The paper considers the vision of the world and the person of Józef Kazimierz Plebański (1831–1897), the Warsaw historian, one of two Polish students of Leopold von Ranke. In my article, I analyse the essential categories and objects which structure his thinking about reality, such as liberty, Providence, moral laws, state, nation, and humanity. At the end, I try to compare the worldview of Plebański with the worldview of historicism.

In this article I try to think about the terms “stories” and “ontologies” in Ewa Domańska’s works: Mikrohistorie. Spotkania w międzyświatach (1999; 2005), Historie niekonwencjonalne (2006), Historia egzystencjonalna (2012), Historia ratownicza (2014) and I try to compare my conclusions with her latest publication. I am interested in the turning point in her thoughts, giving up the theory and methodology of history and switching to the ontology of the dead body. In order to do this I look through these publications and indicate which threads could help work out the excellent, innovative, and fresh conception of Nekros. The main part of the article is a detailed discussion of this. In the other part, I consider how to interpret more traditionally a past description like “cultural memory” and whether Domańska’s works accidentally invalidate them. I suggest a short statement of Marcin Napiórkowski’s and Stephen Marks’ works to show closer (Marks) and further (Napiórkowski) parallels or completely different presentations of similar problems.

The text deals with the issue of “historical biography”. It aims to reconstruct the key concepts connected with the biographical publishing series “The Legacies of the progressive personalities of our past”. The text answers the question what conceptual framework surrounded and legitimised the edition.

According to UNESCO, in 2015, the sculpture as the artistic medium was third among financed public residency art programmes. Contemporary public art and cultural programmes across Europe were focused on finding a balance between cultural identity and cultural diversity among the communities. Therefore, aesthetics and function became a significant issue related to the exploration of participatory design on public sculpture. In this paper, an adopted model of Kurt Lewin’s force field analysis was used to explore the function of sculpture in the public space. The aim was to further evaluate inclusive design to answer the question: Does contemporary sculpture in the public space evoke a certain kind of group dynamic process?

The article deals with the issue of illness and suffering in Carmelite sermons of the 17th–18th centuries. The question of the origin of suffering is considered along with the role of God’s mercy and justice in the preaching discourse about the rightness and purposefulness of suffering of the human being. In addition, an analysis of the views of preachers about topics related to passing away and the attitude they advocate in the face of death is included.

The aim of the paper is to shed light on the theoretical background of the inclusion of health in the standard of living studies, and the use of two of its specifi c measures — life expectancy at birth and body height. Hence, the article describes the idea of capabilities and functionings developed by Amartya Sen as a proposed solution to the limitations of the classic measurement of the standard of living.

In the fi rst half of the 20th century, the German historiography of medicine created genuine ideas of methodology of research on the history of the medical sciences and medicinal practice. They were a continuation of the native historiographic tradition which was present in German university didactics and literature about the history of medicine in the 19th century. The uniqueness of German anti-positivist methodologies was based on a perception of cultural context in the genesis of medical theories and doctrines. They were researching cultural factors in the overall structure and analysing their infl uence on academics’ and common folk’s perception. There were two rival methodological trends — neoromantic and sociocultural ones, and the second gained wider infl uence in the historiography of medicine. The sociocultural trend had a few research schools, among them: Kulturgeschichte der Medizin, Sozialgeschichte der Medizin and Alltagsgeschichte der Medizin. The main purpose of this paper is to show the genesis of German anti-positivist trends in 20th century, the most important achievements of sociocultural historiography in Germany till 1933 and after 1945, and its infl uence on the standard American historiography of medicine in 20th century. The paper also presents a wide range of literature printed in both Germany and USA about the aforementioned historiographic trends.

The article attempts to show Szczepan Twardoch’s novel Drach as a literary version of the counter- history, which constitute an alternative vision of the past. The theory of counter-history was taken from Michel Foucault’s writings Society Must Be Defended. By this conception Foucault tried to restore the history of those excluded from the offi cial historical discourse.

The article is a brief presentation of the relationship between the politics of memory and Facebook. This type of connection advantages aestheticism, pictures and emotional infl uence but discounts traditional instruments modelling collective memory. The article focuses on the answer to the question of how a popular culture aesthetic infi ltrates and changes the politics of memory.

The article will consider the possibility of using sources in modernising the biological study of existence in history on the basis of selected trends of “modern historiography”. The problem of sources is considered in the context of the use of anthropology of knowledge, historical anthropology, microhistory, and chaos theory in historical-medical research. In this process, I see an opportunity to look for new research spaces and, therefore, ask new questions to source messages or to search for new ones. Therefore, it is important not to forget about the need to base the narrative on the source while introducing methodological innovations.

Early modern medicine knew thousands of medicines and possible treatments that could be found in guidebooks, medical dissertations, herbaria, and dispensaries. The article presents the characteristics of the basic sources of the history of medicine, as well as their specifi city and the range of information they provide. The aim is to show possible source selection method in an attempt to describe a real picture of the therapeutic methods most commonly used by the offi cial medicine in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The aim of the article is to analyze literary images of women who had an impact on the history of Poland in the historical novel Gambit hetmański (2014), written by Robert Foryś. This type of fiction is a popular variety of the genre, its main theme is the conflict between political factions fighting for power. The leaders of the factions are women. The article focus on the answer to the question: whether Foryś creating scandalous portraits of women who reach for power is a threat or a chance for them to recall and preserve their presence in history.

One of the major subjects that construct the emotional right-wing script is the history of the postwar Polish independence Underground and the related present-day politics and historical policy. The analysis of the right-wing press enables the distinction of four temporal categories to which specific toposes can be assigned as well as the moulded emotional elements: 1) the period of struggle, 2) the period of imprisonment and possible death, 3) the period of the Third Republic [of Poland], and 4) the period from the victory of the Law and Justice party (PiS) in the parliamentary elections until the present.

The article attempts to reach the elements that control the efforts of constituting a specific type of vision of the past, with which — as I believe — we are dealing in the contemporary public discourse about history.

The paper examines the contemporary discussion of the concept of ‘national hero’. As the subject of analysis interpretations of the role of Roman Dmowski, the leader of Polish nationalist movement in the first half of 20th century, in the contemporary political and historical discussion in Poland was chosen. On that example the way in which political life is changing the previous assessment and meaning of the ‘national hero’ is observed.