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The primary school was considered to be democratic in terms of social equality, though with suppressed freedom. It was not widely discussed that every Communist party in countries in the Soviet sphere in Europe had kept to the same policy in their coming to power. All of them made efforts to set up unified, primary school-based education systems to attract disregarded teachers working in basic education; and they also promised to raise the social standing of undereducated people. It was forgotten that teachers from the pre-war period – persons who carried a mixed baggage of racist, nationalistic attitudes and social sensitivities – went on to play a key role in school reform, in coalition with people coming with the Red Army; though from this 1948-1950 period, all such groups have been marginalized in public life and eliminated from social memory and, ultimately, from history.
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This paper aims to explore the social, economic and political-ideological context of the rise and fall of comprehensive education policies on both sides of post-war Europe. Our interest lies in seeking the reasons behind this phenomenon from the 1980s onwards; for scientific, policy and other critical discourses focusing on class-based selection mechanisms within education have been greatly diminished. We hope that identifying the major divergences and convergences between the history of comprehensive education policies in Hungary and the UK will provide us with a perspective that locates Hungarian State Socialism within a global context and allow us to study the sources and the development of ideologies that were influential as regards class-centred education policies.
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The Ukrainian police actively participated in the extermination of Ukrainian Jews. While in central and eastern Ukraine a signiicant percentage of the Jewish population managed to survive the occupation, in its western territories (Volhynia and Eastern Galicia) more than 90 percent of the Jews were murdered. One important difference between western Ukraine on the one hand and central and eastern Ukraine on the other was nationalism. Western Ukraine was the home of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists which in the 1930s and early 1940s transformed into the main Ukrainian fascist movement and in 1943 formed the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Even though the Germans prevented the OUN from establishing a fascist state modelled on the Independent State of Croatia and arrested its commanders, the OUN sent its members to serve in the police which helped a small number of German functionaries with the ghettoization, appropriation of Jewish property, and extermination of the Jews. The extermination of the Jews was one of the main political goals of the OUN which used the German-controlled police to achieve it.
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In the studies published so far the Central Jewish Historical Commission (Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna, CŻKH) has been treated as a prelude to the target operation of the Jewish Historical Institute. Little attention has been devoted to its organizational structure and general operation, with emphasis laid on collection of testimonies, securing archives, and publications. Meanwhile, the CŻKH objectives and tasks, including its main task, that is, documenting and talking about the lot of Polish Jews during World War II, were much broader than assumed. This article is a sketch of the CŻKH history – its activity, programmatic assumptions, and Holocaust research methodology.
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This article attempts to present the reception of the Holocaust in relation to the topics of the atomic bombs and Japanese war crimes. Author’s comparative analysis revealed a number of shared issues regarding the war memory mechanisms, and also the characteristic style of Japanese narration centered on the key word ‘peace’. After the testimony period we are slowly entering the post-testimony era, when there will be no living witnesses. But it is also a period which enables researches to conduct a distanced analysis of the political and social discourse on war, particularly regarding Japan, whose post-war historical memory was built with the use of language of ambiguity and omissions. Using the comparative approach makes it possible not only to show the similarity of a number of issues regarding narration about the war, but it also conditions new narrations, which move beyond paradigms of national memory.
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This text is an attempt to reconstruct the history of the Main Shelter Home (Główny Dom Schronienia), that is, the largest orphanage for youngest children operating in the Warsaw ghetto. Witkowska-Krych presents its history, which goes back to the mid-19th century, and its situation during the first year of the war and during its move into the ghetto and until the deportation to the death camp in Treblinka in August 1942. In light of the surviving official, press, and personal sources the author sketches the circumstances in which that unique institution had to function. She also writes about the individuals connected with that institution and those who worked for its benefit.
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Zagłada, jakiej Niemcy dokonywali w obozie śmierci Auschwitz-Birkenau była przede wszystkim wyzwaniem technicznym. Aby je rozwiązać, SS zwróciło się o pomoc do cywilnych ekspertów, którzy podjęli się zadania udoskonalenia procesu zabijania i usuwania zwłok, aby był on tani, szybki i nie pozostawiał śladów. W rozwiązaniu trudności technicznych znaczącą rolę odegrali pracownicy firmy Topf i Synowie z Erfurtu, znanego na całym świecie producenta pieców krematoryjnych. 31 maja 1945 r., dzień po aresztowaniu przez władze sowieckie jednego z głównych inżynierów firmy, Ludwig Topf, współwłaściciel przedsiębiorstwa, popełnił samobójstwo. W liście pożegnalnym pisał o sobie jako niewinnej ofierze okoliczności, która nie może liczyć na sprawiedliwy wyrok w swojej sprawie.
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The analysis of Zsuzsanna Hanna Biró is based on an integrated personnel database that contains registration data for secondary school teachers graduating between 1873 and 1945, and the teachers’ data from the so-called secondary school pocketbooks. There is the attempt to correlate possibilities for becoming a teacher with three sets of variables: a) the structural features of the school (gender and confessional segmentation), b) the role played by cultural capital and the transmitting of professions among factors connected with family socialization, and c) the impact of the choice of higher education studies and gaining a doctoral. A logistic regression analysis proves that becoming a teacher relates to all three sets of variables. Among structural factors, gender separation seems to be the stronger indicator, which, due to the straitened market in which girls’ schools operate, shows a lower chance of female graduates becoming teachers throughout the covered time period. ”Confessional inequality” can only be mentioned in relation to Jewish graduates, and their situation improved only temporarily, in the 1920s, with the opening of Jewish schools. The father’s education was not a substantive indicator. Male teachers usually emanated from families with a low socio-economic status – while a higher proportion of female teachers came from families possessing a high socio-economic status. Transmission of professions played a greater role in any teaching career after the First World War. However, one’s study program has always been able to improve the possibility of one’s getting employment in this time period – which can be especially seen in the case of language faculties. Though having a doctoral degree had no direct influence on someone’s taking up a career, a lack of academic positions did result in the fact that more and more teachers with academic ambitions got a job in secondary schools, which significantly raised the prestige of being a teacher in the first half of the 20th century.
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This article addresses the complexities of the distinction between “high” and “low” literature. I offer a brief survey of the development of so-called Unterhaltungsliteratur, or light fiction, in Hungary, followed by a presentation of the essays and articles on this topic in the Hungarian literary journal Nyugat (1908–1941), which the passing of time notwithstanding retain much of their relevance today.
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Nagy Péter: A Rima vonzásában. Az ózdi helyi és gyári társadalom a késő dualizmustól az államosításig. Napvilág Kiadó, Budapest, 2016. 384 oldal.
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Constitutional identity of a state comprises of a form and specificity of the constitutional order shaped by the constitutional tradition, specific character and state of development of international relations (geopolitical factors), influence of various trends in legal and political thoughts, etc. Description of the constitutional identity of the People’s Republic of Poland (1944-1989) must address numerous aspects, including traditions of Polish constitutionalism (e.g. making a reference to principles of a Constitution of 1921), specific character of economic system (planned economy allowing individual ownership, especially in agriculture) and, what seems obvious, dominant influence of Soviet-type constitutionalism.
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The study presents a comprehensive picture of fertility behaviour of Calvinist and Unitarian families of Kide, from the middle of the 19th century until the middle of the 20th century. The beginning of the investigation period has low fertility rates. An interesting change in fertility behaviour can be observed in this period: instead of providing the interval between marriage and the first childbirth, and especially between the births, the postponement of the desired number of children is derived from the age-specific fertility curves. This is the nuclear family milieu, where maternal experience carries a new female subjectivity.
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This article concerns the assessment of the Republic of Poland (1918–1939) creation — as a political unit — by Paweł Jasienica — not only an outstanding historical essayist and philosopher of history but also an eyewitness of the events described. In 1967, in the retreat of his own room, he wrote his Polish Experience to be edited in the British periodical „Journal of Contemporary History” — hence off censorship — totally devoted to the problem of the birth of the independent Polish entity. A dominating theme in Jasienica’s analysis is the Polish path to independence, connected with the objection to the partitioners’ voluntarism and struggle for borders mainly with its eastern neighbor country — Bolshevik Russia. P. Jasienica proves that independent Poland defended its existence thanks to fast and widespread social reforms as well as full democratisation of political life. Polish society mass participation in Polish-Bolshevik war 1920 and its successful outcome was caused also by the fear of Soviets’ „red terror”.
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The author of this article starts from the assumption that the vision of reality to be found in textbooks of the political economy of socialism should be treated as part of the official discourse of the Polish People’s Republic. In the analysis of a number of selected textbooks, he focuses mainly of the “stimuli” issues. After deconstructing the relevant texts, he proceeds to search for all kinds of regularities, politically correct statements and ways of masking purely ideological beliefs. His focus is also on the criticisms repeated in different works by different authors.The article offers the analysis of the history of ways of speaking about historiography’s social function. This approach is inspired by Foucault’s view of how historical interpretations are shaped. The author also touches on the issue of the knowledge/power relation, following ‘French Theory’ in his understanding of it. The way in which politics and education coexisted in Communist Poland offers a clear-cut example of the interrelation between power and knowledge. The educational materials intended for Polish students and Polish intelligentsia distorted the picture of both the past and present.The author shows that ‘Foucauldian practices’ adhered to in the political economy of socialism involved the use of a set of incentives designed not only to motivate employees of different level to work better but also to shape their political and moral and historical views.
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Władysław Gomułka was the Polish communist leader who, most probably, played the most important role in the history of Poland. In the years 1943–48 he was the Secretary of the Polish Workers’ Party, and next, from 1956 to 1970, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party. According to the rule ‘the more power the more responsibility’, which had particular significance in non-democratic systems, Gomułka was responsible or co-responsible for everything good but also for everything bad that happened in Poland during his rule. At the same time he is this Polish communist leader, on whose life and activity over twenty books were published. One of the recent ones was published by Anita Prażmowska. Unfortunately, this is not a successful attempt.
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Immediately after the war a discussion about the condition of the natural environment in Poland was held mainly in the specialist press that emphasised its degradation as especially dangerous for the society biologically and psychically wasted by experiences of the war. During the period of deStalinisation and political “thaw” after the 1956 October the subject of air and water pollution was more and more present in the press, but also in discussions of both the leaders of the state and some organised circles of the society. An increasingly well-known deteriorating state of the natural environment which adversely affected economic performance forced the government to search for remedies. As a result, new legal regulations were introduced with accompanying organisational changes. The most important of them were: the establishment of the Ministry of Navigation and Water Management (1957), Central Water Management Board (1960), and local structures responsible for the protection of waters from pollution, the introduction of the Water Law (1962), and the enactment of the Air Pollution Protection Act (1966). From 1960s on, systematic pollution tests of waters and air were carried on, which indicated that between 1967 and 1970 the condition of lakes and rivers deteriorated in comparison to the period of 1964–1967. In the same period there was an increased emission of greenhouse gases and reduced dust emissions. The main reasons for this were: the inefficacy of adopted laws (including a penalties system), insufficient financial investments in effective purification equipment, which was technologically outdated in its large part, the lack of qualified personnel specialised in environmental protection. There were, however, in the analysed period some elements of environmental awareness of people which were expressed, among other things, in letters sent by Polish citizens to the government.
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With the end of the Second World War, the feldsher’s profession was regulated by legal acts dating back to the interwar period. The leading act was the Act of 1 July 1921, on the feldsher’s profession, which briefly defined the feldsher’s qualifications. The key legal act regulating the legal position of feldsher was a law passed by the Legislative Sejm on 20 July 1950, on the feldsher’s profession. The feldsher’s powers were divided into two groups: activities performed independently (that is, in feldsher’s points and non-public health care institutions) as well as activities carried out non-independently – that is, under the guidance of a physician. The issues related to professional secrecy and disciplinary liability were regulated separately. Trying to determine the feldsher’s position in the system at that time, during the legislative work, it was recognized that it would be a profession between a doctor and a nurse. The reason for the adoption of such a solution was the possibility of performing small independent treatments, to whose performance a nurse was not authorized. Initially, the feldsher’s profession enjoyed the great interest of those willing to practice the profession. At this time, medical publications often presented the social advancement of feldsher school students, who continued their medical education after graduation. However, the interest in the feldsher’s profession gradually began to decline and the school year 1962/1963 was the last period of the feldsher’s education in Poland. The last feldsher school functioned then in Warsaw. From this moment on, the feldsher’s profession was left to its own devices. Since 1956, the feldsher’s qualifications have been extended to the possibility of working in sobering stations. Further powers were awarded to the feldsher in the 1960s, including issuing death certificates, diagnosing venereal diseases during medical examinations in sobering stations, and the inclusion of this profession in the fight against infectious diseases. In the case of the feldsher’s profession, the issues of a prestigious nature, such as the introduction of appropriate decorations similar to those of the physician or nurse, for instance long-term seniority, were also omitted. The feldsher’s profession was recalled when Poland entered the European Union structures, which led to the introduction of a new regulation in 2005 regulating the scope of activities to which the feldsher was qualified.
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