Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland is a music history of Solidarity, the social movement opposing state socialism in 1980s Poland. The story unfolds along crucial sites of political action under state socialism: underground radio networks, the sanctuaries of the Polish Roman Catholic Church, labor strikes and student demonstrations, and commemorative performances. Through innovative close listenings of archival recordings, author Andrea F. Bohlman uncovers creative sonic practices in bootleg cassettes, televised state propaganda, and the unofficial, uncensored print culture of the opposition. She argues that sound both unified and splintered the Polish opposition, keeping the contingent formations of political dissent in dynamic tension. By revealing the diverse repertories-singer-songwriter verses, religious hymns, large-scale symphonies, experimental music, and popular song-that played a role across the decade, she challenges paradigmatic visions of a late twentieth-century global protest culture that place song and communitas at the helm of social and political change. Musical Solidarities brings together perspectives from historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and sound studies to demonstrate the value of sound for thinking politics. Unfurling the rich soundscapes of political action at demonstrations, church services, meetings, and in detention, it offers a nuanced portrait of this pivotal decade of European and global history.

All refugees flee the looming threat of extinction. This is a powerful story of one Polish family’s escape from war-torn Europe after the Second World War, and the life they built as newcomers in a small community in western Canada. They brought with them the hope for a better life, but their war time experiences were a constant burden interfering with their inner peace and desire for security. The story of their lives, struggles and successes, aims to create a legacy of hope for their descendants and anyone with a similar cultural history or experience. It is a must read for those wanting an understanding of that era, as well as seeing how the experiences of this family were reflective in many ways to today’s ongoing refugee crisis.

At least nine million Americans trace their roots to Poland, and Polish Americans have contributed greatly to American history and society. During the largest period of immigration to the United States, between 1870 and 1920, more Poles came to the United States than any other national group except Italians. Additional large-scale Polish migration occurred in the wake of World War II and during the period of Solidarity's rise to prominence. This encyclopedia features three types of entries: thematic essays, topical entries, and biographical profiles. The essays synthesize existing work to provide interpretations of, and insight into, important aspects of the Polish American experience. The topical entries discuss in detail specific places, events or organizations such as the Polish National Alliance, Polish American Saturday Schools, and the Latimer Massacre, among others. The biographical entries identify Polish Americans who have made significant contributions at the regional or national level either to the history and culture of the United States, or to the development of American Polonia.

Yoram Gross' recollections of his life, told simply and directly, cannot be read without emotion. This is the story of a youth who was forced to grow up during the Nazi occupation of his country, Poland. Despite the surrounding horrors, the book is surprisingly cheerful. It is living holocaust history, delivered lightly, with veracity and deep feeling.

National Races explores how politics interacted with transnational science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This interaction produced powerful, racialized national identity discourses whose influence continues to resonate in today’s culture and politics. Ethnologists, anthropologists, and raciologists compared modern physical types with ancient skeletal finds to unearth the deep prehistoric past and true nature of nations. These scientists understood certain physical types to be what Richard McMahon calls “national races,” or the ageless biological essences of nations. Contributors to this volume address a central tension in anthropological race classification. On one hand, classifiers were nationalists who explicitly or implicitly used race narratives to promote political agendas. Their accounts of prehistoric geopolitics treated “national races” as the proxies of nations in order to legitimize present-day geopolitical positions. On the other hand, the transnational community of race scholars resisted the centrifugal forces of nationalism. Their interdisciplinary project was a vital episode in the development of the social sciences, using biological race classification to explain the history, geography, relationships, and psychologies of nations. National Races goes to the heart of tensions between nationalism and transnationalism, politics and science, by examining transnational science from the perspective of its peripheries. Contributors to the book supplement the traditional focus of historians on France, Britain, and Germany, with myriad case studies and examples of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century racial and national identities in countries such as Russia, Italy, Poland, Greece, and Yugoslavia, and among Jewish anthropologists.

"This volume will be of particular interest to medical professionals, neuroscientists, neurologists, psychologists, educators, music therapists, musicologists, sound engineers, computer scientists. Manuscripts address how the tools of cognitive neuroscience have provided new insights into where and how rhythm is coded in the brain; production and perception abilities and the relationship between the two; the use of music as a tool for the investigation of human cognition and its underlying brain mechanisms; recent research investigating various aspects of musical memory and learning, and implications for medical rehabilitation for patients with memory disorders; advances in the fields of developmental auditory neuroscience, empirical music aesthetics, and music emotions in normal and disordered development such as autistic spectrum disorders; mutual interactions between music and language in children and adults with cochlear implants; and human communication of information, ideas, and emotional states, and the shared networks of speech and motor processing with musical processing"--NYAS Web site