Search results for ""author thomas m. prymak""

For decades, Ukrainian contacts with the outside world were minimal, impeded by politics, ideology, and geography. But prior to the Soviet period the country enjoyed diverse exchanges with, on the one hand, its Islamic neighbours, the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire, and, on the other, its central and western European neighbours, especially Poland and France.Thomas Prymak addresses geographical knowledge, international travel, political conflicts, historical relations with religiously diverse neighbours, artistic developments, and literary and language contacts to smash old stereotypes about Ukrainian isolation and tell a vivid and original story. The book treats a wide range of subjects, including Ukrainian travellers in the Middle East, from pilgrims to the Holy Land to political exiles in Turkey and Iran; Tatar slave raiding in Ukraine; the poetry of Taras Shevchenko and the Russian war against Imam Shamil in the High Caucasus; Ukrainian themes and the French writers Honoré de Balzac and Prosper Mérimée; Rembrandt's mysterious painting today titled The Polish Rider; and Ilya Repin's legendary painting of the Zaporozhian Cossacks writing their satirical letter mocking the Turkish sultan.Drawing together political and cultural history, languages and etymology, and folklore and art history, Ukraine, the Middle East, and the West is an original interdisciplinary study that reintroduces Ukraine's long-overlooked connections beyond Eastern Europe.

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Since the 1970s and 1980s, the study of immigration and ethnicity has grown to become an essential aspect of North American history. In Gathering a Heritage, Thomas M. Prymak uses the essays and articles he has written over the past thirty years as a historian of Ukrainian and Ukrainian Canadian history to reflect on the evolution of ethnic studies in Canada and the United States. The essays included in this book explore the history of Ukrainian and Slavonic immigration to North America and the literature through which these communities and their historians have sought to recapture their past. Each previously published essay is revised and expanded and several more appear here for the first time - including the fascinating story of French Canadian writer Gabrielle Roy's connections with Ukrainian Canadians and her tumultuous affair with a Ukrainian Canadian nationalist in pre-war London.

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