Nowa Huta Pozniak, Kinga
11/2014, Letnik:
233
eBook
Kinga Pozniak shows how the political, economic, and social upheavals in Nowa Huta, Poland have profoundly shaped the memory of these events in the minds of three generations of people who lived ...through them since the end of the Second World War.
Unfinished Utopiais a social and cultural history of Nowa Huta, dubbed Poland's "first socialist city" by Communist propaganda of the 1950s. Work began on the new town, located on the banks of the ...Vistula River just a few miles from the historic city of Kraków, in 1949. By contrast to its older neighbor, Nowa Huta was intended to model a new kind of socialist modernity and to be peopled with "new men," themselves both the builders and the beneficiaries of this project of socialist construction. Nowa Huta was the largest and politically most significant of the socialist cities built in East Central Europe after World War II; home to the massive Lenin Steelworks, it epitomized the Stalinist program of forced industrialization that opened the cities to rural migrants and sought fundamentally to transform the structures of Polish society.
Focusing on Nowa Huta's construction and steel workers, youth brigade volunteers, housewives, activists, and architects, Katherine Lebow explores their various encounters with the ideology and practice of Stalinist mobilization by seeking out their voices in memoirs, oral history interviews, and archival records, juxtaposing these against both the official and unofficial transcripts of Stalinism. Far from the gray and regimented landscape we imagine Stalinism to have been, the fledgling city was a colorful and anarchic place where the formerly disenfranchised (peasants, youth, women) hastened to assert their leading role in "building socialism"-but rarely in ways that authorities had anticipated.
This volume offers the first comprehensive analysis of wills in late medieval Krakow. It presents the origins of testamentary acts in the Kingdom of Poland and its centre, Krakow, and their ...subsequent transformation from so called ‘canonical wills’ to ‘communal wills’. Wysmułek discusses the socio-cultural role of wills and sets them in their contemporary legal, social, and economic context. In doing so, he uncovers their influence on property ownership and family relations in the city, as well as on the religious practices of the burghers. Ultimately, this work seeks to change the perception of wills by treating the testamentary act itself as an important agent of historical social change – a ‘tool of power’. Readership: Urban historians of the late medieval period interested in the socio-cultural development of law, and anyone interested in medieval documentary history.
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