Mud sweeter than honey

Winner of the Polityka Passport Award Winner of the Kościelski AwardA revelatory oral history of the people who suffered, rebelled, and survived under the secretive dictatorship of Enver Hoxha in Albania, one of the twentieth century’s most brutal and Kafkaesque regimes, from award-winning Polish...

National questions

National Questions consists of fifteen formerly published articles on nations and nationalism by Alexander J. Motyl, professor of political science at Rutgers University – Newark.

Nationalist politics and everyday ethnicity in a transylvanian town

Situated on the geographic margins of two nations, yet imagined as central to each, Transylvania has long been a site of nationalist struggles. Since the fall of communism, these struggles have been particularly intense in Cluj, Transylvania's cultural and political center. Yet heated nationalist...

On bonifratrów street

This book tells the exceptional story of how Michael Katz survived the Holocaust as a Jewish boy hiding ‘in plain sight’.

Operation danube reconsidered

This book brings the international context of the 1968 crisis in Czechoslovakia to the center of attention. It brought together experts from within as well as from without Central Europe to kindle an international discussion on the Prague spring, its origins, its unfolding, its aftermath, and, mo...

Poland: a history

Polish minds that shaped world philosophy

This is the story about twenty-eight Polish philosophers who shaped both the continental and the analytical traditions of world philosophy. Each is portrayed and discussed with three key words.

Postcards from absurdistan

A sweeping history of a twentieth-century Prague torn between fascism, communism, and democracy—with lessons for a world again threatened by dictatorshipPostcards from Absurdistan is a cultural history of Prague from 1938, when the Nazis destroyed Czechoslovakia’s artistically vibrant liberal dem...

Poverty and social exclusion during and after poland's transition to capitalism

This book examines poverty in Poland during the transition to capitalism and in the decade that followed through the lives of women in disadvantaged post-industrial urban neighborhoods. It searches for the causes that drive and maintain poverty in changes in industrial relations, welfare regimes,...

Revolution from abroad

Jan Gross describes the terrors of the Soviet occupation of the lands that made up eastern Poland between the two world wars: the Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia. His lucid analysis of the revolution that came to Poland from abroad is based on hundreds of first-hand accounts of the hardshi...

Romania and the holocaust

From summer 1941 onwards, Romania actively pursued at its own initiative the mass killing of Jews in the territories it controlled. 1941 saw 13,000 Jewish residents of the Romanian city of Ia?i killed, the extermination of thousands of Jews in Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia by Romanian armed fo...

Samizdat, tamizdat, and beyond

Comparative history of samizdat and tamizdat Multi-disciplinary approach to to dissident media, including art, music and film First scholarly treatment of cultural cross-border activities during the Cold War Comparative framework of socialist and post-socialist media in Eastern E...

Stanislaw brzozowski and the migration of ideas

As a writer, critic, and philosopher, Stanislaw Brzozowski (1878–1911) left a lasting imprint on Polish culture. The essays in this volume reassess and contextualize Brzozowski’s writings from a distinctly transnational vantage point.

The austrian revolution

The definitive work on Eastern Europe’s revolutionary period and the unique working-class experiment of Red Vienna

The belzec death camp

This book is a comprehensive account of the Belzec death camp in Poland, which was the first death camp to use static gas chambers as part of the Aktion Reinhardt mass murder program. It covers the construction and the development of the mechanisms of mass murder. The story is painstakingly told ...

The chosen few

Just a game? This intriguing visual title looks deep into the underbelly of football (soccer) fandom, featuring a vast photographic archive of fans' graffiti and street art captured by a pioneering ‘graffitologist’. At the intersection of the street and sport we find themes of the day: how racial...

The culmination of conflict

As Germany fought the Soviet Union during World War II, a much smaller but equally vicious struggle was unfolding in southeastern Poland, fueled by longstanding ethnic and territorial conflicts between Poles and Ukrainians. Both sides organized large partisan armies and sought control over territ...

The demon in democracy

The dialectical meaning of offshored work

A thoughtful analysis of the developing interplay between post-socialist European communities and Western neoliberal actors.

The jews of eastern europe, 1772-1881

In the nineteenth century, the largest Jewish community the modern world had known lived in hundreds of towns and shtetls in the territory between the Prussian border of Poland and the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea. The period had started with the partition of Poland and the absorption of its ...

The last peasant war

A history of the largely forgotten peasant revolution that swept central and eastern Europe after World War I—and how it changed the course of interwar politics and World War IIAs the First World War ended, villages across central and eastern Europe rose in revolt. Led in many places by a shadowy...

The rebellion of the daughters

An in-depth exploration of the flight of young Jewish women from their Orthodox homes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuriesThe Rebellion of the Daughters investigates the flight of young Jewish women from their Orthodox, mostly Hasidic, homes in Western Galicia (now Poland) in ...

The vesels

This book deals with the Slovak National Uprising that was launched on 29 August 1944 in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia. In the West, the uprising is an under-researched topic in the history of WWII. The Slovak state was an ally of Nazi Germany, but the uprising proved that the population did not shar...

Then they started shooting

An illuminating, decades-spanning analysis of children’s experience during wartime and its reverberation into their adulthood

Transregional versus national perspectives on contemporary central european history

This volume compares different regional perspectives on the national and democracy-building aims of individual states. It confronts discourses about national states to regional perspectives on the past as well as the current political and social landscape. Why are we observing calls for national ...

Ukraine's many faces

Addressing readers from diverse backgrounds, this volume approaches the history of Ukraine and its people through primary sources, from the early modern period to the present.