Ukraine has been at the top of the headlines this past year, but despite a long tradition, networks of Ukrainian studies in the United States and Canada, the availability of good surveys, and a critical scholarship in English and other western European languages, few historians in North America (and Western Europe) with the exception of specialists are familiar with basic facts and developments of Ukrainian history. Long-term, intertwining histories of Ukraine and Russia and Ukraine’s former status as a Soviet Republic which have portrayed Ukrainian history through the lens of Russian and Soviet history, along with the birth of a liberal progressive narrative of European history that developed in North America and Western Europe after World War I, have relegated the history of the Ukraine to the margins of the European historical narrative. Whereas, beginning in the 1990s, other former Soviet Republics and Eastern and Central European countries began to reassess and reformulate their histories, the complicated course of Ukrainian independence and ongoing struggles with Russia have presented challenges to the writing a new synthesis of national history and, in turn, have obscured our understanding of Ukrainian history.

This panel will present papers on different aspects of Ukrainian history in the first half of the twentieth century by three Ukrainian historians who are visiting scholars in the United States and Canada, whom are here due to the ongoing war. The papers will highlight the Ukrainian experience during World War I and the Russian Revolution, the construction of a Soviet identity, and persecution in Stalinist Russia. The session is aimed at a broad audience and will help historians from outside the fields of Ukrainian and East European history begin to understand Ukrainian history and its place within the broader European mosaic. It will provide these visiting scholars a professional development opportunity to present in the large annual meeting of the AHA, attend sessions in all areas of history, and interact with historians outside of their fields of history, which they have not been able do before.

Note: Partial housing for these three scholars is being covered by a grant by the organization Scholars at Risk and full or partial air transportation by their North American host institutions. A request for funding from the AHA to cover registration fees, per diem, and a small transportation surplus is sought in a separate request.