What Can I Read To Learn More About Poland?

While it might be theoretically possible to learn everything about Polish and Baltic history on the Internet, sometimes you might want to actually hit the library to learn a little bit more. Fortunately, there is a huge body of printed work that you can use to expand your knowledge of this topic. While all these books about Poland vary in the depth, detail and level of scholarly research, all can be useful to the interested reader.

God’s Playground: a History of Poland by Norman Davies (Columbia University Press, 1982) is considered to be one of the best English-Language surveys of Polish history. This two-volume set covers the period from the beginning to 1795 in the first book, and 1795 to the present in the second. While enormous amounts of information are presented in well over 1000 pages, Davies manages to deliver it in a concise and coherent manner. Sometimes there’s a deluge of detail (such as a chapter on the Polish grain trade of the 1600s), but even if you can comprehend 10 percent, you’ll learn a lot.

If you don’t have the time to sit and read such a daunting work, you can always read Heart of Europe: a Short History of Poland (The Guernsey Press Co., 1986), also by Davies. More than just a condensed version of God’s Playground, Heart of Europe does a great job tying Poland’s past to its present. Davies goes backwards in time while relating Poland’s history, starting in the early 1980s and applying events from that period to find the ultimate causes, trends and patterns in the past. Although the book was written at a time when it looked like communism would never end—Poland’s attempt at revolution had been stalled at that point—Davies’ vantage point doesn’t hinder him from showing how Poland’s past has had a tremendous effect on the 20th century.

Another good survey of Polish history is Adam Zamoyski’s The Polish Way (Hippocrene Books, 1987). While it doesn’t pack the academic punch of Davies’ work, the book details the political and cultural events that have shaped Poland. Much of the book deals with history before the 19th century—often considered Poland’s “golden age”—but reading The Polish Way is a good way to get started.

There are also a number of books that, while they cover the eastern European region in general, devote large sections to Poland. Two of them, by historian Joseph Rothschild, provide an excellent introduction to studying the region. East Central Europe Between the World Wars (U. of Washington Press, 1974), which is part of the larger series A History of East Central Europe, provides an overview of Polish history from 1914-1939 in chapter two. Although it’s mainly political history, Rothschild covers Poland’s economy, society and demographics as well.

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