“The right to one’s home” is a project that raises the issue of affordable housing, challenging this broad concept both in universal terms and later applied to specific condition of a site located in Warsaw, Poland. Beside the obviously economic dimension, affordability stretches out to urban politics by proposing new power relations and redefining neoliberal cities of today. By reclaiming centrally located, infrastructurally connected and potentially attractive sites it is a tool to counteract gentrification. Within the thesis, affordability is achieved with both organizational and spatial strategies – meaning that architectural solutions are accompanied by a simple administrative model that introduces different actors (municipality, private investors, housing cooperatives, non-profit organisations). Seeing the opportunity of reducing building cost in prefabrication, three panel systems were designed and placed on the site. Deriving from the history of concrete panels and shifting to more sustainable material – cross laminated timber – the author tried to reach harmonious balance between quantity, quality and affordability. The proposal was not radicalized with micro-apartments nor was intended to save on architectural values – on the contrary, individual and careful design of the outer skin that covers structural core was an important goal of the project. Standardised architectural solutions and organizational strategies on the municipal level were combined to enable socially sustainable housing environment.

Yes

All stories stem from two setups: a stranger came to town or someone went on a journey. For me, these stories are not an either/or situation but a both/and. I was born, along with my older brother, in my mother's hometown of Buckhannon, West Virginia. My childhood was spent in my father's homeland of Poland. My missionary parents moved back to America in 1996 when my grandmother, on my mother's side, died. As a stranger, I journeyed south to Florida with my family. I call Orlando home, after living here for a dozen years. My story is how I journeyed with my family as a boy from Poland to America and along the way felt tugged by both my parents' heritages. I considered my homeland strange, but took root as a man in the States. The unknown became familiar. When I entered college, half my life had been spent in Florida, in a balance with my childhood in Poland. Now the majority of my life has been spent here in Florida. Narrative poetry is a self-investment on the page. A collection of such poetry is as close to memoir. I tell my life story in these poems: I chronicle my change from a stranger to a local in this collection, highlighting my international experience, and explaining how home is three different places: Buckhannon, Warsaw, and Orlando.

No / The military dimension of the Cold War was characterised by the strategic nuclear stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union as well as the large-scale regional military confrontation in Central Europe. As part of the process of East-West détente there was an effort to address the risks of war in Europe by means of an arms control process referred to as MBFR (Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions). The true purposes and intentions of both sides (NATO and the Warsaw Pact) in these negotiations has so far not been fully understood. This book is based on path-breaking archival research that clarifies the objectives and tactics of the parties to the negotiations and the reasons for why the negotiations ended without an agreement. It makes a major new contribution to the understanding of Cold War History.

In Holocaust research, the study of elderly Jews in Nazi German ghettos remains a blind spot. This thesis begins to fill the research gap by exploring the everyday life of elderly Jews and their agency under the structural conditions of the Warsaw ghetto. On a broader scale, my key findings contribute to scholarly debates and lay the foundation for further research, on Jewish responses to ghettoization and agency during the Holocaust, including the continuity and disruption of gender roles and social hierarchies in the family and Jewish ghetto community as well as religious practices as a coping strategy for elderly Jews in the ghetto. The theoretical framework augments current gender scholarship and explanations of agency and structure in the ghetto with intersectional theory, including gender, class as intervening variables, which represents a barely used theoretical approach to an under-researched subject. To answer my main research question "How did gender, class, and family as well as the Jewish community and German authorities influence the life of elderly Jews in the ghetto?”, the analysis is conducted in the tradition of the history of the everyday on the micro-level. My empirical analysis examines the living conditions, agency, survival, and vulnerability to violence and death of elderly people in the Warsaw ghetto. The primary sources used in the empirical analysis are a combination of archival documents - including the clandestine Oneg Shabbat ghetto archive -, diaries and memoirs by elderly Jews as well as oral history interviews of their grandchildren. A general scarcity of sources by elderly, especially poor elderly and female elderly Jews in the primary sources available to the author, constitute the limitations of this thesis.

The city as a focal point of both domestic and international security policy is characteristic of the 21st century security landscape in Europe. Amidst the 'War on Terror' and the pan-European battle against organised crime, the city is the location where global processes are actually taking place. Urban security is the local policy response both to such global threats as terrorism and local ones, such as violent crime. Public transport systems in particular came under threat after the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001, Madrid in 2004, and London in 2005. This doctoral thesis studies security policy in three public transport systems – Berlin, Stockholm, and Warsaw – from a comparative perspective focusing on the conditions that made new and very specific understandings of security possible. The study argues that urban transport security has undergone radical changes during the last ten years. While transport authorities and the police used to conceive security as related solely to crime rates, today the focus of security practices consists of passengers' perceptions. The study shows how this shift is paralleled by a new discourse of 'security as emotion', and how it came into being. It concentrates specifically on the central role that surveillance and private policing assumes as the security policy shifts objectives to the inner life of the passengers. Today, complex governance networks of both public and private actors manage security in the three cities. The analysis shows how passengers are constructed in the urban security policy as children, consumers, and citizens. These different 'roles' constitute the passenger in the eye of urban security governance characterised by technocracy, 'friendly security', and individual responsibility. The introduction of new governance models for public administration, the legacy of European communist regimes, and rising fear of crime are central conditions for this new, sensitised urban transport security.

The Warsaw Quarries of Coshocton County, Ohio, virtually ignored since Holmes' landmark papers of 1919, are investigated to achieve several goals: 1) to create a revised general typology of the material culture of bedded-chert lithic procurement sites; 2) to demonstrate that the occurrence of radiocarbon samples at lithic procurement sites is the norm rather than the exception; 3) to clarify the nature of activity at the site through a synthesis of functional and attribute analyses of material recovered from a peripheral spoils ridge; 4) to demonstrate that data collected at procurement sites by surface collection constitutes an insufficient database for analysis; 5) to test an hypothesis that the presumed absence of classic site elements (stratigraphy, diagnostic artifacts, dateable material) is incorrect. Since the completion of late 19`h and early 20`h century work in the field, analysis of quarry sites in North America has been limited to sporadic and usually very subject-specific research. By neglecting to evaluate the overall nature and function of lithic procurement sites, recent work has relegated lithic procurement to a sub-field of only secondary interest to archaeologists. / Department of Anthropology

This thesis explores the late-nineteenth century partnership between Bradford worsted manufacturers the Briggs brothers and the German merchant Ernst Posselt, and their subsequent foreign direct investment in a modern factory and workers’ community at Marki, near Warsaw, in Russian Poland. Protectionism and increasing foreign competition are discussed, among many complex economic pressures on British industry, as likely catalysts for this enterprise and the general historiography of the Polish lands is explored to reveal a climate of extraordinary opportunity for well-capitalised foreign industrialists in this period. This thesis provides fresh perspective on the role of the consular service in facilitating British foreign enterprise and, in context of the Bradford partners’ strategy for local integration through social networking and religious affiliation, presents unique findings regarding the character and operations of Warsaw’s elite commercial community in the late-nineteenth century. Through the development and domination of market and raw materials sources, this venture is shown to have monopolised worsted manufacture in the Russian Empire, using state of the art technology to create, and modern marketing techniques to promote, its product range and evolving image. Aspects of British and Polish social history are compared to assess the efficacy of introducing the model-community concept, in combination with a radical employment policy, to less industrially-developed Russian Poland. The instrumentality of an expatriate community of skilled Yorkshire foremen in diffusing British industrial technology throughout the Russian Empire is described, against a backdrop of political instability and social upheaval which dramatically impacted on business behaviour after 1905.

The thesis deals with the issue of gentrification in the post-socialist context of Central Europe. This phenomenon occurs mainly in the inner city districts, where the local social structure is disturbed through the physical upgrade of the neighborhood (e.g. flats, shops and restaurants) by pushing out the poorer layers of society by the more wealthy ones. In the cities marked by the communist urban planning, the inner city parts were neglected at the expense of peripheral prefab concrete buildings, thus creating great potential for local investment after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The process of gentrification is illustrated in this paper by the comparison of the two city districts Praga-Północ (Warsaw) and Prague 7 (Prague) in the time between 1989 and 2017. As a starting point for comparison, a special case of Prenzlauer Berg district in Berlin is used, where the process has shown significant impact already in the 1990s. In this respect the aim of the thesis is to investigate the links between Warsaw and Prague, also how these cases differ. At the same time, the role of the public sector is studied as a relevant factor influencing gentrification in the post-socialist region of Central Europe. The results of the study showed that analogous processes of gentrification appear in the Praga-Północ and...

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