Nationalizing a Borderland

Alexander Victor Prusin is a professor of history at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and the author of The “Land Between”: Conflict in the East European Borderlands 1870-1992.

“While a regional study, [Nationalizing a Borderland] is all the more important for locating the intersection between war, ethnicity, imperial collapse—and one should add collective psychic disturbance—in the creation of nation-states and the degree to which such a combination may have entirely fatal consequences for ethno-religious communities most marginal to the struggle.”—Nations and Nationalism“Prusin has produced a well-researched monograph that should be consulted by students of the Great War, twentieth-century ethnic cleansing, and Christian-Jewish relations in Eastern Europe.”—American Historical Review "The author explores the 'dynamics of persecution' of Galician Jewry (a very sizeable community) from the side of the Russian Empire and the emergent independent Polish state. He demonstrates that there was an interesting symmetry between their attitudes, both coming to see the Jews as a universal and lethal threat to their national interests."—John Klier, author of Imperial Russia's Jewish Question, 1855-1881"Nationalizing a Borderland is a fascinating, if harrowing case study. Making intensive use of primary and secondary sources, including the national archives of Poland and Ukraine, Prusin focuses his attention on a particular place and time – Galicia between 1914 and 1920 – in order to explore how empires fall and nation-states arise from their ashes. — Jildy Sauce