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Throughout the nineteenth century the province of Galicia was noted for political conflicts and the cultural vibrancy of its three major national groups: Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews. This volume brings together for the first time eleven essays on various aspects of the last seventy-five years of Austrian Galicia's existence.
The Cossack revolution of 1648 redrew the map of Eastern Europe and established a new social and political order that endured until the early nineteenth century, with the full integration of Ukraine into imperial states. It was an era when Ukrainian Cossack statehood was established, when a country called Ukraine appeared for the first time on European maps, and new, diverse identities emerged. Eighteenth-Century Ukraine provides an innovative reassessment of this crucial period in Ukrainian history and reflects new developments in the study of eighteenth-century Ukrainian history. Written by a team of primarily Ukrainian historians, the volume covers a wide range of topics: social history, demographics, history of medicine, religious culture, education, symbolic geography, the transformation of collective identities, and political and historical thought. Special attention is paid to Ukrainian-Russian relations in the context of eighteenth-century Russian imperial unification. Eighteenth-Century Ukraine is the most comprehensive guide to new visions of early-modern Ukrainian history.
The collapse of Polish rule in the Ukraine in the mid-seventeenth century changed the course of East European history. The great Cossack revolt of 1648 exposed the weaknesses of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After the emergence of a Ukrainian polity, a struggle for dominance ensued, paving the way for the Russian annexation of the Ukraine. Frank Sysyn examines the failure of Polish policy through the career of Adam Kysil. A leader of the Ukrainian nobility and an official of the Polish government, Kysil was ideally suited to serve as the mediator between the rebels and the government. His failure signaled the already irreconcilable differences that divided them. Based on extensive archival research in Poland and the USSR, Sysyn's study is a contribution not only to scholarship on Eastern Europe, but also to discussions on the preconditions and nature of early modern revolts and on the change of political and social elites.
In the middle of the seventeenth century, Bohdan Khmelnytsky was the legendary Cossack general who organized a rebellion that liberated the Eastern Ukraine from Polish rule. Consequently, he has been memorialized in the Ukraine as a God-given nation builder, cut in the model of George Washington. But in this campaign, the massacre of thousands of Jews perceived as Polish intermediaries was the collateral damage, and in order to secure the tentative independence, Khmelnytsky signed a treaty with Moscow, ultimately ceding the territory to the Russian tsar. So, was he a liberator or a villain? This volume examines drastically different narratives, from Ukrainian, Jewish, Russian, and Polish literature, that have sought to animate, deify, and vilify the seventeenth-century Cossack. Khmelnytsky's legacy, either as nation builder or as antagonist, has inhibited inter-ethnic and political rapprochement at key moments throughout history and, as we see in recent conflicts, continues to affect Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, and Russian national identity.
Examining commonalities and specificities of massive famines produced by the two largest Communist states.
How did state power impinge on the religion of the ordinary person? This perennial issue has been sharpened as historians uncover the process of 'confessionalization' or 'acculturation', by which officials of state and church collaborated in ambitious programs of Protestant or Catholic reform, intended to change the religious consciousness and the behaviour of ordinary men and women. In the belief that specialists in one area of the globe can learn from the questions posed by colleagues working in the same period in other regions, this volume sets the topic in a wider framework. Thirteen essays, grouped in themes affording parallel views of England and Europe, Tsarist Russia, and Ming China, show a spectrum of possibilities for what early modern governments tried to achieve by regulating religious life, and for how religious communities evolved in new directions, either in keeping with or in spite of official injunctions.
The opportunities opened up by the Gorbachev reforms have shown that religion is one of the most significant dynamic forces in Soviet society. Yet few scholars have attempted to relate the study of churches and religious movements in recent centuries to the politics and culture of the Soviet Union. To remedy this deficiency, leading western experts on Christianity in the Eastern Slav lands gathered at a conference in London on the occasion of the millennium of the baptism of Rus'. Their papers present unexpected and fascinating insights into an under-rated but crucial aspect of the life of the Soviet peoples.
They touch on religious, philosophical, aesthetic, ethical, sociological, historical, and political ideas, and thereby illuminate significant attitudes, values, ideological commitments, and systems of thought that have crystallized at central moments in the development of Ukraine.