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Two nations on wheels : Greeks and Poles at the crossroads : a millennial history

It has been about half a century since the end of the Greek civil war (1949) and the Stalinization of Poland (1949) as well as a decade since Poland's Democratization (1990). After the fall of Communism, the whole of Europe tends to integrate into a peaceful commonwealth. Thus, Greek and Polish histories converge, whereas most of the time they had diverged and went off in opposite directions. Greece was the first country to defeat communist aggression in Europe. Poland was the first Communist country to shake of Communist tyranny and set the stage for the collapse of the Soviet empire. Greece and Poland have played key roles in European history. The present cannot be comprehended without reference to the past. The extraordinary events of the 1980s-1990's provide a good opportunity for an examination and comparison of the development of Hellenism and Polonism. Poland's birth coincided with the most glorious period of Byzantium when contacts with the two states were undertaken. After the twelth century, Byzantium began to decline and fell in 1453 whereas Poland expanded and became a great empire, only to follow Byzantium's fate and disappear as a state in 1795.In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, Greece and Poland re-emerged as independent states which was an illustration of the dynamics and continuity of their societies.

Last of the free : a millennial history of the Highlands and islands of Scotland

Written by a man who is both an award-winning historian of the Highlands and Islands and a key figure in shaping the region's future development, this is an account of how the Highlands and Islands of Scotland evolved into the way they are today. But the book is not simply the story of humanity's millennium-long involvement with one of the world's most spectacular localities. It is also a contribution to the present-day debate about how Scotland - and Britain - should be organized. James Hunter's central contention is that the Highlands and Islands were most successful when the region possessed a large measure of autonomy, which turned places like Iona and Kirkwall into centres of European significance. That autonomy was destroyed, he maintains, by mediaeval Scotland's monarchy, by 17th-century Scotland's parliament and by the British politicians who inherited the Scottish state's unrelenting determination to ensure that inhabitants of the Highlands and Islands had no worthwhile control over their own destinies. The more recent history of the Highlands and Islands, in Hunter's opinion, has consisted mainly of attempts by the region's people to regain freedom and rights - including rights to land - of which they were deprived in the Middle Ages and afterwards. Today those attempts are succeeding and, this book argues, ought to be encouraged by Scotland's new government. If it is to do better by the Highlands and Islands than Scottish governments of the past, it will have to see that devolution of political power does not stop in Edinburgh.

The veil is torn : A.D. 30 to 70 from Pentecost to the fall of Jerusalem

Conmemoración del Golpe Cívico-Militar en Chile 1973 / 2023