoja, kad grožinė literatūra, kaip tik dėl to, kad ji nepretenduoja į mokslinį objektyvumą, gali pasiūlyti veiksmingą tiesos etiką. Destabilizuodami skaitytoją per faktų ir pramanų, tuo pat metu ir taip apibūdintų, ir sunkiai išskiriamų, susiliejimą, šiuolaikiniai istoriniai romanai priskiria skaitytojui detektyvo vaidmenį, sugrąžindami jam ir veikėjiškumą, ir atsakomybę. Tokią literatūros koncepciją gal geriausia išanalizuoti dviejuose šiuolaikiniuose pasakojimuose apie sicilietį klastotoją Paolo Ciulla, kurie klastojimą padaro beletristinės etikos kriterijumi istorinei tiesai atpažinti. Šie pasakojimai – tai romanai „Il falsario di Caltagirone“ [„Kaltadžironės klastotojas“] ir „Ciulla, il grande malfattore“ [„Ciulla, didysis piktadarys“]. Juose abiejuose padirbti banknotai yra prizmė, per kurią kvestionuojamos Italijos ekonominės mutacijos ir jų kultūrinės bei socialinės pasekmės. Politinis aktyvistas ir į paraštę nustumiamas homoseksualas, klastotojas Ciulla tampa esminiu, nors ir dviprasmišku, įkūnijimu praeities, paženklintos ekonominių ir politinių krizių, kurių ištakos XIX a., bet jos Italiją vis dar veikia. Tokie naratyvai iš pažiūros faktiški, bet išskleidžiami nepatikimų pasakotojų, nuolatos svyruoja tarp rūpesčio perteikti dokumentuotą tiesą bei primirštą politinę istoriją ir klastotojo gyvenimo neaiškių aspektų prasimanyto atkūrimo hermeneutiniais ar netgi komiškais tikslais. Skaitytoją pasitinka referencinių ir beletristinių skaitymo režimų sudėtingas sujungimas, paliekantis etinę ir epistemologinę atsakomybę pačiam išsiaiškinti Italijos ribinės istorijos vinguriavimus.
Vaněk, Miroslav and Pavel Mücke: Velvet revolutions: An oral history of Czech society. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, ix + 251 pp., ISBN978-0-19-934272-3. If a publishing house as renowned as Oxford University Press publishes a book representing it, it is in the reviewer’s opinion an exceptional success of the Czech historiography. As a matter of fact, this is what Miroslav Vaněk and Pavel Mücke have achieved with their "Velvet revolutions: An oral history of Czech society". It is a pioneering work which, using oral history, systematically conveys and interprets perceptions, thinking, opinions, and attitudes of “ordinary people” during the period of more than two decades from the Prague Spring to the fall of the Communist regime and democratic transformation; more over, being focused on an international audience, it enables such perceptions, thinking, opinions, and attitudes to be understood across the mental barrier of the former Iron Curtain. The publication is based on an analysis and interpretation of more than three hundred methodologically conducted interviews most of which date back to between 2006 and 2013 and whose purpose was to record stories and experience of “ordinary people” during the period in question in a structured manner, i.e. with a focus on several central topics, including politics, family, school and education, employment and unemployment, perception of the West, travelling, and leisure.
The sudden and unexpected death of Stephen Bathory, king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, on 12 December 1586 provoked many hypotheses. Since the king was generally regarded as a healthy man in his prime, historians and physicians have for centuries tried to solve the mystery of his sudden death. One of the primary sources to this question is a text attributed to one of the royal physicians – Jakub Gosławski. The document, entitled The Death of His Majesty Stephen King of Poland at Grodno on 12 December Anno Domini 1586, better known as The Real Truth about the Illness and Death of Late King Stephen Bathory of Poland, was written soon after the king’s death. Its original version has not been found, while two copies have been preserved in the Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw and in the Princes Czartoryski Library in Krakow.The source contains information extremely valuable for historians and historians of medicine about the last days of King Stephen, symptoms of his illness, and treatments meted out to him by his physicians. A valuable supplement is made by a post-mortem report describing the appearance and state of his internal organs. Gosławski’s text has already been published in the past, but either it was done without due care, with many mistakes and omissions, or on the basis of some other manuscript, unknown to us. The present edition juxtaposes the two known copies, with a substantial body of editorial commentary and that pertaining to the content. This makes it possible to see the diﬀerences between the two copies, in the ﬁrst place. There is also the ﬁrst edition of the text included, issued in 1830 by Edward Raczyński, which in the most important fragments is quite diﬀerent to that of the texts kept in the Central Archives of Historical Records and in the Princes Czartoryski Library.The edition of this source is even more pertinent given the fact that, in recent years, there is a number of specialists questioning the widespread and preserved diagnosis that the king’s death was caused by uraemia. The well-edited source text, with a commentary pertaining to the content, can help researchers in thoroughly analysing the symptoms of Bathory’s illness and shed new light on the causes of his death.
The study deals with political activities of the Soviet Army in Czechoslovakia after the intervention on August 21, 1968, and its sympathizers from the ranks of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The authoress examines the topic in the early stage of the so-called normalization (until the spring of 1970), focusing on the local level; however, she sets her research into a broader period context and derives general conclusions from its results. Although the official agreement on the temporary stay of Soviet troops in the territory of Czechoslovakia declared that the Soviet Army should not interfere with domestic affairs of the Czechoslovak state, the Soviet leadership kept devising plans how to make use of the presence of Soviet troops for political purposes. Soviet officers participated in the dissemination of Soviet propaganda, established contacts with local antireform party officials, spoke at their forums, complained about hostile attitudes of Czechoslovak political bodies, and thus kept pressing for a legitimization of the political arrangements. The authoress shows that local pro-Soviet activists, who had maintained contacts with the Soviet Army from the very beginning and been taking over its political agenda, were playing a crucial role in the success of these efforts. In line with Soviet intentions, they were implementing the normalization process “from below”, initiating purges in various organs, demanding the dismissal of officials protesting against presence of the Soviet Army, participating in the subsequent political vetting. They were actively pushing through a change of the official approach to the Soviet Army and helped break its boycott by the Czechoslovak society, which had initially been almost unanimous. In doing so, they were making use of their personal contacts to organize manifestation “friendship” meetings and visits of Soviet soldiers to Czechoslovak schools and factories. The authoress analyzes the reasons of the attitude of these activists, most of whom came from the ranks of “old” (pre-war) and “distinguished” members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and illustrates the development outlined above by specific examples. By way of conclusion, she notes that, although different forms of the Czechoslovak-Soviet “friendship” since 1968 are often viewed as mere formalistic acts without any deeper meaning at the level of “lived” experience, they were, from the viewpoint of the Soviet policy, well thought-out and centrally planned propagandistic activities which contributed to the promotion of the Soviet interpretation of the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion and discredited its opponents.
The paper focuses on the way in which the authors of Polish Catholic and Evangelical catechisms of the 16th century understood and explained of the idea of the Church. According to the decrees of the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church was presented as the continuator of the teachings of the Apostles, with its power deriving from the authority of the Pope, the successor of Peter, and unity of faith confirmed by miracles. Protestant theologists preach about the visible church, which exists wherever the pure Word of God is preached, and claim that sacraments are administered in accordance with the Gospel. The universal invisible Church exists alongside the visible Church. It connects every person following the Christ, who is the only head of his Church.
The author, interested in the history of the Polish People’s Army (political work on the level of military units), focuses his attention on the problem of shaping collective memory of Poles in Poland under communists. The article is devoted to one of the elements of political and educational work in the Polish People’s Army – to the so-called “education based on tradition”, which was a tool of inculcation of the special vision of history in line with the political principles (emphasising “progressive traditions”, the history of workers’ movement and activities of communists during the World War II). Tools used for this “education based on tradition” included halls of tradition (which were the centres of this activity), political training, celebrations of important feast days and anniversaries, visual propaganda and cultural-educational work. In the closing part of the article the author presented also some limitations of this education, together with a selection of results of sociological research conducted in the army in the 1960s, which evidenced the effectiveness of propaganda work.
Opening new areas and perspectives, multidisciplinary researches make it possible to review the existing historical knowledge. Paradigm poliphonicity is of importance not only for an integrating Europe-Mediterranean present, but also for the national history and the diversityof its coexisting identities. The principles of Iberian epic from the late sixteenth century, triggered by the battle of Lepanto, reconfirmed the renaissance prestige and attractiveness of the heroic-patriotic genre, as well as of imperial ideology. The urban centers of the Montenegrin Littoral are significantly represented in the considered works, contextualizing, beside Venetian illustrative and descriptive solutions, the relating strategies and discourses.
In the morning of 13 December 1981 Poles were informed of the martial law declared on Poland by Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski. The move was accompanied by mass arrests of Solidarity leaders and political dissidents; and militia and army troops in tanks and armoured military vehicles appeared on the streets of every major city. The restrictions imposed on the country included, among others, curfew between 10 pm and 6 am; telephone lines were disconnected, and mail was subject to censorship. Streets were patrolled by soldiers, classes in schools and at universities were suspended, travel between towns required permission, and many other restrictions on civil liberties were imposed. Only two national-wide papers were issued, which in the Tri-City region were merged into one „tri-daily” published by the party comrades selected by the Voivodeship Committee of the party. All public administration, state services, mines, power plants and most of the key companies were placed under military management. All this, combined with an economic and political crisis of the state, had a dramatic impact on the everyday life of people, who rebelled against martial law by organising strikes and street demonstrations. The article describes the everyday struggle of people in the harsh reality during the first months after the introduction of martial law in Poland on the example of Gdańsk, Gdynia and Sopot, which together make up the “Tri-City” (Trójmiasto) conurbation.
The article analyzes the collection of old-printed books, which are kept in the Monastery of Saint Jovan Bigorski. These books are poorly researched in Macedonian and Bulgarian historiography. The focus is on the brief notes made in the margins of a book. They testify to the important role that the monastery had in the 17th-19th centuries. In addition these notes are a testimony to the lives of ordinary people which often leaving aside from the Big Narrative.
Studying the various forms of women’s political and civic activity during the First World War, the article reveals a different resource of women’s agency (and emancipation), i.e., the affective environment of women’s experience (their pain and their social suffering). Emphasizing the problem of (micro and macro) corruption, a specific social phenomenon that the anger of women made publicly visible, the article also stresses a new process, i.e., “becoming aware of what it means to be a woman” and “what it means to be a man” (beyond the horizon of defined gender roles). The author reveals why it was precisely the anger of women (the poor one’s, in many cases uneducated) that expressed “the horror of their coercive situation showing its face” (M. Duras). Thus, the article is an attempt to rethink the national modern project and certain mechanical and idealistic interpretations (by left-wing and right-wing historians) of the growth of political awareness among new historical subjects: the people, the workers, women. Thus the author emphasizes how the new joint communities of men and women were formed (communities that cut across gender, social and class divisions) in the course of resistance against the threatened ontology – what is in fact just and what isn’t. In this way, the moral boundaries of society were revealed (inasmuch as the fact that those boundaries were being crossed provoked joint resistance against this transgression). Along with this, other boundaries (those between good from evil) became clearly perceptible, and hence, a “new ethical society” became suddenly thinkable (a society in which hunger, bad hygiene and death from social diseases, such as typhus fever, tuberculosis, alcoholism, would no longer be part of the normal order of things). The article attempts to show how it was precisely the emancipation of (ordinary and often uneducated) women from their forced passivity and social unhappiness that contained other views of women about the social world.
In 1937 the Bulgarian Red Cross Journal informed about the death in Washington of the ‘great worker of the American and Global Nurses’ deed – Miss Clara Noyes, who deserves gratitude and honour because her contribution for the nurses’ deed in Bulgaria’. About 80 years after her death a book about her life was published written by Roger Noyes. The biography is based on archive documents, publications and oral history. Roger Noyes presents the historical background of the Progressive Era and the political and social context of the suffragist’s movement, the racial problems, the rise of the public health sphere and the nurses’ profession as the most spread women’s job at that time. The book about Clara Noyes reveals a lot of interesting questions about the international contacts between the women’s organizations and their agents who supported the establishment of new educational institutions and changed the place of women in the public sphere. This opens a wide field for research of mutual influences, solidarity, power relations and hier-archies. They are important women’s networks of exchange which helped to overcome a lot of difficulties on the Balkans, in other European countries and in the USA.