The article analyzes museum representations of communism in Poland from the perspective of exhibition strategies influencing the public understanding of the past. Over the past forty years, Western museums have increasingly moved away from the affirmative model of presenting the past, dominating since the nineteenth century, towards critical paradigms and even those pro-moting social activism. The analysis of Polish exhibitions devoted to recent history carried out from this perspective allows us to reveal the functions fulfilled by museum institutions in the Polish social and political reality.

The authors discuss possibilities and limits for applying a research model of the study of memory politics, originally developed by them with the aim to research the Polish case only, to other countries of East Central Europe which after the WW II formed the sphere of the Soviet domination. They pose a question whether it should be appropriate to combine it with the so called transnational approach.

The text presents the procedures and techniques of the research method aimed at “evoking the historical source”, which is understood as the researcher’s prepared and implemented scientifi-cally rigorous participation in the creation by a witness of history of such a reminiscence material that could be a carrier of information and would be subjected to rudimentary historical analysis. The text presents the defined assumptions and subsequent stages of the research procedure.

The subject of the article is the specific nature of historical narration in digital media (YouTube). Both the media where the Polish state is the channel owner and ones belonging to individual political parties and fractions are being studied. The relationship between the narration and national identity is analyzed. The question under discussion is to what extent national identity is a phenomenon ingrained in the ethnic and historical peculiarities of a given society. The authors contrasts the primordialist concept with Ernest Gellner’s modernist concept. In the second part the authors refer to the discussion about the significance of historical narration for the formation of identity: if historical narration is just an accidental component of identity formation processes or rather a fundamental one.

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.

I assumed so far that the notion of historical thinking was a worthy and handy “sponsor” of meta‑historical enquiry. Therefore, I left both thinking and, in particular, historical thinking without even a quasi‑definition. In this paper I make an attempt to operationalize the notion of historical thinking using historical semiotics (semiotics of culture), a domain of humanities developed by the founding fathers of the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School, Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspenskij. The association of cognition and communication not only enriches the study of language but also culture and historiography. Bearing in mind the meta‑historical contexts I found interesting, I significantly reorganized the lecture contents found in Uspenskiy’s Ego Loquens. This interpretation took the form of annotated diagrams, which represent and interpret key categories of Uspenskiy’s philosophy resultant from the semiotic concept of language and culture. Underlying it, there is the act of communication as both the act of anthropogenesis and the genesis of the subject of cognition. We point out the qualities of historical thinking which already flow from the qualities of thinking tout court. Along the way we introduce the problem of the status of the so‑called objective and virtual reality, typical of the philosophical aspects of historical semiotics and crucial for potential meta‑historical analyses.

Analytic philosophy is sometimes understood in opposition to continental tradition. In this article, I would like to show that a Lviv‑Warsaw School shared many fundamental traits with analytic orientation. In afterwar Poland, this tradition clashed with the dialectical materialism that lacks strong scientific tradition but had the full support of the communist party. This situation produced a unique scenario in which the methodology of science could strive as a mainstream area. A crucial role was attributed to the theory of history.

In my paper I try to analyze Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty‑First Century as a history book. Thus, the following questions have been posed: at the intersection of which streams, tends, and traditions of the contemporary historiography could one place Piketty’s oeuvre? What can be said of those elements of the book that can be labeled as historical epistemology: source work, conceptualization of the object of study, etc.? As an attempt to revive serial history, does it inherit the baggage of “misdeeds” against which the entire movement of cultural history rose up? What role does the concept of longue durée play in the book? The historical aspects of Piketty’s thought have the potential to spark controversy among professional historians, but it is one of its many virtues.

Oskar Halecki’s reception in French historiography is one of the interesting examples of diffi-culties in understanding Polish historical thought in France. As one of the leading authors of the concept of East‑Central Europe in world historiography, a descendant of the Viennese aristoc-racy and an ambassador of Polish humanities in the League of Nations Committee on Intellec-tual Cooperation, he promoted the history of the countries of the region, considering their independent of Russia cultural specificity, deeply connected with the values of the Christian Europe. Meanwhile, after the Second World War, the socio‑economically oriented historiogra-phy of “Annales” was gaining more and more popularity in Paris – and in Warsaw itself ...

This article explores the reception of French Theory in Poland after 1989. I argue that post-modern tendencies entered the Polish humanities in a distorted form, having travelled via the USA. I propose the hypothesis that the transplantation of the concept of power‑knowledge, which was central to the US‑American take on Michel Foucault, led to something that I term “the Foucault Effect.” It became entangled in the processes of democratization and political and economic transformation taking place in the 1990s, meaning that on the one hand it “raised consciousness” of power mechanisms, while on the other hand promoting a sense of subjecthood that was a product of power relations and thus was deprived of agency. I argue that regardless of the critique of anthropocentrism that is prevalent in the contemporary humanities, the socio-‑political situation in the world today demands a return of the strong subject, whose figuration would take into account lessons learned from French Theory.

In this article, I will sketch a particular way of thinking about existence in time, the consequence of which would be practicing historiography as a response to the voices of the dead coming from the past. This theoretical conception of history tries to understand history not so much as an unfolding process of succession over time but as some community of the living and the dead. If the voices of the dead, defined in terms of spectrality, are to be active somehow in the present, they cannot be prematurely suppressed by gestures of closing the past understood as blocking the transmission of these voices to the future. After analyzing the problem of false closures in history, I am trying to understand spectrality that would combine both past and present activity. The article aims to propose tasks for a historiography that would consist in regaining in con-temporary culture the ability to hear the voice, the gaze, and the expectations coming from the past, present in various forms which can be grasped by an encompassing notion of spectrality. Reflection on spectrality brings us closer to the meaning of the concept of counter‑time.

This article offers a survey of the careers of 54 Polish female historians who received the habilitacja degree in 1945–1989 at seven Polish universities – four of those were founded soon after the Second World War (University of Łódź, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, University of Wrocław, Maria Skłodowska‑Curie University in Lublin), while three had been established earlier (University of Warsaw, Jagiellonian University in Kraków and the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań). Analysis of personal files and various biographical materials has led the author to a number of conclusions about female historians’ academic careers. The careers reflected the discipline’s development, both in terms of the expansion of its field of inquiry, as well its methodological diversity and the conditions in which it operated. Career paths followed by women were not much different from those followed by men. Neither advancement requirements, nor employment policy at the schools of higher learning were discriminatory towards any of the sexes. However, as far as the female career advancement is concerned, there were some differences between the old and new universities: it was easier for women to obtain managerial positions at the latter.

The issues raised in the article focus on the ways of communicating family narratives from the perspective of reflection on this type of historical writing by the history of historiography. An expression of this reflection is the proposed classification of narrative strategies and genre types of narration within the set of family histories, and the conceptual category of family histories, which captures this set and opens the field for further discussions on the phenomenon of private family narratives.

The article presents the concept of the economic history of Witold Kula. He understands economic history as historical and comparative anthropology. However, he does not see the need to change the name of the discipline because he understands anthropology in a traditional way. This name refers to a separate discipline of knowledge which is primarily interested in primitive societies. Taking account of the existence of different research styles in anthropology, it must be stated that Kula’s research on the economy represents the scientistic style of researching culture.

Hayden White did not directly examine the issue of the independence of history as a discipline of knowledge in his theoretical reflection. He did not ask about the subject of historical studies, the specificity of the methods used in it, the difference between history and other fields, or the economic and social conditions of historical discourse. In this article, I revise White’s writing and reconfigure the extant research using the concept of autonomy.
White — primarily in his works from the 1970s and 1980s — devoted much attention to exposing and describing cultural compulsions resulting in historical practices and violating their autonomy. These actions also brought unexpected results. At first, the use of structuralism in these practices, and then poststructuralist concepts of “the death of the author” and textualism, suggested claims that freed historiography from its links with an author’s biography and world-view, and with the social context in which a given work is produced. Using Foucault’s descrip-tion of the order of discourse, in turn, brought the image of a strict rigor of historical discipline, which, however, is not equal to the strong autonomy of history.
A stronger delimitation of the field of history appears in his — already in the twenty‑first century — offer to use Michael Oakeshott’s division into the practical past and the historical past. Whilst censuring academic historical writing as sterile and rejected by readers because it fails to answer contemporary existential, social and political questions, White, most likely unintentionally, described the independence of historians’ actions from the demands of the societies to which they belong. According to commentators, his remarks can be a productive inspiration for reflection upon the distinctiveness of the discipline of history.

The paper examines the special historiographic evidence: the lost last book of the well‑known Polish historian and methodologist Professor Jerzy Topolski entitled “New Methodology of History”. 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 place of the history of historiography in Topolski’s comprehensive oeuvre has not been subjected to a holistic analysis yet. I will try to highlight some of the key topics rather than propose an exhaustive interpretation of them The article concentrates on the analysis of both the notion of historiography itself, as well as interpretation the main historiographic work of the Poznan historian.

Andrzej Wajda’s films are interesting and serious historical narratives, which enter in dialog both with academic historiography and with other forms of familiarization with the past. Some of Wajda’s historical films are part of the paradigm of the affirmative vision of history. It is a vision that focuses on creating the positive picture of the bygone world, on showing those elements of the past that a given community recognizes as glorious and heroic, worth imitating, commemorating, and honoring, which can be the object of pride or even worship. The affirma-tive vision of history belittles, leaves in the background or omits all those themes from the past that fall outside positive evaluation for various reasons and could distort a consistent favorable picture of the past of a community. In the present article I would like to examine from the comparative perspective of two films, “A Generation [ Pokolenie]” (1954) and “Katyń” (2007). The comparison between Andrzej Wajda’s two films made in the space of fifty years shows that despite the fact that the two pictures were produced in entirely different historico‑cultural contexts, using different film styles, the two screen stories present the affirmation of diametri-cally disparate versions of history, it is the dramatic strategies for and techniques of affirmation of history that remain the same in either case.

Life history is a term usually assigned in the history of historiography to the Italian school of microhistory. In fact, it is a concept typical for the natural sciences in the case of which it is a framework focused on studies of life history strategies as well as life cycles. Life history analysis has become the subject of numerous studies around the world and has been gaining in popularity in social sciences. The author presents life history as a certain research perspective for historical studies which is capable of incorporating both natural and cultural approaches. He draws inspirations of the life history perspective from recent research into history of modern Poland.