Lietuvos istorijos metraštis /The Yearbook of Lithuanian History

The article deals with our research on the Ruthenian documents of Alexander Jagiellon and Sigismund the Old, the grand dukes of Lithuania, which cover the whole period of the reign of these rulers (1492–1544) and are kept in Vilnius. In the course of empirical research, we registered 142 such documents; the main data about them are represented in the annex to the article. Meanwhile, in the main part of the article we try to identify the scribes who were responsible for the preparation of the documents, to identify the documents that were written by the scribes who signed them, and to discuss the palaeographic features of all the documents.

Based on genealogical data, the article investigates the marriage policy of the Gorski family (Nałęcz coat of arms) from its establishment in Samogitia in the second half of the sixteenth century to its rise in the first half of the eighteenth century. First, a general portrait of the

The article deals with the activities of the Vilnius Magistrate’s Court between 1795 and 1813. It discusses the personal composition of the court, the working environment of the judges, and judicial and administrative practices that are relevant and offer an opportunity to gain a better understanding of the economic, financial, social, and familial problems of the urban residents and their relations with other estates and strata of the urban population.

The article aims to explains why, among all the non-dominant ethnic groups, the imperial authorities in the so-called Western region allowed the existence of only the Lithuanian educational society ‘Saulė’ [The Sun]. The argument is made that this was due to the recognition of Kaunas governorate as a Lithuanian ‘national territory’ on the Russian mental map, the lack of assimilation potential (from the point of view of the officials), the admission that the Lithuanians were ethnically-culturally detached from the ethnic Russians, as well as the efforts of the governor of Kaunas, Piotr Verevkin, to prevent the closure of this society. Part of the article is devoted to a discussion of Verevkin’s motives.

The paper examines the impact of total land reclamation on the Soviet modernisation of agriculture and the countryside, analyses the political, economic, and social aspects of the Soviet reconstruction of the homestead settlement system, and attempts to assess the economic

The article discusses the evolution of research of the second half of the twentieth century to the twenty-first century in Western Europe and the USA into the material culture of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. It highlights the most characteristic stages in the development of the historiography on this topic and the most significant discussions. Attention is also paid to the research into material culture in Lithuania, because so far this topic has not received much attention from historians, although archaeologists and museologists have been working successfully in