The study analyses the changes in the way the reigns of the first two historical rulers of Poland - Mieszko I and Bolesław Chrobry - were presented in Polish history textbooks of the 19th and 20th centuries. The analysis takes into account the influence of changing political conditions and the results of historical research on the changes in the content of textbooks over time. The existence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of different educational opportunities and a different strategy of activity of the institutional censorship of the partitioning states. The liquidation of censorship after the First World War. Jędrzejowicz's educational reform from the end of the Second Rzeczpospolita. The changes in result of the communists' full control of the educational system and the publishing market from 1948 onwards and the impact of the war experience. The effect of the abolition of institutional censorship and the pluralization of the publishing market after 1990.