Władysław Konopczyński

Władysław Konopczyński (26 November 1880 in Warsaw – 12 July 1952) was a leading Polish historian and publisher of primary-source materials.

Konopczyński was a student of Polish historian Szymon Askenazy. He became a professor at Kraków's Jagiellonian University (1917) and a member of the Warsaw Scientific Society (Towarzystwo Naukowe Warszawskie) and the Polish Academy of Learning (Polska Akademia Umiejętności, 1922).

He was a polyglot who knew 14 languages.

Konopczyński's chief interests were Polish parliamentary history, 17th- and 18th-century Polish politics and political thought, and the Bar Confederation. He wrote histories of Poland and of the modern world. In his own time, he participated as a member of the Polish delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 and as a representative of Popular National Union in the Sejm between 1922 and 1927 during the Second Polish Republic. He argued for the recognition of the role of Roman Dmowski in the fight for Polish independence.

In 1931 he founded Polski słownik biograficzny (The Polish Biographical Dictionary) and served as its first editor, seeing seven volumes through press, 1935–49, before being forced by Poland's postwar communist government to resign his editorship. Many of his former and contemporary students also contributed to this work, including Emanuel Rostworowski, Władysław Czapliński, Józef Feldman, and Józef Andrzej Gierowski.

During World War II, Konoczyński survived German imprisonment at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Released in February 1940, he returned to Kraków where he continued to teach history secretly, rebuking those who claimed that the circumstances of the war kept them from their studies.

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