scholarly journals Statistics of Poland – the First Yearbook of Polish Lands: Authors and Content

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (338) ◽  
pp. 229-245
Author(s):  
Józef Pociecha

The beginning of the twentieth century is a time of the development of official statistics in European countries. Due to the lack of its own independent state, it was not possible to publish a Yearbook of Poland at the time. In this context, the Polish Statistical Association (PSA) was founded in Cracow in 1912. One of its main tasks was to merge statistical information on Polish lands dispersed among statistical offices of Russia, Germany and Austria and to issue its own statistical yearbooks for Polish lands and their population. Before the beginning of World War I, the PSA was able to prepare the publication Statistics of Poland, printed in 1915, whose main authors were: A. Krzyżanowski and K. W. Kumaniecki. Many people from the intellectual elite of the country were involved in the project. The territorial scope of Statistics of Poland is interesting. It covers the territory of the first Polish Republic and the area of Upper Silesia and the southern Masuria, where Poles were the majority. Statistical data contained in Statistics of Poland amaze by their abundance even today. The importance of Statistics of Poland is that it gave arguments for the Polish delegation in the con­duct of the discussions on the shape of the territory of reborn Poland in 1918 carried out at the peace conference in Versailles.

Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.


2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.


Author(s):  
Brent A. R. Hege

AbstractAs dialectical theology rose to prominence in the years following World War I, the new theologians sought to distance themselves from liberalism in a number of ways, an important one being a rejection of Schleiermacher’s methods and conclusions. In reading the history of Weimar-era theology as it has been written in the twentieth century one would be forgiven for assuming that Schleiermacher found no defenders during this time, as liberal theology quietly faded into the twilight. However, a closer examination of this period reveals a different story. The last generation of liberal theologians consistently appealed to Schleiermacher for support and inspiration, perhaps none more so than Georg Wobbermin, whom B. A. Gerrish has called a “captain of the liberal rearguard.” Wobbermin sought to construct a religio-psychological method on the basis of Schleiermacher’s definition of religion and on his “Copernican turn” toward the subject and resolutely defended such a method against the new dialectical theology long after liberal theology’s supposed demise. A consideration of Wobbermin’s appeals to Schleiermacher in his defense of the liberal program reveals a more complex picture of the state of theology in the Weimar period and of Schleiermacher’s legacy in German Protestant thought.


2012 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Koven

This essay examines an early twentieth-century Christian revolutionary habitus—a “technique of Christian living”—based on the conviction that everyday life was an essential site for reconciling the claims of individual and community, the material and the spiritual. The pacifist-feminist members of London’s first “people’s house,” Kingsley Hall, linked their vision of Jesus’s inclusive and unbounded love for humanity to their belief in the ethical imperative that all people take full moral responsibility for cleaning up their own dirt as part of their utopian program to bring social, economic, and political justice to the outcast in London, Britain, and its empire. In imagining what a reconstructed post-World War I Britain might become, Kingsley Hall’s cross-class band of workers used mundane practices to unmake and remake the late-Victorian and Edwardian philanthropic legacy they inherited.


2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1253-1271
Author(s):  
TALBOT C. IMLAY

Anticipating total war: the German and American experiences, 1871–1914. By Manfred Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. ix+506. ISBN 0-521-62294-8. £55.00.German strategy and the path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the development of attrition, 1870–1916. By Robert T. Foley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv+316. ISBN 0-521-84193-3. £45.00.Europe's last summer: who started the Great War in 1914? By David Fromkin. New York: Knopf, 2004. Pp. xiii+368. ISBN 0-375-41156-9. £26.95.The origins of World War I. Edited by Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+552. ISBN 0-521-81735-8. £35.00.Geheime Diplomatie und öffentliche Meinung: Die Parlamente in Frankreich, Deutschland und Grossbritanien und die erste Marokkokrise, 1904–1906. By Martin Mayer. Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002. Pp. 382. ISBN 3-7700-5242-0. £44.80.Helmuth von Moltke and the origins of the First World War. By Annika Mombauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi+344. ISBN 0-521-79101-4. £48.00.The origins of the First World War: controversies and consensus. By Annika Mombauer. London: Pearson Education, 2002. Pp. ix+256. ISBN 0-582-41872-0. £15.99.Inventing the Schlieffen plan: German war planning, 1871–1914. By Terence Zuber. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xi+340. ISBN 0-19-925016-2. £52.50.As Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig remark in the introduction to their edited collection of essays on the origins of the First World War, thousands of books (and countless articles) have been written on the subject, a veritable flood that began with the outbreak of the conflict in 1914 and continues to this day. This enduring interest is understandable: the First World War was, in George Kennan’s still apt phrase, the ‘great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century. Marking the end of the long nineteenth century and the beginning of the short twentieth century, the war amounted to an earthquake whose seismic shocks and after-shocks resonated decades afterwards both inside and outside of the belligerent countries. The Bolshevik Revolution, the growth of fascist and Nazi movements, the accelerated emergence of the United States as a leading great power, the economic depression of the 1930s – these and other developments all have their roots in the tempest of war during 1914–18. Given the momentous nature of the conflict, it is little wonder that scholars continue to investigate – and to argue about – its origins. At the same time, as Hamilton and Herwig suggest, the sheer number of existing studies places the onus on scholars themselves to justify their decision to add to this historiographical mountain. This being so, in assessing the need for a new work on the origins of the war, one might usefully ask whether it fulfills one of several functions.


2003 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 689-695 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Meares

Objective: To draw attention to the absence of a concept of personal existence in standard psychiatric approaches to mental illness. Method: To sketch a shift in Western consciousness which occurred suddenly before World War I, involving a banishment of such notions as self and the awareness of inner life from the discourse of psychiatry, psychology and philosophy, leaving a fundamental vacancy at the heart of these disciplines. Results and Conclusion: The positivist–behaviourist hegemony of the twentieth century involved an implicit devaluation of that which is essentially human. The influence of this tradition brings with it the risk of an understanding and treatment of mental illness which leaves out issues at the core of humanity. I suggest we need to recover something of the manner of thinking of the great figures in psychological thought who were writing before the rise of behaviourism and who were contributing to the origins of dynamic psychiatry. A study of the phenomena of human consciousness was central to their work. Main figures mentioned include: Hughlings Jackson, the great neurologist who considered a career in philosophy; Pierre Janet, a philosopher turned psychiatrist; and William James, a physiologist who became a psychologist and philosopher.


Author(s):  
Geoffrey P. Nash

This chapter examines the development of Arab British fiction. It begins with an overview of the making of Arab British fiction, citing anti-colonialism, Orientalism, and hybridization as the main elements of Anglophone Arab writing up to the close of the twentieth century. It then considers British novels about Egypt in which paternalistic “genuine love” for, and “wise understanding” of, the politics of Egypt overlaid colonial attitudes. It also analyzes Arab British fiction in relation to the colonial experience Arabs received from British domination in Arab lands, which lasted from the end of World War I to the early 1950s. Finally, it discusses postcolonial crosscurrents in the works of Arab British women, along with the predicament of exile and Diasporic consciousness in male Arab British fiction.


2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 374-392
Author(s):  
Jane Shaw

This article looks at the ways in which the Panacea Society – a heterodox, millenarian group based in Bedford during the inter-war years – spread its ideas: through personal, familial and shared belief networks across the British empire; by building new modes of attracting adherents, in particular a global healing ministry; and by shipping its publications widely. It then examines how the society appealed to its (white) members in the empire in three ways: through its theology, which put Britain at the centre of the world; by presuming the necessity and existence of a ‘Greater Britain’ and the British empire, while in so many other quarters these entities were being questioned in the wake of World War I; and by a deliberately cultivated and nostalgic notion of ‘Englishness’. The Panacea Society continued and developed the idea of the British empire as providential at a time when the idea no longer held currency in most circles. The article draws on the rich resource of letters in the Panacea Society archive to contribute to an emerging area of scholarship on migrants’ experience in the early twentieth-century British empire (especially the dominions) and their sense of identity, in this case both religious and British.


1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Cordell

In 1919, Polish nationalist forces led by Josef Pilsudski succeeded in re-establishing an independent Polish state. Poland had disappeared from the map of Europe in 1794 following the third partition. It had been devoured by its traditional enemies; Prussia, Austria and Russia. Historically, Poland had been a state without fixed borders, and via a combination of changing dynastic alliances and a pattern of eastward migration, from the twelfth century formerly Slav areas east of the rivers Oder and Neisse became progressively germanicized. By 1921, following the end of World War I, several peace conferences, and after a series of referenda in disputed (former) German areas and a series of wars with all of its neighbors, including an especially successfully prosecuted war against the embryonic Soviet Union, the new state had managed to become a state which incorporated virtually all ethnic Poles. However, in addition to incorporating the overwhelming majority of ethnic Poles, the borders of the new Polish state also included huge numbers of other ethnic, religious and national groups.


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