The aim of the paper is to provide hints on how to read Acemoglu and Robinson’s institutional hypothesis. First, we recall the meaning of their inclusive and extractive institutions. Then, we classify and compare the concept to certain approaches present in development economics. Additionally, we outline the perspective of historical research of institutions, raising the approach of historical natural experiments and comparative methods. We claim in the paper that to understand Acemoglu and Robinson’s institutional hypothesis and their strong rejection of other hypotheses on economic development one has to turn back to the basic notion of institutions. We argue that the authors of Why Nations Fail are focused on considering formal institutions only, which impoverishes the research perspective presented in that book.

The article places the environmental history on the map of historical research. It contains a problematised definition of environmental history, outlines its key determinants, describes its research issues and methodology, and analyses the question of the historical sources that are used by environmental historians. The article also reflects on the relationship between environmental history research and theoretical reflection, primarily from the field of post-human studies and postcolonial studies. It also considers the interdisciplinary potential of these in relation to the humanities as well as natural and earth sciences. The article also contains a review of the state of research on environmental history in the Polish historiography of the last five years.

In the article, I try to show the world of the past as the world of games. First of all, history appears as a game – the game of the historian with his subject of study or cognition. Secondly, history itself can be conceptualised by the metaphor of the game. The history of Portugal is treated as an example of the object of historical research, which changes along with the theories applied. The act of theorising sets the limits of the known past. On the basis of selected examples from the history of Portugal in the 20th century, I try to show how the use of various research tools allows us to ask new/different questions.

The goal of the article is to propose a different approach to – and therefore a new concept of – the history of thinking. Reflecting on the history of philosophy, it suggests a broader understanding of the latter. Yet traditional studies in the history of philosophy are not to be rejected; they need to be reformed, and such a reform could be performed basing on the experiences of the discipline of historiography. Thus conceived, the history of thinking could open us to a different future.

This article analyses the first traces of postsecular turn in historical theory, arguing that they first emerged in Dominick LaCapra’s book History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (2009) and in Allan Megill’s subsequent polemic with that work. The author claims that what prevails in LaCapra’s narrative is the rhetoric of “resisting apocalypse”, thus demonstrating how he inscribes postsecular themes with the issue of trauma, together with its religious connotations. The discussion between LaCapra and Megill is treated here as a point of departure for considering the forms that the postsecular can take in historical theory.

This article is an attempt to represent the aspirations of the Polish aristocracy during the First World War by imagining the dreams of Maria Lubomirska – wife of Prince Zdzisław Lubomirski, arguably the most important Polish politician in Warsaw at the time. Lubomirska and her circle attended séances led by a popular medium, and they saw what they wanted to see, just as they perceived the changing political tides in the same way. Though aristocrats were in some sense already anachronistic at this time, they still wished to maintain their superior social and political position into the future. Lubomirska in particular envisioned an independent Poland led by a king. The idea of Poland becoming a monarchy may seem absurd in hindsight, but as the article shows, if we return to this moment in history without teleological presumptions it was a likely outcome until the last days of the war. Text in italics comes directly from Lubomirska’s diary.

Artykuł jest recenzją książki: Ziemianka w XIX-wiecznym kurorcie. Listy Stefanii z Lemańskich Rzewuskiej do męża z pobytów w zagranicznych uzdrowiskach, oprac. Jarosław Kita, Urszula Klemba (Łódź: Księży Młyn, 2017).

This interview with Paul Roth was conducted after a symposium dedicated to his latest book The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, which took place at the European Network for Philosophy of Social Sciences conference on August 30, 2019. This interview is authorised. Translation from English and all footnotes – Piotr Kowalewski Jahromi.

Recenzja książki Katarzyny Pękackiej-Falkowskiej, Dżuma w Toruniu w trakcie III wojny północnej (Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 2019).

Tekst jest recenzją pracy: Violetta Julkowska, Historie rodzinne. Narracje – narratorzy – interpretacje (Poznań–Bydgoszcz: Instytut Historii UAM i Oficyna Wydawnicza EPIGRAM, 2018), 272 ss.

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.

This short essay presents how complex and difficult it is today to study the ethnic, cultural, and civilisational transformations in the areas subjected to Rome. It seems it is no longer enough to use the term ‘Romanisation’ to describe all the complicated and diverse phenomena of adaptation, acculturation, or assimilation in the Roman world.

The main goal of this paper is to present a fully developed concept of Paul A. Roth’s philosophy of history to the Polish reader. Of course, it is just an introduction, but with the interview it should be a good starting point for further analysis. These seem desirable given Roth’s very ambitious programme, which in addition is based on “old facts”; that is, an analytical philosophy of history and science. The rapprochement between the two “visions” is not only a philosophical consideration, but also responds to the often-raised voices of practitioners. This introduction refers primarily to Roth’s latest book, indicating a possible interpretation. This “reading” is conducted by indicating the historical context, recalling philosophical analyses and determining the validity of the proposed solutions in order to decide how much science there is in history and vice versa.

This article aims to look at the Roman interest in the past beyond the context of traditional historiography, focused on the great politics, events and individuals. It suggests that antiquarian writing was not so much a separate literary genre, but rather an alternative model of historical reflection focused on studying the distant past in all its manifestations: everyday life, culture, religion, language or law.

In the extensive polemic with the book Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past by Ethan Kleinberg, the reviewer comments on the innovative potential of deconstruction as it enables the conception of various scenarios of the future. Kleinberg’s reflections on the ontology (or hauntology) of the past are located within the current discussion about “the ontological turn.” The reviewer compares Kleinberg’s take on a deconstructive approach to the past with similar considerations presented by Sande Cohen in the US as well as by Keith Jenkins, Alun Munslow and, more recently, Berber Bevernage in Europe.

The aim of this article is to present the understanding of social history of Jerzy Topolski, from the theoretical side and as it was used in practical research work. The source basis, aside from the few direct quotes from the historian from Poznan on social history, are mainly analyses of his selected original works and works edited by him. The article also takes note of the discussion surrounding the term ‘social history’ itself and the research scope of social history as a historic discipline or sub-discipline which took place in the second half of the 20th century, which is the period in which Topolski published his works.

This article is a review of Ethan Kleinberg’s Haunting History. For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past (Stanford, 2017). I focus on three issues related to that work. These are: historians’ attitude towards the deconstruction; the idea of ontological realism and its critique; the role of young historians in modern academia. This text is based not only on the book reviewed but also on its different analyses and ways it was used in other research. In the conclusion, I present how Haunting History can be used as an emancipatory tool by scholars who are starting their academic careers now.

The paper examines the special historiographic evidence: the lost last book by the well-known Polish historian and methodologist Professor Jerzy Topolski entitled “Methodology of History at the Beginning of the 21st Century”. Only its working outline in the form of an extensive table of contents has survived, but this does not prevent the author from making interesting hypotheses as to its meaning.

The aim of this paper is to partially capture the state of theoretical debate amongst Polish historians on their own discipline in the second half of 20th century. To achieve this we analyse the content of the first twenty five volumes of journal Historyka published in the period when Celina Bobińska was its editor-in-chief (1967–1995). We assume that Historyka – the only journal dedicated to the theory of history and history of historiography – was situated in the centre of exchanges on academic historical practices. We do not treat its content as a reflection of contemporary studies in the theory of history, but as a dominant position in the self-understanding of the discipline competing with other utterances. The paper is a reconstruction of this offer, which is composed of the definitions of subjects of historical studies, descriptions of productive methods, hierarchy of masters of historical writings and their influential books.

Jerzy Topolski was one of the most outstanding Polish historians of the late 20th century. He wrote numerous works, including a synthesis of the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Com-monwealth in the 16-18th centuries, which is the object of the analyses presented in this article.

The article describes features of Jerzy Topolski’s narrative in economic history. It focuses on four important threads and moments in his research on this field: great manor property, estimation of national income in the history of Poland, the birth of capitalism in Europe, social dependencies in the manor economy system.

Kilka uwag na temat książki ks. Dawida Stelmacha, Interpretacja teologiczna problemu społecznego porozumienia w historii politycznej Polski lat 1980–1989. Rozprawa doktorska napisana na seminarium naukowym z Katolickiej Nauki Społecznej pod kierunkiem ks. prof. dra hab. Pawła Bortkiewicza TChr (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Kontekst, 2016), 175 ss.