Andrii Portnov, "Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City" (Academic Studies Press, 2022)

Summary

Andrii Portnov's Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City (Academic Studies Press, 2022) is the first English-language synthesis of the history of Dnipro (until 2016 Dnipropetrovsk, until 1926 Katerynoslav) locates the city in a broader regional, national, and transnational context and explores the interaction between global processes and everyday routines of urban life. The history of a place (throughout its history called ‘new Athens’, ‘Ukrainian Manchester’, ‘the Brezhnev`s capital’ and ‘the heart of Ukraine’) is seen through the prism of key threads in the modern history of Europe: the imperial colonization and industrialization, the war and the revolution in the borderlands, the everyday life and mythology of a Soviet closed city, and the transformations of post-Soviet Ukraine. Designed as a critical entangled history of the multicultural space, the book looks for a new analytical language to overcome the traps of both national and imperial history-writing.

John Vsetecka is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Michigan State University where he is finishing a dissertation that examines the aftermath of the 1932-33 famine in Soviet Ukraine (Holodomor).

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John Vsetecka

John Vsetecka is the Jaroslaw and Nadia Mihaychuk Postdoctoral Fellow in Ukrainian Studies at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. He writes about issues concerning famine, transitional justice, and the legacies of mass violence in Ukraine. When he's not teaching or writing, you can find John hiking in his beloved Rocky Mountains. Please visit his website to learn more: https://www.jvsetecka.com
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