The book is based on long-term ethnographic research in the Polish-Belarusian borderland. It examines the dynamics of symbolic boundaries between the Catholic and Orthodox believers in their everyday lives. By analyzing the space of local cemeteries, rituals, and attitudes related to death, eating practices, and food sharing, the author points to the changing sense of ethnic identity and the feeling of familiarity and otherness. Confessionally mixed neighborhoods and families enable different forms of religious bivalency and become a crucial factor in bridging and crossing ethnic boundaries. Socio-cultural norms and social relations shape the ethnic identity of the borderland's residents more than the institutional frames of both churches.

This monograph deals with Polish foreign policy shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. In tracing the diplomatic activity of foreign minister Jozef Beck, it discusses six general problems: (1) the Polish political situation under the pressure of appeasement; (2) the project of Intermarium and efforts to implement it; (3) the action against Czechoslovakia and the conflict with the Soviet Union; (4) the Polish attitude towards the German concept of Gesamtlosung in Germany's relations with Poland; (5) the genesis of the Polish alliance with Great Britain; (6) the Allies' military inaction after Nazi Germany's aggression. In these conditions, Poland made four key decisions: it stood against Czechoslovakia, it rejected German demands, it allied itself with the United Kingdom, and it rejected the Soviet Union's claim for the Red Army to march across Polish lands.

This work represents the first truly comprehensive and non-biased history of psychohistory, a vanguard branch of historical scholarship that studies the psychological dimension of the past using principles of psychoanalysis and psychology as its theoretical ground. Tomasz Pawelec is an experienced methodologist and historiographer who systematically examines, reconstructs, and evaluates the major theoretical and methodological guiding assumptions shared by psychohistorians. In effect, he provides the reader with an intriguing portrait of a peculiar research paradigm - and a specific intellectual "monad" - that developed within the twentieth-century American history. At the empirical foundation of his work lies a broad collection of psychohistorical publications.

The different theoretical notions and practices of the relations between the state and religious communities in early modern Europe constitute one of the most interesting problems in historiography. Moving away from a simple "toleration" versus "non-toleration" dichotomy, the author sets out to analyse the inter-confessional relations in selected European territories in a "longue duree" perspective, between Reformation and Enlightenment. Outlining the relations between the state and the different Churches (confessions) in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Holy Roman Empire of Germany, and the Northern Netherlands serves to highlight the specificity of Northern Netherlands serves to highlight the specificity of "free" (non-absolutist) composite states, where the particularly complex process of defining the raison d'etat determined the level of religious toleration that was politically feasible and socially acceptable.

This book is devoted to the religiosity of the medieval Christian masses in Central and Eastern Europe and its relationship with the traditional cultures of that time. Addressing such topics as the common instruction of the three prayers and the Decalogue, "Christian" magic in everyday life, the Marian devotion, and various images of heaven and eternal damnation, the author never loses sight of his main topic: the complex and powerful interaction between medieval folklore and Christianity.

In his work Limit Experiences, Jacek Leociak addresses questions that are fundamental to the twentieth-century experience: How can we represent such traumatic events as the Holocaust? Was Lyotard correct when he claimed that reality had succumbed to the gas chambers? How can we describe the "indescribable"? Moving seamlessly through such topics as the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, the carpet bombing of Dresden, and Jews left for dead in the Nazi execution pits who miraculously "exited the grave" alive, Professor Leociak succeeds in offering readers a profound representation of twentieth-century limit experiences by embedding them in a broad array of sources and building around them a rich historical context.

Hate Narratives examines the limits of free speech and focuses on the role of language in creating images of reality, and on language's power to build social relationships based on hatred. The study provides an analysis of language used in totalitarian systems, along with a particular kind of narrative description, namely dogmatic hate narratives, which are used in democratic systems as well. It focuses on the notion that the media and other sources of information create "parallel realities", and that facts created by media are translated into social fact. Central to this line of thought are the determinants by which an individual chooses from among the various broadcasted images of reality.