This story appeared in the Spring 2021 Letters & Science magazine.
Kathryn Ciancia’s fascination with how people have historically mobilized the idea of “civilization” began with the stories her Polish grandfather shared.
As a child growing up in a town near Liverpool in the United Kingdom, Ciancia, now an associate professor of history, would listen to him describe his childhood in Poland in the 1920s. He would talk about his own father, who maintained the bridge over the Vistula River, which had, prior to the First World War, marked the border between the Russian and Habsburg empires. When the family had to travel beyond their village, they preferred to go to what had formerly been part of the Habsburg empire because they believed that levels of civilization were higher there.
But while she reveled in the personal and emotional connections such conversations sparked, she didn’t fully understand what these stories meant.
“He told me about a world that was so alien to me as a British teenager,” she recalls. “At the time, I didn’t know the historical context—all I knew was what he told me.”
In graduate school, that childhood fascination was part of what drove her to unearth the deeper history behind her grandfather’s memories. She set out to study how some Poles tried to modernize and, in their eyes, bring “civilization” to the poorest parts of Poland in the wake of the First World War. It’s the story she tells in On Civilization’s Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World, her recently published first book.
“I didn’t end up researching my grandfather’s personal trajectory, but rather his sense of Polishness, what it meant and why it was so important to him,” she explains.
Instead of focusing on the politicians who sometimes dominate historical narratives, Ciancia decided to look at the folks “in the middle”—including public health workers, schoolteachers, urban planners, and border guards—who journeyed to a province in Poland’s multiethnic eastern borderlands. Using photographs, published articles and records from archives, she pieced together the story of how these groups tried to modernize agricultural and building techniques, increase literacy rates and establish sewer systems and usable paved roads.
Ciancia, who had planned to pursue journalism before deciding on academia, had to use a reporter’s skills to track down individual stories and place them in their proper context. She also worked on using her sources to communicate the character of a place and time in the past, while simultaneously highlighting the very particular viewpoints those sources offered.
“The important thing was to recognize that my sources were not simply a window into a world, but a staging of that world,” Ciancia says. “There was always an agenda behind them.”
The book is also about the ways in which mobilizing ideas of civilization involves excluding certain groups, sometimes under the very guise of inclusivity.
“Who gets to be a member of the nation and who gets to make that decision?” asks Ciancia. “It’s a debate we’re continuing to have today in the United States and across the world. This book is about Poland, but it’s also about a lot more.”
During the period covered in Ciancia’s book, her historical actors often described an inclusive vision of Polish nationalism, one that encompassed both Ukrainian-speaking Orthodox Christians and Jews. But there were limits to inclusion. Even as some Poles celebrated what they saw as Jewish cultural contributions, like the architecture of historic synagogues, they also attempted to reduce the number of Jews on town councils. Efforts to improve local sewer systems and water quality were often not-so-subtle criticisms of Jewish-run communities.
“Even when people say they are being inclusive, there are often exclusions built into the narrative,” says Ciancia.
Ciancia’s next project involves exploring the history of how Polish citizenship was managed between 1918 and the early period of the Cold War in locations beyond the geographical borders of Poland— including in China, one of the more unexpected places one might find a community of Polish citizens. She’s focusing on the powerful and complex role the staff at Polish consulates held.
“It was often these people who decided on the fate of someone else,” she argues. “Such individuals can—and did—change people’s lives completely.”
