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»Quantifizierung der Sterblichkeit durch die Spanische Grippe in den Städten der Zweiten Polnischen Republik. Ein Blick auf die Kommunalstatistik«. Due to war turmoil, border lability, and administrative chaos accompanying the recreation of an independent Polish state, national or even regional demographic statistics that could shed some light on the spread and intensity of the influenza pandemic in Polish territory are absent. Hence, I try to scrutinize the timing and extent of Spanish flu mortality through the local statistics gathered by the municipal statistical offices (mainly Warsaw, Lviv, Krakow, and Łódź). The gathered data is modelled using Serfling Regression to estimate excess mortality and identify waves and recurrences of the flu. These results are then juxtaposed with the outcomes of similar procedures done for other countries to address the question of direction and spread of the Spanish flu across Central and Eastern Europe. The study shows a weaker impact of the Spanish flu in Polish cities than in Western and most notably Southern Europe. It also confirms that the spread of the pandemics in Poland was not linear, as it depended on the size, importance, and connectivity of the city rather than on the mere geographic location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Students' taller stature is associated with higher grades for school subjects. • Height premium persists when differences in social status are taken into account. • Height premium visible at the school level is not consistent between different teachers of the same subjects. • Body Mass Index does not show significant association with school grades. This study finds that a positive association between stature and academic performance measured by the grades for various subjects, the height-school premium, was present in a historical sample of 147 school boys attending a gymnasium (public secondary school) in Cracow, Poland, between the wars. This effect persists when controlling for a set of demographic and socio-economic variables, though the strength of the relationship is modest (0.018 higher average grade for Polish, 0.014 for mathematics, 0.016 for art, and 0.013 for the combined subjects with each centimetre of height). The differences found between the magnitude and significance of the height-premium in different school subjects could be a marker of unequal association between stature, and cognitive, social, and physical skills, suggesting at least a partial role of cognitive ability in this relationship. However, the effect visible at the school level is not consistent between different teachers of the same subjects, hence the mechanism behind the height-school premium in the analysed population to a large extent relied on the subjective judgment of the teachers, who could reward social skills but also discriminate against shorter students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses upon the Second Republic of Poland and its 1921-1931 fertility rate as based on data found within the indices of the Princeton University (Princeton, New Jersey) European Fertility Project (EFP), a study which provided data on the numbers of births and population numbers in a given period (and also correlated that data of actual fertility in a given society against a theoretical fertility maximum). Using the numbers found in the EFP data for 1931, the author notes that there was evidence of a conscious reduction in fertility among Poland's married population. This, he posits, was an indication that limiting the number of offspring was viewed not only as something beneficial and desirable for society and the family, but also that that particular population group both perceived this and had the capacity to act to attain such a goal.