About Us
What is Lives Uncharted?
Lives Uncharted chronicles the experiences of Polish migrant women who arrived in the United States before 1914. Our goal is to deepen our knowledge of how the Polish immigrant women who came to the United States before 1914 lived every day.
Although historians have been piecing together the stories of women immigrants from the pre-1914 migration wave for decades, we still know surprisingly little about them. Why? Above all, it is not easy to find them in traditional archives. Most of them lived private lives that they rarely documented. Many could not read and write or did not consider their stories worth sharing. And it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that mainstream historians got interested in the lives of ordinary people, including working class immigrants. So before we recognized the importance of ordinary immigrant women in history (or women in general, for that matter), precious historical documents were ignored, lost, or even discarded.
If you have a family story, or know a Polish migrant woman’s story, or have relevant historical documents, help us write a communal history of lives uncharted. We want to record a history of women who are absent from or hidden in the traditional archives.
People behind Lives Uncharted
Marta Cieślak serves as editor, contributor, and administrator of Lives Uncharted. She is a historian who explores connections between Eastern Europe and the United States.
Marta grew up in a small town Łęczyca [pronounced wenchitza] in central Poland. She graduated from the University of Warsaw and got her doctoral degree from the University at Buffalo. Marta teaches history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and has also worked as a public historian. Her essay “Crossing the Boundaries of Modernity: The Transatlantic Journey of Polish Peasants to the United States” (Polish American Studies, Vol. 73, No. 2, Fall 2016) received the 2017 Swastek Prize, awarded by the editorial board of Polish American Studies for the best article published in a given year.
Marta’s favorite activities include hiking with her dog Beatrice and cooking, or at least imagining she will make an elaborate meal following a recipe that she has found online. She also loves experimenting with fermented foods (sauerkraut, beet kvas, or sour pickles).
Anna Müller serves as editor and contributor of Lives Uncharted. She is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, where she teaches the history of modern Poland. She is particularly interested in women’s and gender history.
Anna’s hometown and her favorite place in the world is Gdańsk (northern Poland). She graduated from the University of Gdańsk and worked in Gdańsk at the Museum of the Second World War, where she was a curator of the concentration camps, the Holocaust, and eugenics sections. Anna earned her doctoral degree from Indiana University. Her book If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland (Oxford University Press, 2018) received the Oskar Halecki Polish History Award from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.
Anna is a committed yoga practitioner and a vegetarian food enthusiast. She once aspired to become a photographer. History won that battle but she still loves photography.
Marta and Anna met through their work for the Polish American Historical Association. They quickly became friends and have since collaborated on several projects. Among them was a special issue of Polish American Studies on gender and sexuality (vol. 78, no. 1, Spring 2021) that they guest edited. In it, they published an article titled “‘Husbands Who Do Not Beat,’ or on Gender and Sexuality in Polish American Studies” that also inspired Lives Uncharted. Marta and Anna are currently working on an edited volume that will examine the meanings of gender and nation in East Central Europe. When they do not talk about work, they talk about food, skincare, and second-hand clothing.
Our story
Lives Uncharted was inspired by conversations with community members that have shared their family stories with us. Nearly every time we have given a talk about the experience of Polish immigrant women in the United States, audience members reached out to us with remarkable stories, anecdotes, and questions. We realized that so many community members had stories about Polish immigrant women that they wanted to preserve and share but no outlet to do it. As a result, Lives Uncharted was born.
How to use Lives Uncharted?
Lives Uncharted is a non-profit project created for public history, educational, and research purposes. All the content published on Lives Uncharted, including stories, personal documents, photographs, memories, and personal experiences, remain the property of the contributor. Please do not reproduce without the owner’s permission.
All the content published on Lives Uncharted, including stories, personal documents, photographs, memories, and personal experiences, can be used by educators, researchers, and all the other members of the public only if they credit the original source and use the content for non-commercial purposes.