Early Modern Polish Commanders and the Use of Combined Arms​

The Institute of World Politics

This event is part of the 10th Annual Kościuszko Chair Spring Symposium in honor of Lady Blanka Rosenstiel sponsored by the Kościuszko Chair of Polish Studies and the Center for Intermarium Studies. About the lecture: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s small armies, based around a seemingly outmoded form of heavy cavalry, Winged Hussars, were able to hold their own against numerically superior foes, including those using tactics and weapons designed specifically to defeat such cavalry for more than two hundred years. This lecture discusses how armies of the Commonwealth and their commanders successfully used a combination of troops and tactics to “shape the battlefield” and overcome superior enemy forces time and again.​ About the speaker: Dr. John Radzilowski has taught history, art history, and geography at University of Alaska Southeast on the Ketchikan campus since 2007. Prior to moving to Alaska, he taught history courses at the University of St. Thomas, Hamline University, and Anoka-Ramsey College in Minnesota. Dr. Radzilowski also served as assistant project director at Center for Nations in Transition, at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota where he helped design and administer USAID and State Department-sponsored training programs for business, economics, and political science faculty and NGO leaders in Ukraine and east central Europe. Dr. Radzilowski’s research and teaching interests are wide-ranging and diverse: immigration and ethnicity, military history, war and genocide, the impact of technology on the history and geography of the Great Plains and Midwest, local and regional studies, and the history of Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and central and eastern Europe.