Galicia as a historical problem
Thematic issue of “Kwartalnik Historyczny”

“History of the Austrian part [of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth] can be treated as historical problem in its own right. -- The lack of national independence results not only in subjection of a given national group to foreign interests --, but also in one or another way means exposing the dominating state to the influence of the conquered population”. These words were written almost 50 years ago by Henryk Wereszycki in an essay entitled The past of Galicia as a historical problem.
The history of Galicia has been since then a subject to numerous studies not only by Polish historians but also – especially after 1989 – Ukrainian ones. The English and German language historiography takes more and more active part in the study of Galicia too. Wereszycki’s intuition has been largely confirmed – substitution of analysis of interactions between state and nationalities and between nationalities themselves for studies of various nationalities separately does really bring us closer to seeing Galicia’s entanglement in the manifold contexts, whose significance by far exceeds the history of a single province. The historiographical output of last decades is therefore worth a closer look.
“Kwartalnik Historyczny” asks hereby all the interested researchers for original innovative studies dealing with the history of Galicia within the framework of the Habsburg Monarchy (1848-1918). They should represent the threads of research especially developed in the last years and decades, such as, e.g., the forms of Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish national movements in all their manifestations, the functioning of political institutions, the problems of cultural history, including the role of urban centres as birthplaces of new style of everyday life and of new type of mass politics, as well as of new, modernist, aesthetic sensitivity. Among the important subjects one should not omit the social aspects of religious life, especially role of churches and religious denominations in modernising the attitudes of the rural population and in their political mobilisation. The possibility of modification of the traditional picture of Galician backwardness, as presented by Stanisław Szczepanowski in his Nędza Galicji w cyfrach, is also worth reconsidering, in the light of recent debates on the category of modernisation,
The Editors of “Kwartalnik Historyczny” will gladly welcome comparative studies presenting the analysed problems in the perspective either of the Habsburg Monarchy as a whole or of another appropriate setting. Texts in Polish, English, German, French or Russian are to be submitted until 1 December 2007. Please abide by the editorial instruction of “Kwartalnik Historyczny”, to be found on our web page.