Over 250 photographs from several museums and archives adorn a chronicle of Ukrainians in North America. Begins with a survey of the political and economic conditions in the homeland; describes the three different waves of immigration over the past century; and concludes with a comparison between settlers in Canada and the US. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Exploring a rich array of folk traditions that developed in the Ukrainian diaspora and in Ukraine during the twentieth century, Ukrainian Otherlands is an innovative exploration of modern ethnic identity and the deeply felt (but sometimes deeply different) understandings of ethnicity in homeland and diaspora.

A quixotic figure, Vasile Avramenko (1895-1981) used folk culture and modern media in a life-long crusade to promote Ukraine’s struggle for independence to North American audiences. From his base in New York City, he built a network of folk dance schools and produced musical spectacles to help Ukrainian immigrants sustain their identity. His feature-length Ukrainian language films made in the 1930s with Hollywood director Edgar G. Ulmer, the “king of ethnic and B movies,” were shown throughout North America. Orest T. Martynowych’s The Showman and the Ukrainian Cause is a fascinating portrait how culture can become a political tool in a diaspora community.

The Canadian Social History Series is devoted to in-depth studies of major themes in our history, exploring neglected areas in the day-to-day existence of Canadians. The emphasis of this innovative series is on increasing the general appreciation of our past and opening up new areas of study for students and scholars. The editor of the series is Gregory S. Kealey, Provost, Professor of History and Vice-President (Research), University of New Brunswick. A leading historian of the Canadian working class, Dr Kealey was the founding editor of Labour/Le Travail. Ukrainian immigrants to Canada have often been portrayed in history as sturdy pioneer farmers cultivating the virgin land of the Canadian west. The essays in this collection challenge this stereotype by examining the varied experiences of Ukrainian Canadians in their day-to-day roles as writers, intellectuals, national organizers, working-class wage earners, and inhabitants of cities and towns. Throughout, the contributors remain dedicated to promoting the study of ethnic, hyphenated histories as major currents in mainstream Canadian history. Topics explored include Ukrainian-Canadian radicalism, the consequences of the Cold War for Ukrainians both at home and abroad, the creation and maintenance of ethnic memories, and community discord embodied by pro-Nazis, Communists, and criminals. Re-Imagining Ukrainian Canadians uses new sources and non-traditional methods of analysis to answer unstudied and often controversial questions within the field. Collectively, the essays challenge the older, essentialist definition of what it means to be Ukrainian Canadian. Rhonda L. Hinther is the Western Canadian History curator at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Jim Mochoruk is a professor in the Department of History at the University of North Dakota.

The history of Ukrainian immigration, settlement, and community-building in Canada.

This book is the first comprehensive survey of Ukrainian historical writing in North America during the Cold War. The author describes the development of Ukrainian historical studies in Canada and the United States as an open, sometimes difficult dialogue between the Ukrainian ethnic and academic communities on the one hand and between Ukrainian scholars and Western academic mainstream on the other. He focuses on the institutional and the intellectual issues including various interpretations of major topics related to the Ukrainian national grand narrative, considering them in the evolving academic and political contexts of Slavic, East European, and Soviet studies.

The first English-language biography of Dmytro Dontsov, the “spiritual father” of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, this book contextualizes Dontsov’s works, activities, and identity formation diachronically, reconstructing the cultural, political, urban, and intellectual milieus within which he developed and disseminated his worldview.