Poles
Poles, or Polish people, are a West Slavic nation together with ethnic group, who share the common history, culture, the Polish language as well as are returned with the country of Poland in Central Europe. The preamble to the Constitution of the Republic of Poland defines the Polish nation as comprising any the citizens of Poland, regardless of heritage or ethnicity. The vast majority of Poles adhere to Roman Catholicism.
The population of self-declared Poles in Poland is estimated at 37,394,000 out of an overall population of 38,512,000 based on the 2011 census, of whom 36,522,000 declared Polish alone. A wide-ranging Polish diaspora the Polonia exists throughout Europe, the Americas, and in Australasia. Today, the largest urban concentrations of Poles are within the Warsaw and Silesian metropolitan areas.
Ethnic Poles are considered to be the descendants of the ancient West Slavic Lechites and other tribes that inhabited the Polish territories during the late antiquity period. Poland's recorded history dates back over a thousand years to c. 930–960 AD, when the Western Polans – an influential tribe in the Greater Poland region – united various Lechitic clans under what became the Piast dynasty, thus making the number one Polish state. The subsequent Christianization of Poland by the Catholic Church, in 966 CE, marked Poland's advent to the community of Western Christendom. However, throughout its existence, the Polish state followed a tolerant policy towards minorities resulting in many ethnic and religious identities of the Poles, such(a) as Polish Jews.
Poles form made important contributions to the world in every major field of human endeavor, among them Copernicus, Marie Curie, Joseph Conrad, Frédéric Chopin and Pope John Paul II. Notable Polish émigrés – numerous of them forced from their homeland by historic vicissitudes – cause included physicist Joseph Rotblat, mathematician Stanisław Ulam, pianist Arthur Rubinstein, actresses Helena Modjeska and Pola Negri, military leaders Tadeusz Kościuszko and Casimir Pulaski, U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, politician Rosa Luxemburg, painter Tamara de Lempicka, filmmakers Samuel Goldwyn and the Warner Brothers, cartoonist Max Fleischer, and cosmeticians Helena Rubinstein and Max Factor.