Zmiany granic Polski na przestrzeni wieków zachęcam do komentowania
Historia Polski w pigułce
Świetna animacja stworzona aby pomóc znajomemu :) Wędrówka przez wieki może zainteresuje i ciebie (możliwość wykorzystania na lekcji historii)
Polish border changes over the years
History of Poland
Mieszko's son, Duke Bolesław I Chrobry (r. 992-1025), established a Polish Church structure, pursued territorial conquests and was officially crowned the first king of Poland in 1025, near the end of his life.
Attempts to reunite the Polish lands gained momentum in the 13th century, and in 1295, Duke Przemysł II of Greater Poland managed to become the first ruler since Bolesław II to be crowned king of Poland.
The Union of Lublin of 1569 established the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a more closely unified federal state than the earlier political arrangement between Poland and Lithuania. The Union was largely run by the nobility through the system of a central parliament and local assemblies, but was led by elected kings. The formal rule of the nobility, who were proportionally more numerous than in other European countries, constituted an early democratic system.
During the reign of John II Casimir Vasa (1648-68), the nobles' democracy fell into decline as a result of foreign invasions and domestic disorder.
During the later part of the 18th century, fundamental internal reforms were attempted in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as it slid into extinction. The reform activity, initially promoted by the magnate Czartoryski family faction known as the Familia, provoked a hostile reaction and eventually a military response on the part of neighboring powers-yet it created conditions that fostered economic improvement.
Although no sovereign Polish state existed between 1795 and 1918, the idea of Polish independence was kept alive throughout the 19th century. There were a number of uprisings and other military conflicts against the partitioning powers. Military efforts after the partitions were first based on the alliances of Polish émigrés with post-revolutionary France
After more than a century of foreign rule, Poland regained its independence at the end of World War I as one of the outcomes of the negotiations that took place at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.
On September 1, 1939, Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland, the opening event of World War II. Poland had signed an Anglo-Polish military alliance as recently as August 25, and had long been in alliance with France. The two Western powers soon declared war on Germany, but they remained largely inactive (the period early in the conflict became known as the Phoney War) and extended no aid to the attacked country. The numerically and technically superior Wehrmacht formations rapidly advanced eastwards and engaged massively in the murder of Polish civilians over the entire occupied territory.
By the terms of the 1945 Potsdam Agreement signed by the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, the Soviet Union retained most of the territories captured as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, including western Ukraine and western Belarus, and gained others. Lithuania and the Königsberg area of East Prussia were officially incorporated into the Soviet Union, in the case of the former without the recognition of Western powers. Poland was compensated with the bulk of Silesia, including Breslau (Wrocław) and Grünberg (Zielona Góra), the bulk of Pomerania, including Stettin (Szczecin), and the greater southern portion of the former East Prussia, along with Danzig (Gdańsk). Collectively referred to as the "Recovered Territories", they were included in the reconstituted Polish state. With Germany's defeat, the re-established Polish state was thus shifted west to the area between the Oder-Neisse and Curzon lines. The Poles lost 70% of their pre-war oil capacity to the Soviets, but gained from the Germans a highly developed industrial base and infrastructure that made a diversified industrial economy possible for the first time in Polish history.