Whiteness and Polishness

In 2019, the New York Times launched a series of articles entitled “The 1619 Project,” which argued that we should reorient our understanding of American history by using as a starting point the year when the first African slaves were sold in the territory that would become the United States.1 Not surprisingly, Donald Trump immediately countered by sponsoring “The 1776 Project,” which attempts to position the libertarian right as the heir to a long tradition of American greatness.2 A furious battle over historical memory is now being fought around these two texts, with school districts mandating that one or the other be adopted into the curriculum, depending on the political orientation dominating in any particular district.3 This was the backdrop for me when I read Adam Leszczyński’s Ludowa historia Polski (“The People’s History of Poland”), so the book felt familiar even before I noticed the references to Howard Zinn’s (1980) A People’s History of the United States. The country of my birth and the country that I study as a historian are rarely so explicitly aligned. Both