We are extending the call for papers - the issue "Post-war people’s history"

The recent growing interest of Polish humanities in writing people’s histories carries with it many methodological questions, perhaps no challenge as serious as the one concerning the availability, scale, and credibility of sources used to write them. This issue asks about the potential of a particular set of sources – memoirs and diaries solicited by organizers of post-war “diary competitions” – in the context of a wider project of writing a people’s history of state socialism in Poland. The goal of this issue will thus be to broaden the field of people’s history, hitherto concentrated mainly on the period of serfdom in Poland and its long-lasting consequences for social order and culture. It will also seek to question the dominant tradition of interpreting state socialism as a time of absolute subjugation of the working and peasant classes.

The diaries of peasants and workers are one of the few sources actually created by representatives of the two social classes, hailed as the leading actos of the new system. Our goal will be to consider working-class diaries and memoirs – both published and unpublished – as materials helpful in uncovering the complex reactions of their authors to the radical changes of class structure in the post-war period and such social processes as: class mobility, migrations to cities, engagement in political and social organizations, land reform, changes in gender roles, the growing prestige of physical labor, new approaches towards ownership, more egalitarian access to culture. Rather than view the representatives of peasant and working classes solely as cheated and exploited victims of the system, we ask about their ambiguous agency, the ways in which the symbolic reconfiguration of the post-war order influenced their identities. We also ask about the ways in which workers and peasants both negotiated and critiqued the new socialist system.

We thus solicit articles engaging with post-war diaries and memoirs as sources, critically investigating their potential to generate knowledge about working-class identities and life trajectories.