EN
In the West the crisis of social history began much earlier due to a postmodern ciriticism of the paradigms of historiography from 1950–1970. In Poland the lack of trust towards social history was additionally intensified by the attempts of the communist party to render it a counterbalance to inconvenient political history. Studies on this aspect of the past, however, were not suspended after 1989, but the limits of social history still remain unclear since at present it does not possess a single dominating methodology. Today, social history is rather a collection of diverse interests, whose object is society although even the definition of the latter concept is ambiguous. The author conducted a survey of the state of research into the discussed domain in Poland in 1989–2009. He deals with the Middle Ages and modern times, listing pertinent publication series, and considers works about the social history of the nineteenth century, mentioning, i.a. the recently issued three-volume history of the intelligentsia edited by Jerzy Jedlicki. Finally, he discusses an epoch that is the focus of his own research work, i.e. the twentieth century, paying separate attention to the interwar period. The following remarks have been devoted to research concerning Polish society during the communist era – a topic that continues to stir political emotions. Contemporary research treats socio-economic problems and those with an anthropological tinge as equally making part of contemporary broad-sense social history. The future shape of this discipline can only inspire loose suppositions.