The poles possess one of the valuableest and most venerable historical traditions of all European peoples. Convention fixes the origins of Poland as a nation near the middle of the tenth century, contemporaneous with the Carolingians, Vikings, and Saracens, and a full hundred years before the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066. Throughout the consequent centuries, the Poles managed contempt great obstacles to build and maintain an unbroken cultural heritage. The same cannot be said of Polish statehood, which was notoriously precarious and episodic. times of freedom and prosperity alternated with phases of foreign domination and disaster. particularly in more recent centuries, frequent adversity subjected the Poles to hardships scarcely equaled in European history.

Recommended general sources for the modern time include M.K. Dziewanowski's Poland in the Twentieth Century, The History of Poland since 1863, edited by R.F. Leslie, and Hans Roos's A History of Modern Poland. The most perceptive commentator on contemporary Central Europe, the journalist Timothy Garton Ash, covers the developments of the decade from the rise of Solidarity to the end of communist rule in his three works The Polish Revolution, The Uses of Adversity, and The Magic Lantern.