Zenon E. Kohut – författare

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.

Both modern Ukrainian nationhood and the historical preconditions of the country’s contemporary conflict with Russia are rooted in a complex period of development in Cossack Ukraine. The Making of Cossack Ukraine traces the evolution of early modern Ukrainian political thought and culture from their sixteenth-century origins to 1714.Early modern Ukraine was home to a multitude of interrelated political cultures, including those of the Ruthenian nobility, the Kyivan clergy, and the Cossacks. Zenon Kohut shows how constant interplay between these cultures contributed to the development of political, territorial, religious, ethnic, and national collective visions that reflected early modern concepts of nation, state, and identity. Two persistent narratives – the idea of Ukrainian autonomy and perpetual rights, and the idea of a continuous “Russian” tsardom stemming from medieval times – formed the foundation for not only Ukrainian state and nation building but also Russia’s modern identity and sense of nationhood, creating the ideological underpinning for Russian imperialism.Based in a classical analysis of ethnic, religious, and political ideas developed by early modern Ukrainian intellectuals, The Making of Cossack Ukraine brings to light the origins of present-day Ukrainian political thought.

Although English-language histories of Ukraine have been published since the 1930s, there has been no one-volume compendium of articles covering Ukrainian history from ancient times to the present, emphasizing the modern period. The A to Z of Ukraine introduces Ukraine to the reader through 700 entries on population, geography, economy, politics, and culture; descriptions of institutions, cultural monuments, political parties, battles and wars; and biographical sketches of key individuals in politics, the arts and sciences, the church, and the military. The work includes nine maps and a comprehensive chronology of Ukrainian history. It also features the most extensive and up-to-date bibliography of English-language writings on Ukraine currently in print. Scholars, students, and other readers interested in Ukraine's history will find this comprehensive volume a most useful resource.

Although present-day Ukraine has only been in existence for something over two decades, its recorded history reaches much further back for more than a thousand years to Kyivan Rus’. Over that time, it has usually been under control of invaders like the Turks and Tatars, or neighbors like Russia and Poland, and indeed it was part of the Soviet Union until it gained its independence in 1991. Today it is drawn between its huge neighbor to the east and the European Union, and is still struggling to choose its own path… although it remains uncertain of which way to turn. Nonetheless, as one of the largest European states, with considerable economic potential, it is not a place that can be readily overlooked.The problem is, or at least was, where to find information on this huge modern Ukraine, and since 2005 the answer has been the Historical Dictionary of Ukraine in its first edition, and now even more so with this second edition. It now boasts a dictionary section of about 725 entries, these covering the thousand years of history but particularly the recent past, and focusing on significant persons, places and events, political parties and institutions as well as more broadly international relations, the economy, society and culture. The chronology permits readers to follow this history and the introduction is there to make sense of it. It also features the most extensive and up-to-date bibliography of English-language writing on Ukraine.