Norman Davies

Ivor Norman Richard Davies (Bolton, Lancashire; June 8, 1939) is an English historian, known for his publications on the history of Poland and the British Isles.

Career

Disciple of A.J.P. Taylor, Davies studied history at Magdalen College, Oxford. After stays in Grenoble, France, Perugia, Italy, and Sussex, England, he tried to study for a doctorate in Russia, but was denied an entry visa. He then headed to Krakow to study at the Jagiellonian University and research the Polish-Soviet War. As that war did not officially exist in the historiography of communist Poland at the time, he was forced to change the title of his dissertation to British Foreign Policy towards Poland, 1919-20. After obtaining his doctorate in Krakow, the English text appeared under the titleWhite Eagle, Red Star. The Polish-Soviet War 1919-1920in 1972.

Since 1971, Davies taught Polish history at the School of Slavic and East European Studies (SSEES), University of London, where he was a lecturer from 1985 to 1996. He currently works at Wolfson College, University of London. Oxford. Throughout his career, Davies has given lectures in many countries (United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, China, and major European countries).

The work that gave him his reputation in the English-speaking world was God's Playground (1981), a general but exhaustive overview of Polish history, which continues to be considered the most influential. This made Davis immediately famous in Poland, although—or perhaps because of it—it could only be distributed as a samizdat copy.

Amid the current climate in Poland, Davies published a more concise, essayistic description of the role of the past in Poland's present, titled Heart of Europe (1984).

Some Western colleagues have accused Davies of a "Polishophile" in the presentation of the Polish-Soviet, Polish-Jewish or Polish conflicts with the West. In particular, some Jewish historians, led by Lucy Dawidowicz, Abraham Brumberg and Theodore Rabb, object to Davies' historical treatment of the Holocaust in the Nazi occupation of Poland. They accuse him of minimizing historical anti-Semitism and promote a view in which the Holocaust occupies a position in international historiography that tends to minimize the suffering of non-Jewish Poles and even denounces them as anti-Semitic. Davies's supporters maintain that he gives due attention to the genocide and war crimes perpetrated by both Hitler and Stalin against Jewish and non-Jewish Poles. Davies argues thatStudents of the Holocaust need not fear that rational comparisons might threaten that uniqueness. Just the opposite and that ...one needs to mentally reconstruct the entire photograph to understand the true enormity of the Polish cataclysm in the war, and then say with absolute conviction 'Never again'.

In 1986 Dawidowicz's criticism of Davies's treatment of the Holocaust was cited as a factor in a controversy at Stanford University in which Davies was denied a position for 'scientific defects'. Davies sued the university for breach of contract and defamation, but in 1989 the court ruled that he did not have jurisdiction over academic matters.

In the 1990s, Davies returned with two monumental works on European history as a whole (1996) and the British Isles in particular (1999). In both books he specifies the importance of the & # 34; peripheries & # 34; on equal footing and revises conventional wisdom in historiography that he considers Western- and Anglocentric-biased, respectively.

Later, Davies and his former research assistant, Roger Moorhouse, co-wrote a story about Wrocław, at the suggestion of the city's mayor. The book considers the city a focal point of central European history and uses it to present that history 'in two words'. Although some colleagues criticized a number of technical defects in the book, it became a best-seller in both Germany and Poland, where they were published simultaneously.

Davies also writes essays and popular articles for media outlets. Among others, he has worked for the BBC and for British and American magazines such as The Times , The New York Review of Books and The Independent . In Poland, his articles appear in the liberal Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny.

After 1989, God's Playground became required reading in Poland, where each subsequent book was translated and immediately became a commercial success. In 2000, Davies' Polish publishers Znak published a collection of his essays and articles under the title Smok wawelski nad Tamizą (The Wawel Dragon on the Thames). >) which is not available in English.

Davies' book, Warsaw, 1944 (Rising '44), describes the Warsaw Uprising and did very well received in 2004, on the occasion of its 60th anniversary.

Prizes and distinctions

Davies holds several honorary degrees, including honorary doctorates from the universities of Lublin and Gdańsk, is a member of the Polish Academy of Teaching (PAU) and the European Academy of Scientiarum et Artium, and is associated with the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society. Davies is also an honorary citizen of Lublin and Krakow. In 2005, he was awarded the Order of Saint Stanislaus 1st class of Poland.

Publications in English

• 1972: White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War, 1919-20. (2004 edition)
• 1977: Poland, Past and Present. A Select Bibliography of Works en Español.
• 1981: God's Playground. A History of Poland. Vol. 1: The Origins to 1795, Vol. 2: 1795 to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• 1984: Heart of Europe. A Short History of Poland. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• 1996: Europe. A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• 1999: The Isles. A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• 2002: (with Roger Moorhouse): Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City. London: Jonathan Cape.
• 2004: Rising '44. The Battle for Warsaw. London: Pan Books.
• 2006: Europe at war 1939-1945: Not simple victory
• 2011: Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe. Allen Lane. ISBN 978-1-84614-338-0

Publications in Spanish

• 2005: Warsaw, 1944. Planet.
• 2008: Europe at war 1939-1945. Planet.
• 2013: Missing kingdoms. The forgotten history of Europe. Gutenberg Galaxy.

Decorations

• November 2009: Honorary Medal Bene Meritogranted by the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Poland.