Lecture 1: What is national history and the history of Ukraine?

Professor Paul Robert Magocsi — Ukraine: A History Course.

The Ukrainian Jewish Encounter is pleased to present a lecture series by Paul Robert Magocsi titled Ukraine: A History Course. Magocsi recorded 45 lectures in 2023 at the University of Toronto, where he holds the professorial Chair of Ukrainian Studies and is a history and political science professor. He is also a Board Member of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter.

Magocsi, one of the world’s leading experts on Ukraine, explores this fascinating country in all its complexity, from its history, culture, geography, politics, and multi-ethnic composition. The lectures are an important counterweight to Russian propaganda and explain Ukraine’s importance to global security today.

Time stamps are available for each lecture. Auto-translate is available in Ukrainian, major European, Asian, African, and Middle Eastern languages, including Hebrew and Yiddish.

Recordings of the lecture series were made possible with the support of the Temerty Foundation.

All the lectures are available on YouTube here.

3:25 List of lectures
6:20 Lecture #1
7:10 National history. History of Ukraine
8:11 Definition. Nation has two meanings
11:45 Approximately 6,500 languages/individual cultures, but only about 200 states
14:10 Territory (state/country). Nation/nation-state. People (inhabitants/ethnolinguistic group). Nationality/people
18:40 Application of national history. Justify existence
19:52 There is nothing intrinsically wrong with applied history, national or otherwise. Every psyche needs a degree of mythology to sustain itself
23:32 Enlightenment thinkers
26:20 Bernard Lewis, Islamic scholar, The Foundation Myth
28:27 Mihály Horváth
30:51 H. G. Wells, Arnold J. Toynbee

For further information, you may wish to consult A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (University of Toronto Press, 2010)

Robert Paul Magocsi
Chair of Ukrainian Studies University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada, September 2023.