Center, Margins, and the Making of Historical Knowledge in Poland

How is historical knowledge made far from the centres of academic power? Center, Margins, and the Making of Historical Knowledge in Poland traces the production of history on the margins of a centralised academic system, from the end of World War II to the founding of the Institute of National Remembrance in 1998.The book begins with the mechanism of control: how post-war reconstruction concentrated scholarly power in Warsaw and subordinated or starved the pre-war regional learned societies. It then shows how centrally sponsored themes – above all the Millennium of the Polish State – enabled provincial museums, journals and research centres to come into being. Two north-eastern case studies follow: Białystok, a devastated regional capital where a humanities community was built from nothing, and Łomża, administratively subordinate to Białystok yet oriented towards Warsaw – an academic “suburb” that supplied the capital with elites and offered its scholars a space of relative freedom. The book’s central contribution is two models of the intellectual periphery – colonisation driven by the centre, and diaspora patronage in which the province recruits the centre – showing that even a scholarly wasteland could create something of its own.Based on archives, memoirs, oral-history interviews and samizdat, the book will interest historians of historiography and of state socialism, sociologists of science and of intellectuals, and scholars of Central and Eastern Europe. It offers an empirically grounded framework for studying knowledge production beyond the metropolis.