This present collection of George Gömöri’s essays covers several centuries of Polish literature and its reception abroad. The first three essays are devoted to Jan Kochanowski, the greatest poet of the Polish Renaissance, followed by shorter pieces on Stefan Batory, King of Poland from 1576 to 1586, whom Montaigne thought to be ‘one of the greatest princes of our age’. This is followed by a comparative essay on the Pole Mikołaj Sęp Szarzyński and the Hungarian poet Bálint Balassi, both important poets of the late sixteenth century, and an essay with an Amendment, investigating Sir Philip Sidney’s little-researched visits to Hungary and Poland. A substantial part of the book is devoted to the Baroque period, first on the poet Hieronim Morsztyn, recently rediscovered in Poland. A long essay analyses his first important work, Worldly Delights, a poem which illustrates the transition from the classical models of the late Renaissance to Baroque poetics. The following part of the book examines the huge impact that the neo-Latin poet Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski made on more than one English poet of the seventeenth-century, while also explaining the political reasons for his warm reception in England. “The Verse Letter of the Polish Baroque” follows the development of this interesting genre from Daniel Naborowski to Jan Andrzej Morsztyn. The final part of the book deals with the great precursor of modern Polish poetry, Cyprian Norwid (1821–1883). The final essays in this collection investigate Norwid’s views on Lord Byron, expressed both in his poetry and his public lectures in Paris, as well as the complex views of the Polish poet on nineteenth-century England, which he only briefly visited, and the United States where he resided for two years.

This annotated guide to English language materials dealing with all aspects of the history of the borderlands since the 1700s gives special attention to conflicts between Germans and Poles and issues that are again critical in Central Europe. Students, teachers, and scholars will find this bibliography of over 1200 entries to primary sources, books, chapters in books, dissertations, journal articles, government documents, fiction, and films easy to use. The introduction points to different names given to the region and puts the bibliography into historical context. The chapters cover different historical periods and organize material either by genre of work or by topics significant to a particular era. Author, title, and subject indexes make the material easily accessible for a wide variety of research needs.

In the last, rootless decade families, neighborhoods, and communities have disintegrated in the face of gripping social, economic, and technological changes. Th is process has had mixed results. On the positive side, it has produced a mobile, volatile, and dynamic society in the United States that is perhaps more open, just, and creative than ever before. On the negative side, it has dissolved the glue that bound our society together and has destroyed many of the myths, symbols, values, and beliefs that provided social direction and purpose. In A History of the Polish Americans, John J. Bukowczyk provides a thorough account of the Polish experience in America and how some cultural bonds loosened, as well as the ways in which others persisted.

At least nine million Americans trace their roots to Poland, and Polish Americans have contributed greatly to American history and society. During the largest period of immigration to the United States, between 1870 and 1920, more Poles came to the United States than any other national group except Italians. Additional large-scale Polish migration occurred in the wake of World War II and during the period of Solidarity's rise to prominence. This encyclopedia features three types of entries: thematic essays, topical entries, and biographical profiles. The essays synthesize existing work to provide interpretations of, and insight into, important aspects of the Polish American experience. The topical entries discuss in detail specific places, events or organizations such as the Polish National Alliance, Polish American Saturday Schools, and the Latimer Massacre, among others. The biographical entries identify Polish Americans who have made significant contributions at the regional or national level either to the history and culture of the United States, or to the development of American Polonia.

The Polish Orthodox Church in the Twentieth Century and Beyond: Prisoner of History shows the adaptability of an Orthodox community whose members are a religious and ethnic minority in a predominantly Roman Catholic country populated by ethnic Poles. It features a triangular relationship among the Orthodox and Catholic hierarchies and the secular state of Poland throughout the changes of government. A secondary interrelationship involves the tense relationship between ethnic Poles on one hand, and minority Ukrainians and Belarusans on the other. As a “prisoner” of its own history and strangers in its own land, the Polish Orthodox Church faces a constant struggle for survival.

The Polish American community has long been identified with three characteristics that the early immigrants brought with them to America, writes Pula: "an affection and concern for their ancestral homeland, a deep religious faith, and a sense of shared cultural values." Prominent among these values are family loyalty, a desire for property ownership, and pride in self-sufficiency.

For four centuries, the Polish�Lithuanian state encompassed a major geographic region comparable to present-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Estonia, and Romania. Governed by a constitutional monarchy that offered the numerous nobility extensive civil and political rights, it enjoyed unusual domestic tranquility, for its military strength kept most enemies at bay until the mid-seventeenth century and the country generally avoided civil wars. Selling grain and timber to western Europe helped make it exceptionally wealthy for much of the period. The Polish�Lithuanian State, 1386�1795 is the first account in English devoted specifically to this important era. It takes a regional rather than a national approach, considering the internal development of the Ukrainian, Jewish, Lithuanian, and Prussian German nations that coexisted with the Poles in this multinational state. Presenting Jewish history also clarifies urban history, because Jews lived in the unincorporated "private cities" and suburbs, which historians have overlooked in favor of incorporated "royal cities." In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the private cities and suburbs often thrived while the inner cities decayed. The book also traces the institutional development of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland�Lithuania, one of the few European states to escape bloody religious conflict during the Reformation and Counter Reformation. Both seasoned historians and general readers will appreciate the many excellent brief biographies that advance the narrative and illuminate the subject matter of this comprehensive and absorbing volume.