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In this episode of The Debrief we explore the powerful figure of Bona Sforza, Queen of Poland back in the 16th century, and whether she really was key in bringing certain vegetables to Poland all those centuries ago… John Beauchamp is joined by possibly the world's greatest Bona Sforza expert, Dr. Darius Güttner from the University of Melbourne, to find out more about the progressive wife of Zygmunt Stary, one of the last Jagiellonian kings.
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In the early 80s and 90s the Polish government cancelled around 9000 km of railway routes, around a third of all routes, abandoning the infrastructures and leaving many people unconnected. In this fourth episode of Next Stop, Iwona Budych, President of the Transport Exclusion Association, and the analyst on public transport Bartosz Jakubowski join us to discuss about the consequences of transport exclusion and share with us the Polish case, where the lack of a trustworthy timetable and a sufficient frequency of trains made many people switch to cars. But what happened with those people who don't have access to cars? Nowadays around 15 million people are transport excluded in Poland, a phenomenon that affects specially children, women, elderly and people living in rural areas. Iwona points out the importance of an efficient network of public transport to ensure everyone has proper access to the labour market, education, health, and other services. Did you know that the railway Luka is constructing in the movie "Life is a Miracle" was built at the beginning of the 20th century to connect Serbia with the Austro-Hungarian Empire? Although it stopped functioning in 1974, some parts of the rail could be reconstructed in the beginning of the 2000 thanks to the support of the movie director Emir Kusturica. Get on board, we'll take you on a journey through the stunning landscapes of the Western Balkans!
In the fourth part of our Brief History of Poland series, Notes from Poland editor-at-large Stanley Bill looks at the "golden age" of Poland-Lithuania in the sixteenth century, covering the period between 1505 and 1572. He examines the reign of the last two Jagiellonian kings; the establishment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; religious tolerance and conflict; the great cultural achievements of the Polish Renaissance; and the beginning of the free royal elections.The Brief History of Poland series will cover over a thousand years of Polish political and cultural history, from 966 until today.Producer: Sebastian LeśniewskiSupport the show (https://notesfrompoland.com/donations/support-us/)
In the third part of our Brief History of Poland series, Notes from Poland editor-at-large Stanley Bill looks at the establishment and development of the Jagiellonian dynasty - covering the period between 1370 and 1505. He examines the beginnings of the Polish-Lithuanian union, the addition of Royal Prussia and the Baltic port of Danzig, the growing freedoms of the nobility, and the evolving political culture of tolerance and its limitations.The Brief History of Poland series will cover over a thousand years of Polish political and cultural history, from 966 until today.Producer: Sebastian Leśniewski.Support the show (https://notesfrompoland.com/donations/support-us/)
Computing In Poland Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us to innovate (and sometimes cope with) the future! Today we're going to do something a little different. Based on a recent trip to Katowice and Krakow, and a great visit to the Museum of Computer and Information Technology in Katowice, we're going to look at the history of computing in Poland. Something they are proud of and should be proud of. And I'm going to mispronounce some words. Because they are averse to vowels. But not really, instead because I'm just not too bright. Apologies in advance. First, let's take a stroll through an overly brief history of Poland itself. Atilla the Hun and other conquerors pushed Germanic tribes from Poland in the fourth century which led to a migration of Slavs from the East into the area. After a long period of migration, duke Mieszko established the Piast dynasty in 966, and they created the kingdom of Poland in 1025, which lasted until 1370 when Casimir the Great died without an heir. That was replaced by the Jagiellonian dynasty which expanded until they eventually developed into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569. Turns out they overextended themselves until the Russians, Prussians, and Austria invaded and finally took control in 1795, partitioning Poland. Just before that, Polish clockmaker Jewna Jakobson built a mechanical computing machine, a hundred years after Pascal, in 1770. And innovations In mechanical computing continued on with Abraham Izrael Stern and his son through the 1800s and Bruno's Intergraph, which could solve complex differential equations. And so the borders changed as Prussia gave way to Germany until World War I when the Second Polish Republic was established. And the Poles got good at cracking codes as they struggled to stay sovereign against Russian attacks. Just as they'd struggled to stay sovereign for well over a century. Then the Germans and Soviets formed a pact in 1939 and took the country again. During the war, Polish scientists not only assisted with work on the Enigma but also with the nuclear program in the US, the Manhattan Project. Stanislaw Ulam was recruited to the project and helped with ENIAC by developing the Monte Carlo method along with Jon Von Neumann. The country remained partitioned until Germany fell in WWII and the Soviets were able to effectively rule the Polish People's Republic until a socal-Democratic movement swept the country in 1989, resulting in the current government and Poland moving from the Eastern Bloc to NATO and eventually the EU around the same time the wall fell in Berlin. Able to put the Cold War behind them, Polish cities are now bustling with technical innovation and is now home some of the best software developers I've ever met. Polish contributions to a more modern computer science began in 1924 when Jan Lukasiewicz developed Polish Notation, a way of writing mathematical expressions such that they are operator-first. during World War II when the Polish Cipher Bureau were the first that broke the Enigma encryption, at different levels from 1932 to 1939. They had been breaking codes since using them to thwart a Russian invasion in the 1920s and had a pretty mature operation at this point. But it was a slow, manUal process, so Marian Rejewski, one of the cryptographers developed a card catalog of permutations and used a mechanical computing device he invented a few years earlier called a cyclometer to decipher the codes. The combination led to the bomba kryptologiczna which was shown to the allies 5 weeks before the war started and in turn led to the Ultra program and eventually Colossus once Alan Turing got a hold of it, conceptually after meeting Rejewski. After the war he became an accountant to avoid being forced into slave cryptographic work by the Russians. In 1948 the Group for Mathematical Apparatus of the Mathematical Institute in Warsaw was formed and the academic field of computer research was formed in Poland. Computing continued in Poland during the Soviet-controlled era. EMAL-1 was started in 1953 but was never finished. The XYZ computer came along in 1958. Jack Karpiński built the first real vacuum tube mainframe in Poland, called the AAH in 1957 to analyze weather patterns and improve forecasts. He then worked with a team to build the AKAT-1 to simulate lots of labor intensive calculations like heat transfer mechanics. Karpinski founded the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He would win a UNESCO award and receive a 6 month scholarship to study in the US, which the polish government used to spy on American progress in computing. He came home armed with some innovative ideas from the West and by 1964 built what he called the Perceptron, a computer that could be taught to identify shapes and even some objects. Nothing like that had existed in Poland or anywhere else controlled by communist regimes at the time. From 65 to 68 he built the KAR-65, even faster, to study CERN data. By then there was a rising mainframe and minicomputer industry outside of academia in Poland. Production of the Odra mainframe-era computers began in 1959 in Wroclaw, Poland and his work was seen by them and Elwro as a threat do they banned him from publishing for a time. Elwro built a new factory in 1968, copying IBM standardization. In 1970, Karpiński realized he had to play ball with the government and got backing from officials in the government. He would then designed the k-202 minicomputer in 1971. Minicomputers were on the rise globally and he introduced the concept of paging to computer science, key in virtual memory. This time he recruited 113 programmers and hardware engineers and by 73 were using Intel 4004 chips to build faster computers than the DEC PDP-11. But the competitors shut him down. They only sold 30 and by 1978 he retired to Switzerland (that sounds better than fled) - but he returned to Poland following the end of communism in the country and the closing of the Elwro plant in 1989. By then the Personal Computing revolution was upon us. That had begun in Poland with the Meritum, a TRS-80 clone, back in 1983. More copying. But the Elwro 800 Junior shipped in 1986 and by 1990 when the communists split the country could benefit from computers being mass produced and the removal of export restrictions that were stifling innovation and keeping Poles from participating in the exploding economy around computers. Energized, the Poles quickly learned to write code and now graduate over 40,000 people in IT from universities, by some counts making Poland a top 5 tech country. And as an era of developers graduate they are founding museums to honor those who built their industry. It has been my privilege to visit two of them at this point. The description of the one in Krakow reads: The Interactive Games and Computers Museum of the Past Era is a place where adults will return to their childhood and children will be drawn into a lots of fun. We invite you to play on more than 20 computers / consoles / arcade machines and to watch our collection of 200 machines and toys from the '70's-'90's. The second is the Museum of Computer and Information Technology in Katowice, and the most recent that I had the good fortune to visit. Both have systems found at other types of computer history museums such as a Commodore PET but showcasing the locally developed systems and looking at them on a timeline it's quickly apparent that while Poland had begun to fall behind by the 80s, it was more a reflection of why the strikes throughout caused the Eastern Bloc to fall, because Russian influence couldn't. Much as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth couldn't support Polish control of Lithuania in the late 1700s. There were other accomplishments such as The ZAM-2. And the first fully Polish machine, the BINEG. And rough set theory. And ultrasonic mercury memory.
A lecture by Trinity Long Room Hub Marie Skłodowska-Curie Cofund Fellow Dr Anna Barcz organised by the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies. The history of Bialowieza mirrors a long practice, beginning with Lithuanian kings from the Jagiellonian dynasty in the 14th century, of cutting the wood and clearing the forest for hunting. Described by the prophetic, romantic, Polish-Lithuanian poet Adam Mickiewicz in Pan Tadeusz [Sir Thaddeus, or the Last Lithuanian Foray: A Nobleman's Tale from the Years of 1811 and 1812 in Twelve Books of Verse], an epic written in 1834, it is one of the greatest signs of environmental consciousness expressed in the national literature. It includes a fragment of description of the deepest heart of the forest that gathers and preserves all species and where humans cannot enter. This so-called “motherland of woods” resembles a strict nature reserve – however, in comparison with our times, Mickiewicz's sanctuary exists only in the wild. Why even the most symbolic, entangled with the national history landscape as Bialowieza cannot help to foster the protection of nature? This question cannot be reasonably answered but we can try to retell the history from the perspective of the forest and its non-human inhabitants. Some would call it the environmental history and some - like me - would advocate for changing the national discourse of telling history in general. In contrast to the existing problem of logging and other human practices disturbing vulnerable Bialowieza's ecosystems and preventing the authorities from extending the borders of national parks mainly on the Polish side (despite the UNESCO heritage list that includes Bialowieza since 1979), I take the militant discourse that ascribes national identity to the trees as an example. In the patriotic, historical narratives, the forest is a soldiers' ally, a partisans' hideout, a hero of songs from the First and Second World Wars, and a witness to history (the forest guerrilla survived even the war, transforming into the so-called anti-communist – the last partisan hid in the forest until 1963). The cultural bond with the forest derives from the darkest history of the first settlers in Eastern Europe and environmental conditions that they found here. Thus, the traditions of nature conservation are inextricably linked to the history of the Polish statehood.
A Book at Lunchtime seminar with Natalia Nowakowska, Somerville College, University of Oxford, Professor Julia Mannherz (Oriel, Oxford) Professor Hannah Skoda (St John’s, Oxford) Chaired by Professor Katherine Lebow (Christ Church, Oxford). Alongside the Renaissance dynasties of the Tudors, Valois, Habsburgs, and Medici once stood the Jagiellonians. Largely forgotten in Britain, their memory remains a powerful element within modern Europe. Remembering the Jagiellonians is the first study of international memories of the Jagiellonians (1386–1596), one of the most powerful but lesser known royal dynasties of Renaissance Europe. It explores how the Jagiellon family has been remembered across Central, Eastern and Northern Europe since the early modern period. The book considers their ongoing role in modern-day culture and politics and their impact on the development of competing modern national identities Offering a wide-ranging panoramic analysis of Jagiellonian memory over five hundred years, this book includes coverage of numerous present-day European countries, ranging from Bavaria to Kiev, and from Stockholm to the Adriatic. It explores how one family are still remembered in over a dozen neighbouring countries. Contributors use memory theory, social science and medieval and early modern European history to engage in an international and interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between memory and dynasty through time. Edited by Natalia Nowakowska, Fellow and Associate Professor in History at Somerville College, University of Oxford, and Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) funded project 'Jagiellonians: Dynasty, Memory and Identity in Central Europe'. Her previous publications include King Sigismund and Martin Luther: The Reformation before Confessionalization (2018) and Church, State and Dynasty in Renaissance Poland: The Career of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon (1468-1503) (2007). Contributors: Natalia Nowakowska, Giedre Mickunaite, Stanislava Kuzmova, Ilya Afanasyev, Dusan Zupka, Susanna Niiranen, Simon M. Lewis, Tetiana Hoshko, Olga Kozubska-Andrusiv
This podcast is about learning Polish from history. This time I want to tell you about Casimir IV (Kazimierz Jagiellończyk) of the Jagiellonian dynasty. He was Grand Duke of Lithuania and King of Poland. Under his rulers Poland recovered Pomerania defeating the Teutonic Knights and the Jagiellonian dynasty became one of the leading royal houses […] The post RP320: Kazimierz Jagiellończyk appeared first on Learn Polish Language Online Resource.
Dr Natalia Nowakowska introduces a new research project which examines the Renaissance Europe Jagiellonian dynasty as an international political phenomenon.