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Birds have inspired people since the dawn of time. They are the notes behind Mozart's genius, the colours behind Audubon's art and ballet's swansong. In The Birds They Sang, Stanisław Łubienski sheds light on some of history's most meaningful bird and human interactions, from historical bird watchers in a German POW camp, to Billy and Kes in A Kestrel for a Knave. He muses on what exactly Hitchcock's birds had in mind and reveals the true story behind the real James Bond. Undiscouraged by damp, discomfort and a reed bunting's curse, Łubienski bears witness to the difficulties birds face today, as people fail to accommodate them in rapidly changing times. A soaring exploration of our fascination with birds, The Birds They Sang opens a vast realm of astonishing sounds, colours and meanings – a complete world in which we humans are never alone.
"Everything looked perfect. Sand - unique Baltic sand, the best in the world - and the calm sea. But wait. Something was amiss. Something was wrong" It starts with a day at the beach. A single white sock that somehow spoils everything. It's enough to send writer and ornithologist Stanislaw Lubienski on a quest to understand what we throw away, where it goes and whether it will be our legacy. By analysing items he unearths on his trips into nature - a plastic bottle, a tube of Russian penis-enlargement cream, a cigarette butt, an empty aerosol can - tracing their origins and explaining the harm they can do, he shows how consumer society has developed out of control, to the point of environmen...
Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a Polish-Lithuanian born in 1746, was one of the most important figures of the modern world. Fleeing his homeland after a death sentence was placed on his head (when he dared court a woman above his station), he came to America one month after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, literally showing up on Benjamin Franklin's doorstep in Philadelphia with little more than a revolutionary spirit and a genius for engineering. Entering the fray as a volunteer in the war effort, he quickly proved his capabilities and became the most talented engineer of the Continental Army. Kosciuszko went on to construct the fortifications for Philadelphia, devise battle plans that...
On 10 April 2010, Polish President Lech Kaczyński and First Lady Maria Kaczyńska were killed in an airplane crash outside the city of Smolensk in western Russia, where they were flying to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Soviet massacre of over twenty-one thousand Polish prisoners during the Second World War. Eight days later, the president and his wife were laid to rest beneath the Krakow Cathedral on Wawel Hill, an ancient necropolis of Polish kings and queens and the most prestigious burial site in all of Poland, where only six other meritorious, non-royal national figures have been enshrined since the demise of the Polish monarchy in the late eighteenth century. The decision to ...
The volume contains articles concerning the influence of Latinitas in the territory now occupied by Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus'. The articles, all published in English, range from history to literature and to cultural history and the history of ideas. They analyze the issue of building an identity, either real or imagined, from different points of view. Among the most interesting topics are the classical origins of myths and ideas that have helped build the national identities of those that constituted the ethnic mosaic of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the role of Neo-Latin poetry, as a conveyor of Latinitas, in the development of national identities. Because of the significance of Latinitas for both common European cultural traditions and the national cultures, literatures and languages of Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Ukraine, it is to be hoped that the subject will continue to attract a good level of attention in the future.
'A fine and deeply affecting work of history and memoir' Philippe Sands Decades ago, the historian Bernard Wasserstein set out to uncover the hidden past of the town forty miles west of Lviv where his family originated: Krakowiec (Krah-KOV-yets). In this book he recounts its dramatic and traumatic history. 'I want to observe and understand how some of the great forces that determined the shape of our times affected ordinary people.' The result is an exceptional, often moving book. Wasserstein traces the arc of history across centuries of religious and political conflict, as armies of Cossacks, Turks, Swedes and Muscovites rampaged through the region. In the Age of Enlightenment, the Polish m...
The Duchy of Warsaw, 1807-1815 is the first academic history of the state established by Napoleon in pre-partitioned Poland at the turn of the 19th century. The book examines the political, social and cultural dynamics of the Duchy and considers its role in Napoleon's wider empire and the politics he engaged in across the European continent during the period. Czubaty explores the history of the Duchy to reveal how political and social ideas, systems and mechanisms from France, Italy and Germany began permeating Central Eastern Europe at this time and goes on to consider how this impacted on the changing political mentalities of the Polish people.