This book is a history of the First World War told from the anthropological perspective. It is the story of its individual participants - soldiers, civilians, women. It looks at the war in terms of its everyday life, its economic affairs, migrations, invasions and military occupation, the role of its civilian infrastructure, and the impact of the national question; and it provides a clinical analysis of its models of ground warfare.

The book shows the mechanisms of the functioning of the competing Lemko political orientations in Poland between 1918 and 1939: Old Rusyns, Moscophiles and National Movement Activists. It discusses the connections of the Greek Catholic and Orthodox Churches with the political, cultural, educational and economic life of the Lemko Region, as well as the ethnic policy of Polish governments towards Lemkos.

In the history of European communist dictatorships, the Albanian case deserves particular attention. Half a century of Albanian communism saw an attempt to apply the model of forceful industrialisation, combined with a brutal and multifarious indoctrination of society, to a backward country which had lived in traditional tribal structures. In Albania, the model of power which was called Stalinist in Europe proved particularly durable and impossible to verify through demographic and generational changes. This work is the first to analyse the process of the ideologisation of the state and its impact on the economic, social and cultural life. An important asset of the book is its extensive use of Albanian source materials as well as works of Albanian historians.

The term Aliyah Bet refers to illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine in the period of the British Mandate for Palestine; it constituted one of the most effective methods of struggle of the Zionist movement for the sovereign state of Israel. Its history is marked, on the one hand, by clandestine activities and spectacular operations, and on the other, by dramatic events (catastrophes of sea liners carrying immigrants, deportations of refugees). The book discusses events without which one cannot understand the contemporary Israel.

The treatise was meant as an analysis of problems connected with the monumental work of Samuel Pufendorf on the reign of Charles X Gustav, King of Sweden. Printed in Nuremberg in 1696, it has not been systematically explored so far. The book of Pufendorf continues to surprise, allows one to re-read the great conflict, known as the Second Northern War, which influenced a large part of Europe. Many legends and myths relate to this dramatic era, some of which are supported by the data contained in the Pufendorf's book, and others may be challenged on the basis of his account. Wojciech Krawczuk's study is mainly devoted to the military history, but it also touches upon other topics, to wit the history of diplomacy and bureaucracy or the research on the early modern cultural landscape.