On June 12 University of Maryland professor of history and former Hoover visiting fellow Piotr Kosicki delivered a lunchtime History & Policy talk entitled "The Illusion of a Just Society: How Catholic Experiments with Communism and Nationalism Shaped the Twentieth Century." Drawing on several years of research in Hoover's collections on Poland, Kosicki's work centers on religious thinkers whose faith drove them into public life, including Karol Wojtyla (the future Pope John Paul II), and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the prime minister who would dismantle Poland’s Communist regime. Kosicki is also the author of the latest publication in the Yale-Hoover series on Authoritarian Regimes, entitled Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and the “Evolution,” 1891-1956.
