The Role of Logic and Aesthetics in Constructing Narrative Wholes in Historiography

The construction of narrative wholes in historiography involves more than logic, but aesthetics as well. It is imagination as well as logic which generates the more or less concretized images constituting the background onto which the historian, "playing" with basic information, imposes some content and portrays some event by means of a narrative. These concretized images incorporate an aesthetic sense of order. Historical narratives also employ general terms which "bind together" the various elements of basic information which, when linked together, form a historical narrative; these general concepts also invoke an aesthetic sense in virtue of which their identity is formed. In both these ways the aesthetic dimension is crucial in the formation of historical wholes.     

Heat treatment of Polish flints

In Poland three types of flint (chocolate, spotted and banded) were intensively mined from the Terminal Palaeolithic to the Early Bronze Age. Although heating of flint to improve its flaking properties was practised across the world from ∼110,000 years ago to the recent, particularly in southwestern Europe, heat treatment of flint in Poland is known from only two sites.     

Unemployment — a socially painful stage in the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy: The case of Poland

The article presents the results of research on the structure of unemployment in Poland at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, described in terms of both kind and spatial variation, by the 49 voivodeships (administrative districts) of the country, using multivariate statistical analysis. The work starts with an analysis of the rise in unemployment over the last few years, since the departure from the centrally controlled economy which was claimed, for ideological reasons, to be free from this problem and which, in fact, was concealing it in its ineffective structures. Unemployment is also related to another factor responsible for the destabilization of the economy, namely inflation. The article closes with a multivariate delimitation of regional labour markets. Although the study is only concerned with Poland, the high unemployment level as a socially painful phenomenon is a feature of the economies of all the post‐Communist countries of Europe.