The article attempts to comprehend the event and eventfulness as a category of contemporary scientific and philosophical analysis. Trying to understand the causes of the modern “renaissance” of the event and the specifics of its use in historical science, the author turns to the reflections of twentieth-century philosophers, who interpreted the event as a break in historical time, as an event that is associated with a sudden and unexpected shift of the semantic field and therefore actualized the role of the subject, able to coordinate this shift in his experience, in consciousness and memory. It has been noted that marking the event as historical is defined not only by the scale of the research (spatial and temporal) but also by being part of a certain culture of memory, a certain tradition. Understanding of this fact made historians and philosophers introduce into the dictionary of the modern humanist one more concept — eventfulness — which fixes in its contents the refusal to consider the sequence of events as unambiguous compulsory causality (the linear concept of time), replacing it with cause-effect event series (event temporality). In other words, an event, its experience and conceptualization are increasingly beginning to be understood as a focus, in which different levels of temporalization embodying different human experiences, including the experience and actions of historians, are actualized. All this gives grounds for criticism of the opposition of event and structural history characteristic of traditional historiography. As the analysis shows, despite the fact that events and structures belong to different orders of temporality, structures, on the one hand, manifest and are comprehended through events, on the other hand, make it possible for an event to exist, to identify it as such, to allow it to take place.

Professor Michał Głowiński died September 29th, 2023. Polish science has lost a great humanist and writer. Text brings a little reminder of his biography, work and influence on the scientific community.

The aim of this article is to present selected methodological threads of the discussion on the status of historical sources which took place in Polish post‑war historiography. In the article, I present the concepts of the historical source formulated in 1957–1989, mainly by Gerard Labuda and Jerzy Topolski. Further in the text, I will present the discussion about Topolski’s concepts and characterize the peculiarities of contemporary history as regards historical sources. In the light of the presented classification of sources, I will reflect on the status of the documents created by the apparatus of repression of the Polish People’s Republic.

Marc Bloch — one of the most distinguished 20th Century historians – is the author of Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940. Serving as a staff offi cer, Bloch witnessed the fall of France in 1940 from the front line. This book is so interesting from the methodological point of view, because we are presented here with a historical source created by a historian, who additionally knows how an ideal type of historical evidence ought to be written. This French historian thought that history is also written to give contemporaries lessons on how to avoid the mistakes of the past. This is an important message of Strange Defeat.

The main aim of the article was to present two emerging discourses of contemporary historiography in the field of digital media. In the first example, the authors present the thought of Niels Brügger, called the Web History and Web-minded historiography, which concentrates upon the digital source itself. The other school is marked by the works of Friedrich Kittler and Wolfgang Ernst, and called media archaeology. It underlines the concept of the medium itself as a primary object of research.