The issue of the Italian eastern border after World War I has interested many Italian, Slovenian and Croatian scholars in the field of politics and diplomatic relations. It is known that Italy's diplomatic failure at Versailles in 1919 led to the rise of D'Annunzio's nationalism, which was entirely adopted by Fascism. The question of the Italian eastern border was provisionally resolved in 1920 but its final conclusion came with the Treaty of Rome signed in 1924 concerning the partition of the Free State of Fiume.
During this period several Italian intellectuals contributed to the political debate on borders. Before, during and after the war, the city of Padua was one of the main centres of Italian democratic irredentism. Within its university, some professors influenced students through their lectures and historical‑geographical teaching and set a basis for a new kind of knowledge, in between populism and scientific instances.
With this contribution, the author considers some particular cases that during the First World War and immediately afterwards exposed their positions through their academic teaching. Among these, the liberal‑patriotic Friulian geographers Arrigo Lorenzi and Francesco Musoni, both professors in Padua, affirming that Italy should reach its natural borders along the Alpine ridge as far as the Istrian and, for Musoni, Dalmatian mountains. Noteworthy at a time, when nationalism pitted peoples against each other, they considered Slavic culture as a natural and historical characteristic of north‑eastern Italy: even if they affirmed it had been used by the Germans to annihilate Italian culture, it should not be eliminated but integrated jointly with the creation of friendly relations with the Kingdom of SCS.
Despite their ideas, history would turn out differently. Their example, however, bears witness to the fact that in intellectual circles and in higher education in Italy after the Great War, in particular among geographers, there was a minority aiming at a peace that went beyond nationalism and was based on study and knowledge regarding neighbouring countries.

Halide Edip Adıvar was one of the best‑known symbols of the modern, pro‑Western daughters of the Republic of Turkey. Through her own life and work, she exemplified how Turkish women should change. One of her greatest works is “The Daughter of Smyrna” (“Ateşten Gömlek”); its story takes place during the war of independence. Women participated in the fight and they encouraged the fighters, similarly to Ayşe, the character from the novel. They were the symbol of Anatolia and Turkey.
In the article, the context of the war of independence is briefly sketched. Then, the figure of Halide Edip is presented with the special attention paid to the period of her fight by Mustafa Kemal’s side. In the last part, the figures of the women presented in the book are analysed. The important questions asked in the article concern the similarities between the author and the characters created by her and how modern Turkish women living in the Republic of Turkey at the beginning of its existence should have looked.

In the chaotic situation following the British invasion of southern Palestine at the end of 1917, military officials faced several countervailing pressures. In addition to ongoing military priorities (including international norms pertaining to military occupations, such as the law of the ‘status quo’), pressing humanitarian concerns, and even the personal religious sentiments of individual officers, the British occupation administration was forced to take into account international pressures and interventions resulting from the overlapping and conflicting promises made during the war (inter alia, Sykes‑Picot agreement, Husayn‑McMahon correspondence, Balfour Declaration, and President Wilson’s 14 Points). This paper focuses on the land policy‑making process as a case study with which to weigh the various factors pressing upon the military occupation as it evolved during its first three years. Land ownership was a huge concern: a properly functioning land registry was seen as key to the improvement of economic and social conditions in the largely agricultural economy, and British interventions were followed closely by all interested parties. The land has also been at the centre of the ensuing century‑long conflict between Arabs and Jews. Thus, a close examination of land policies (and especially the 1920 land ordinance) offers an extremely important window on both the rule of law in the aftermath of the war and our understanding of the current, unending conflict in the land.

This article is part one of a discussion that attempts to examine the state of research on the history of the police in the Second Republic of Poland as presented in to‑date historiography. My interest includes literature concerning both the State Police and the Police of the Silesian Voivodeship, two organisations independent from each other. The 1989/1990 timeline is obviously not accidental, as it was of great significance for the way research on public security organs in the interwar period was conducted.
The recent 100‑year anniversary of the National Police created an excellent opportunity to assess the achievements pertaining to its history and the organisation modelled on it, i.e., the Police of the Silesian Voivodeship (PWŚl). Although their history has been the subject of several studies, it is worth taking a closer look at them trying to assess both the problems addressed and the quality of these studies. The author has made an attempt to carry out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the existing literature, which is to lead to the identification of significant accomplishments, as well as to highlighting unexplored possibilities.
The author has chosen scientific publications as a basis for his analyses. Publications of an occupational nature, that is, manuals, specialist materials, handbooks, course books, etc., remain outside the area of the author’s interest.
The resulting analysis leads to the conclusion that it was not until the late 1980s that the one‑sided image of the pre‑war police, constructed through the discourse of repression against the “progressive” communist and workers’ movements, began to be abandoned. However, still dominating was the factual history, unfortunately not preceded by theoretical reflections.

The article presents the issue of researching emotions in international history. It has been noticed that the development of the research on emotions within other sub‑disciplines of history, humanities, social sciences and neuroscience, provides an international historian with many outcomes enabling further research opportunities. At the same time, it was indicated that the tools traditionally used by historians (i.e., internal and external critique of the sources, and the intuitive approach) may be useful in conducting such research. A historian who decides to deal with the problem of emotions, is, however, forced to pay special attention to the context in which the people whose lives he examines functioned. Therefore, the research on emotions, also in the international context, requires greater awareness of the achievements of other academic disciplines from the historian. This task is difficult and perhaps demands from the historian that they be more sensitive and intuitive than in case of other studies. Nevertheless, by approaching the issue of emotions, international historians have a chance to obtain a more credible image of the past.

The article is an attempt to look at the mediaevalist work of Jacek Banaszkiewicz through the prism of statements of other scholars using the comparative method (including M. Handelsman, M. Małowist, M. Tymowski, K. Modzelewski). The aim is to answer the question of whether there is a set of guidelines that every comparatist should follow. The specific issues discussed here include the role of difference and similarity in comparison, the notions of function, analogy and homology, geographical and chronological limitations of comparative studies, and the role of influence and reception.

The present article is part two of the discussion attempting to assess the state of research on the history of the police in the Second Republic of Poland in historiography. This time I focus on the publications since 1990. I am interested in the literature concerning both the State Police and the Police of the Silesian Voivodeship, two independent organisations. The subsequent part deals with works published since 1990, and the last part is focused on the fate of police officers after September 1, 1939. This section also contains more complete summaries and research postulates. Obviously, the 1989/1990 timeline is not accidental, as it had a significant impact on the way historiography dealing with public security organs in the interwar period was conducted. The turn of the 1980s and 1990s was extremely fruitful for Polish historiography, including research on the history of the pre‑war police. On the one hand, access to archival materials became free and easy, thus opening new perspectives for researchers. This unrestricted possibility of using documents from the family archives of police officers and their family members was of great importance for gaining information about the everyday service of police officers. On the other hand, in some publications we notice a prevailing tendency to over‑heroise and sometimes even mythologise the pre‑war police, and this unfortunately is still happening today. All this coincided with the fact that there were an increasing number of authors dealing with the history of the police in the Second Republic, and consequently, the scope of research I was interested in had to expand.

Late, unlike heavy, modernity until now has been devoid of any radical project for the future. It rather makes people use a rose‑tinted past to cope with future‑oriented anxieties. Solidarity’s desire for heavy modernity demonstrates that this sickness has been around for a long time. In what ways were the people of Solidarity nostalgic, and how did modernity’s global crisis reinvigorate the “desirable heaviness of being”? “The desirable heaviness of being” depicts the phenomenon of nostalgia for postwar heavy modernity within the early Solidarity movement. The theory of post‑socialist nostalgia highlights the importance of nostalgia for the future‑oriented past of heavy modernity in appraising the system during the Solidarity period. The interplay between Solidarity, late state socialism, and the crisis of heavy modernity exemplifies Eastern Europe’s interactions with globalising economies before and after 1989. The recollections of the August Strike as well as the Solidarity trade union’s programme provide examples for the longing. The links between state socialism and the global crisis of modernity shed light on current reasons for nostalgia, which may be of interest to “rescue history”.

In the sixth century, a series of natural disasters struck the Eastern Roman Empire, the most serious of which was the plague that raged from 541 to 542. The contemporary consensus is that Justinian's reign brought a fundamental cultural transformation and, according to Misha Meier's (2016) research, the plague marked a significant caesura in the transition from late antiquity to the Byzantine Middle Ages. The article is based on the assumption that the catastrophic events were a trigger for the transformation of the therapeutic piety, the development of which was conditioned by the ability to project the unreal. The purpose of the paper was to analyse counterfactual projections in rituals created as a response to the disasters besetting in the age of the Emperor Justinian. The author proposes to treat these religious formulas as visualised forms of counterfactual thinking based on the integration of cause and effect, according to the theory of conceptual blending. The article concludes that in case of the 6th century, counterfactual thinking enabled the transformation and development of early mediaeval culture and may have reduced the stress associated with the catastrophic events that affected the society of the Byzantine Empire.

The main topic of this paper focuses on the interdependencies between the 16th century historian’s craft and the legendary origo gentis. Two specific examples would be analysed: Marcin Kromer’s Sarmatian origine of the Poles and Nicolaus Petreius’s Cimbrian origine of the Danes. The general presentation of non‑political and non‑ideological presumptions for accepting the mythical past known from the medieval texts delivers the background on which it can be grasped, how Early Modern historians treated that tradition. The analysis of the working methods would be also preceeded by showing the variety of approaches observed in terms of the topic: when dealing with the ethogenetic theories, the historians decided to use polemical oration/treatise as the main form. Another form: the legendary history was applied for presenting the past “before” and “after” the process of shaping the nation/state. The scholarly methods used by both historians included both tradition and novelty: ethymological deductions, endorsment of the classical authorities (and obviously, the Bible), forgery, but at the same time impressive erudition and attempts to addopt some historical criticism.

This paper is an attempt to answer the question: can the process of historical source construction be a way of responding to national catastrophe?
The primary meaning of the word catastrophe is the unexpected but logical conclusion of a play. Although the word "catastrophe" has changed its meaning, it still retains its connotation. It is not a meaningless ending. History cannot be the cure for catastrophe in the classical sense. Its effects are well described by the idea of Pharmakon, which we can find in Plato. Pharmakon is both a medicine and a poison. A person suffering a catastrophe is not cured, but rather is inebriated by history. It is what gives one the strength to survive the trauma of catastrophe. Historians are no exception.
The second half of the article is a concrete example (case‑study) of how, under the guise of objective studies of historical documents, historians create realities that help them to relive (but not cure) the trauma of catastrophe. Often the historical source is perceived as an immutable, natural basis for the construction of a historical narrative. A historical source has no nationality, but it can obtain it. The most popular and simple way is the publication of new (or first) historical sources edition as "nationals" This article examines a specific example of the race between Polish and German historians (after 1945) on the issue of publishing historical sources concerning mediaeval Silesian history. Since the very same documents had to be published, the primacy in publication of new editions had to determine its "nationality".

Research on the economy of the Polish‑Lithuanian Commonwealth usually follows one of two paths: searching for the genesis of the crisis of the farm and serf economy or estimating the scale of war damage. Is it possible to join these two paths and present a complex model of the functioning of local communities during the crisis? Can it be used in the field of the rescue history?

In recent years, some authors have departed from the classical presentation of World War 2. This article analyses selected alternative and revisionist narratives present in the works of Tymoteusz Pawłowski, Rafał Ziemkiewicz and Piotr Zychowicz in terms of historical and ahistorical thinking, presents the authors' attitude towards the achievements of historiography, and presents the way in which they create their narratives, the content of those narratives, and evaluates them in terms of their correctness from the point of view of compliance with historical facts.

In the first years of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, the foundations were laid for a political crisis that later marked its entire existence until its collapse at the outset of World War II. One of the basic causes for this situation was the centralist policy implemented by the dominant political actors, despite the complexities and heterogeneity of the new state. This study analyses the direction and tempo with which this centralist system was built from 1918 to 1923, with a focus on the western regions which had been a part of the Austro‑Hungarian Empire until 1918, and whose political representatives most strongly opposed centralisation.

The aim of this article is to take a closer look at school communities in the Polish‑Ukrainian borderland in the 1918/1919 school year. Their members, particularly the headteachers, previously focused on teaching the students obedience and loyalty towards the emperor in Vienna, had to completely redefine their roles in order to find themselves in the new reality in the late autumn of 1918. Moreover, another year of the turmoil of war, countless teachers and students in the army, enormous economic problems, exacerbated by the fights for dominance on the disputed territory, forced the headteachers to deal with matters as they arose, and the decisions they made did not always work in practice. What cast a shadow over secondary school activity apart from the Polish‑Ukrainian war was also Polish‑Jewish relations.

This paper investigates the situation of Galician refugees in the Habsburg Empire during the last year of the First World War. The majority of the refugees returned home following the eastward movement of the frontline in 1915 (i.e. after the Gorlice‑Tarnów campaign). However, many others stayed deep within the Austro‑Hungarian Empire till the end of the war. According to the official reports of the Ministry of the Interior, there were still 90 thousand refugees (25% Poles, 28% Jews, and 46% Ukrainians, then known as Ruthenians) receiving social benefits from the state in the Austrian part of the Empire on 1st September 1918. Moreover, one can add countless refugees who stayed in the interior of the Empire at their own expense. The situation became even more complicated when the feelings of enmity on the part of the local inhabitants escalated. Pressed by society, the local authorities started expelling the refugees. As a consequence, some of them returned home, while others still stayed in exile in search of a better life. What is even more interesting is that some of them (mostly Jews) emphasised the lack of a bond with the new Polish state born in November 1918.

The incarceration of those determined to be security risks was a common feature of the wartime regimes of most European belligerents throughout the Great War. Yet, especially in several of the Habsburg successor states, internment and politicised incarceration continued as the war morphed into smaller wars, revolutions, and counterrevolutions. This paper traces the social history of political incarceration in Hungary between approximately 1914–1924, with special attention to the post‑armistice period, during which wartime emergency laws were extended or revised to deal with political upheaval and renewed regional warfare. Within this framework, the paper focuses on the experience of one woman, a university‑educated teacher, who became a leading leftist educator and was imprisoned for her role in the Hungarian Republic of Councils (also called the Hungarian Soviet Republic) in 1920. She left Hungary for the Soviet Union in the 1920s as part of a prisoner exchange, and she remained there until the end of World War Two. She later returned to Hungary, and in 1953, published a memoir about her experiences during World War One and its aftermath. Using a gendered analysis to move from the larger context to the individual experience helps reveal continuity and change from Hungary’s Great War to its “war after war,” as well as the systematic and improvised nature of carceral deprivation and violence against female political prisoners. It also shows how the gendered memories of the Long World War One inflected the post‑1945 socialist party’s ideological mobilisation of women, putting forward an example of socialist womanhood that simultaneously challenged and reinforced the categories of prisoners and activists.

The independence of newly born (or reborn) states at the end of 1918 raised the question of the future of the aristocratic families who had built their position in the pre‑war empires. An interesting example of such dilemmas arose in Poland. This was connected with the fate of two originally German‑speaking families. One of them was a branch of the imperial Habsburg family that settled in Żywiec (German: Saybush) in western Galicia. The other: rich and powerful family of Hofburg von Pless having their main seat in Pszczyna (German: Pless) in Prussian Upper Silesia. They were both members of the absolute elite of European aristocracy, being related to many noble and royal families and playing important roles in the political and economic life of Austro‑Hungary and Germany. What they also had in common was the fact, that their estates were located in a borderland between different ethnic and national groups. After the end of World War One, almost all these properties became part of the independent Polish state. As a result, the new administration treated the families with serious distrust. However, their national choices were different: the Habsburgs of Żywiec started to consider themselves as pure Polish, while the Hofburgs radically adhered to their German self‑identity. This article shows what the criteria were behind these choices.