This article explores the diaries of young bourgeois men from the nineteenth century. It focuses on homesickness as an emotional experience shaped by gender and social expectations. Diaries have long been linked to femininity, but many boys and young men also kept diaries, especially when leaving home for school or university. The selected diaries of four boys reveal close ties to family, reflections on masculinity, and emotional struggles related to separation. Their writings often depict homesickness as a test of character, framing their emotions within cultural ideals of male strength, courage, and religious devotion. The diaries also functioned as tools for self-regulation, memory, and emotional agency, allowing the authors to manage feelings through writing. The study shows how diary-keeping shaped emotional and gender identity. It proves that nineteenth-century masculinity was not only about duty and purpose, but also deeply intertwined with love, longing and personal transformation.

The article puts forward a comparative analysis of two egodocumentary accounts written by girls who grew up in interwar Poland. The study draws on selected educational brochures and psychological guides that defined the emotional norms for girls and young women. How did the authors talk about their “first love”? The research tools developed by historians of emotions, as well as the perspective of girlhood studies, enable us not only to explore the complex nature of this experience, which is embedded in various cultural and social discourses, but also to highlight its emancipatory aspects.

The paper focuses on marital feelings recorded in the last wills of sixteenth-century townspeople of Lwow (Lviv). By comparing the wills of women and men, differences and similarities in the manifestation of positive emotions towards spouses were identified. The information contained in the analysed wills made it possible to determine the qualities that townspeople desired in their husbands and wives. Additionally, the potential reasons and consequences of recording information about marital love were examined.

The article discusses a thought-provoking – though not entirely unproblematic – attempt to investigate attitudes towards the past in the urban context of premodern Poland. The work in question, Piotr Okniński’s monograph on the creation of official historical narratives of the city of Kraków, is examined against the broader backdrop of both Polish and international scholarly discourse. This discourse concerns the mechanisms of collective memory and its politically motivated suppression, the instruments of remembrance, and the active role of urban elites in shaping an authorised version of the communal past.

The article examines the intersection of gender and the manifestation of emotions in Jan Długosz’s late medieval historical work, Annales seu cronicae incliti Regni Poloniae. The text explores how similarities and differences between genders are portrayed in Długosz’s narrative across three key aspects. The first aspect is the depiction of grief. On the one hand, collective emotions associated with the death of a monarch played a significant role in the social life of the Kingdom of Poland. On the other hand, mourning the deaths of other individuals is often represented as a deeply personal and tragic experience, primarily experienced by women. Secondly, the significance of emotions in parenthood and marriage demonstrates that they were more important to women and closely tied to their social position. While emotions could also be important for men, their understanding of fatherhood was broader than that of motherhood. This allowed men to express parental emotions toward their subjects or followers, but they rarely directed those feelings toward their own children. In the third part, the text examines the expressions of emotions related to governance. Despite the long tradition of ira regis, which welcomed the king’s anger, Długosz treated this emotion as marginal when it came to the role in governing and much more favoured in weeping. Anger was even less significant within the repertoire of women’s emotions, and it seemed that Długosz rarely imagined them as capable of manifesting this emotion. Ultimately, the article argues that emotions were primarily associated with the social roles of men and women, and the differences in emotionality were not perceived as part of a fundamental gender distinction.

The article presents the problem of the creation of historical myths using the example of the story of Apolonia Jagiełło Tochman (c. 1825–1867), an alleged participant in the Kraków Uprising of 1846 and the Hungarian Spring of Nations, who came to America with a group of Hungarian insurgents in 1848. Faced with the difficulty of separating fact from myth in her biography, it addresses the problem of the origin of the heroic myth of Apolonia Tochman, whose name is still included in many Anglo-Saxon studies devoted to legendary and historical women warriors. Treating the myth as an unverifiable and ‘immobilised’ formulation that is supposed to say something about the world, as a category of symbolic or factual truths, it attempts to answer the question of whether Tochman’s heroic myth was a product of conscious self-creation, particular interests or social needs and what was the phenomenon of Tochman’s American popularity embraced by American presidents and compared to Joan of Arc, the semi-legendary Catalina de Erauso or the Hungarian heroines of the 1848–1849 revolution.

This article explores the concept of an emotional community among the first German women students around the turn of the twentieth century, analysing both journalistic and literary texts. Moving beyond terminological disputes surrounding ‘emotions’ and ‘affects’, it adopts Sara Ahmed’s inclusive approach, where affect is seen as integral to emotion. The study draws on Barbara Rosenwein’s definition of emotional communities as groups sharing common interests, values, and goals, often reinforced by texts. Through an analysis of excerpts from Ilse Frapan’s novels, Wir Frauen haben kein Vaterland and Die Arbeit, and articles from women’s magazines Die Studentin and Frauen-Rundschau, the paper investigates how specific emotions – namely compassion and a mix of pride and impostor syndrome – were expressed, cultivated, but also suppressed within this nascent community. It argues that these texts not only reflected but actively shaped the emotional landscape of early women students, highlighting the crucial role of literature in fostering a sense of shared experience and identity.

This paper discusses the inclusion of women in municipal social administration in Poznań (at that time, German Posen), the city where, since the end of the nineteenth century, they could be elected to honorary, unpaid positions previously reserved exclusively for men. This process occurred in larger municipalities within the Prussian state. It was the implementation of the ideas of liberal social reformers who believed that the female nature made women experts in caring for the poor and children. According to the reformers, the empathy and emotionality of women would help combat social pathologies originating in the family. The participation of women in social administration is therefore seen as a form of practising emotions in a rationalised public space. The article analyses the reactions of the Poznań press, representing various political persuasions, to this new sphere of women’s activity from the perspective of the prevailing gender hierarchy at the time and from the point of view of the Polish-German national conflict. Methodologically, the article draws on the concepts proposed by Barbara H. Rosenwein and William Reddy.

What does it mean to feel Polish? If Polishness is to be not only an ethnic and cultural feature, but also a way of expressing and realising the Polish spirit, it inevitably entails a particular set of desired feelings, attitudes, and ways of reacting. In my article, I focus on the emotional profile of a Pole, as postulated by National Democracy, a radical nationalist movement, in its beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century in partitioned Poland. The new Pole was to break away from the previous patterns of a conciliatory, helpless, weak, feminine nation. Based on selected journalistic texts, as well as a previously unknown short story by Roman Dmowski, the first published text, I demonstrate the type of “masculine” emotionality that was shaped and postulated by the early National Democrats. I discuss the politics of feelings promoted by the National Democracy and the emotional community it sought to build. The basis of this policy and the community it created was the refusal of compassion in all its forms: as a basis for anti-authoritarian and emancipatory efforts, as a template for relationships between individuals, societies or nations, and as a form of self-reflection. All of these, according to National Democrats, had to be rejected to create the nation of “masters of civilisation, not its lackeys”.

In this article, I investigate Japanomania – the European and American fascination with Japan from the 1860s to the 1910s – focusing on how Western conceptions of time determined perceptions of Japanese culture. Drawing on Edward Said’s Orientalism and Stuart Hall’s conception of ‘the West’ as a historical construct, I claim that Western understandings of time were instrumental in disseminating Orientalism, framing the East as exotic, static, and timeless. The study centres on Japanomania in turn-of-the-century Warsaw, including the reception of Japanese exhibitions and theatre performances, showing that the modern concept of time was a crucial tool of Orientalism. Specifically, the idea of ‘universal’ time allowed for comparisons between cultures, positioning non-Western societies as inferior and preserving Western hierarchies and narratives. The article demonstrates how Western ideological frameworks influenced Polish cultural identities and shaped local fantasies about Japan and the Orient.