Further information: History of Poland during the Piast dynasty Mieszko I Poland expanded under its first two rulers. The dark pink area represents Poland at end of rule of Mieszko I (992), whereas the light pink area represents territories added during the reign of Bolesław I (died 1025). The dark pink area in the northwest was lost during the same period.

The privileges of the szlachta (nobility) kept expanding and in 1425 the rule of Neminem captivabimus, which protected the noblemen from arbitrary royal arrests, was formulated. [21] Władysław III and Casimir IV Jagiellon King Casimir IV Jagiellon was the central figure of the Jagiellonian period The successful outcome of the Polish–Soviet War gave Poland a false sense of its prowess as a self-sufficient military power and encouraged the government to try to resolve international problems through imposed unilateral solutions. [92] [101] The territorial and ethnic policies of the interwar period contributed to bad relations with most of Poland's neighbors and uneasy cooperation with more distant centers of power, especially France and Great Britain. [86] [92] [101] Democratic politics (1918–1926) Bier of Gabriel Narutowicz, the first President of Poland, who was assassinated in 1922The book is a portrait of the colorful, diverse, and multicultural city, but in fact Łódź and its industrial revolution, is shown as brutal, and exploiting the weakest, while destroying nature. This is a very interesting portrait of that times. The Commonwealth, subjected to almost constant warfare until 1720, suffered enormous population losses and massive damage to its economy and social structure. The government became ineffective in the wake of large-scale internal conflicts, corrupted legislative processes and manipulation by foreign interests. [ improper synthesis?] The nobility fell under the control of a handful of feuding magnate families with established territorial domains. The urban population and infrastructure fell into ruin, together with most peasant farms, whose inhabitants were subjected to increasingly extreme forms of serfdom. The development of science, culture and education came to a halt or regressed. [36] Saxon kings Augustus II the Strong, the first Saxon ruler of Poland. His death sparked the War of the Polish Succession. The Commonwealth was able to sustain the levels of prosperity achieved during the Jagiellonian period, while its political system matured as a unique noble democracy with an elective monarchy. From the mid-17th century, however, the huge state entered a period of decline caused by devastating wars and the deterioration of its political system. Significant internal reforms were introduced in the late 18th century, such as Europe's first Constitution of 3 May 1791, but neighboring powers did not allow the reforms to advance. The existence of the Commonwealth ended in 1795 after a series of invasions and partitions of Polish territory carried out by the Russian Empire in the east, the Kingdom of Prussia in the west and the Habsburg monarchy in the south. From 1795 until 1918, no truly independent Polish state existed, although strong Polish resistance movements operated. The opportunity to regain sovereignty only materialized after World War I, when the three partitioning imperial powers were fatally weakened in the wake of war and revolution. The planned national uprising failed to materialize because the authorities in the partitions found out about secret preparations. The Greater Poland uprising ended in a fiasco in early 1846. In the Kraków uprising of February 1846, [53] patriotic action was combined with revolutionary demands, but the result was the incorporation of the Free City of Cracow into the Austrian Partition. The Austrian officials took advantage of peasant discontent and incited villagers against the noble-dominated insurgent units. This resulted in the Galician slaughter of 1846, [53] a large-scale rebellion of serfs seeking relief from their post-feudal condition of mandatory labor as practiced in folwarks. The uprising freed many from bondage and hastened decisions that led to the abolition of Polish serfdom in the Austrian Empire in 1848. A new wave of Polish involvement in revolutionary movements soon took place in the partitions and in other parts of Europe in the context of the Spring of Nations revolutions of 1848 (e.g. Józef Bem's participation in the revolutions in Austria and Hungary). The 1848 German revolutions precipitated the Greater Poland uprising of 1848, [53] in which peasants in the Prussian Partition, who were by then largely enfranchised, played a prominent role. [60] The Uprising of January 1863 Romuald Traugutt, the last supreme commander of the 1863 Uprising Suddenly, things she has taken for granted are revealed to be abnormal, and seemingly everyone in the village of Hektary turns out to have a dark secret.

Andrzej Stasiuk is one of the most recognizable Polish contemporary writers. In 1986 he left Warsaw and moved to the small hamlet Czarne in Beskid Niski in Carpathian Mountains. “Tales of Galicia” is a book about a small sleepy town, somewhere in Southern Poland. Stasiuk describes the struggle and everyday life of the people, during the economic and political transformation in the 1990s. The sad picture of poverty, unemployment, alcoholism and abandoned collective farms is combined with some fantastic, fairy-tale ghosts of the past. Simona Kossak was an unusual character. She was the member of a noble and artist family from Kraków: the granddaughter of Wojciech Kossak, great granddaughter of Juliusz Kossak (both were famous painters), niece of Maria Pawlikowska Jasnorzewska (poet) and Magdalena Samozwaniec (writer), she did not continue the family traditions. Finishing her Biology studies she left home go to the Białowiea forest, where for over 30 years she lived in a wooden forester hut. She was known for her strong personality, for persisting in an uncompromising protection of nature. She was a recognized zoologist, studying the psychology and behaviorism of wild animals. Simona wrote books and articles, and hosted a popular radio program. She had a great talent to telling her stories.

Introduction

The organizations forming the Polish Underground State that functioned in Poland throughout the war were loyal to and formally under the Polish government-in-exile, acting through its Government Delegation for Poland. [162] During World War II, hundreds of thousands of Poles joined the underground Polish Home Army ( Armia Krajowa), [163] a part of the Polish Armed Forces of the government-in-exile. [157] About 200,000 Poles fought on the Western Front in the Polish Armed Forces in the West loyal to the government-in-exile, and about 300,000 in the Polish Armed Forces in the East under the Soviet command on the Eastern Front. [154] The pro-Soviet resistance movement in Poland, led by the Polish Workers' Party, was active from 1941. It was opposed by the gradually forming extreme nationalistic National Armed Forces. [157] [t]