The century that preceded the First World War saw one of the greatest voluntary movements of population in world history. Quite literally, millions of European citizens, some city people, but mostly townsfolk and villagers, deserted their homelands and boarded trains and then oceangoing ships for the New World. They headed for both North America and South America. The movement began in western and northern Europe, but, by the 1850s, had encompassed Germany and central Europe, and, by the end of the century, engulfed southern and eastern Europe. During the first years of the twentieth century, Italy, the lands of the...

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw one of the greatest voluntary movements of population in world history. This movement began modestly with the migration of labour from village to city and from certain countries in Europe to certain others, but, with time, it took on greater proportions with many millions of Europeans, some city people, but mostly country folk and villagers, leaving their homelands and boarding trains (which were a relatively new phenomenon) and then oceangoing ships (ever bigger and faster) for the New World. The movement began early in the nineteenth century in western and northern Europe but,...

After the poet Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko (1856–1916) is perhaps the best-known Ukrainian literary figure of modern times. During his lifetime, he was a widely acclaimed poet, writer, and scholar, and a political and social activist of considerable importance. By the time of his death, he was already a national hero and was especially beloved in western Ukraine, or “Eastern Galicia,” as the major Ukrainian region of the Austrian Empire was then called. Both in Soviet Ukraine and among Ukrainians living abroad, his cult long remained undiminished and, during the Cold War, his works were often reprinted by the...

The general outlines of the great eastern European migration to the Americas, which began in the 1880s and grew in intensity until the outbreak of the First World War, have long been known. During this period, literally millions of central and eastern European country folk left their villages and boarded trains for the bustling port cities on the western coasts of the European continent. From Hamburg, Bremen, Antwerp, and Liverpool, they crossed the ocean on one of the large German or English steamships that plied the Atlantic and took them to the various ports of North and South America. Thereafter,...

Dmytro Ivanovych Doroshenko (1882–1951) was undoubtedly the most important and most prolific Ukrainian émigré historian of the twentieth century. Writing in the 1920s, 1930s, and the 1940s, at a time when the term “Ukraine” was still relatively new to the Western public and when historical scholarship was very much censored and restricted in the USSR, he popularized the very idea that Ukraine had an identity and independent history of its own. He also espoused a conservative but nonetheless progressive philosophy in which a central theme was care for the well-being and enlightenment of the simple Ukrainian country folk. This...

The establishment of Communist dictatorships on the territory of the old Russian Empire after 1917, and throughout eastern Europe after 1944–5, impelled a significant number of scholars into exile in the West. In western Europe and North America, these scholars, and their colleagues who were natives of the Western democracies, began to produce scholarly books on the history, literature, and politics of eastern Europe. Although this process had begun in earnest in central and western Europe in the 1920s and the 1930s, it reached its apogee in North America during the last years of the Cold War, when the...

George W. Simpson (1893–1969) was born and raised in Chatsworth and Owen Sound, Ontario, but is best known as a distinguished Prairie Canadian, a long-time chairman of the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan (1940 to 1957), and first provincial archivist of the Province of Saskatchewan. He was also a pioneer in the field of Slavic Studies and was a charter member of the Canadian Association of Slavists, which was formed shortly after the end of the Second World War.¹

By the final years of the earlier conflict of 1914 to 1918, Simpson was already living in...

During the century and a quarter that have passed since the first Ukrainian settlers arrived in western Canada and inaugurated the formation of what was for a time one of Canada’s largest and most high-profile ethnic groups, the sense of history among this cultural minority and the educational institutions that help mould this sense of history have undergone a distinct evolution. This evolution is unique to Canada, and although it has a few characteristics in common with other centres of the Ukrainian emigration, such as that in the United States, it stands in clear contrast to the complex and often...

The “Long Cold War” between the Soviet Union and the democratic West, which began with the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 and ended with the collapse of the USSR in 1991, was fought on many levels: diplomatic, scientific, technological, economic, journalistic, literary, and scholarly. It is with the last of these, the scholarly level, that we are concerned here.

By scholarship (naukain Ukrainian) is usually meant the pursuit of knowledge by means of generally recognized academic disciplines such as history, sociology, language and literature, or political science, within clearly established institutions of higher learning. In central and eastern...

Lubomyr Wynar (b. 1932) has been a controversial and influential figure within the circles of Ukrainian émigré scholarship since his first appearance on the scene in the late 1950s. Of Ukrainian “Displaced Person” or “DP” background – that is, as a youthful member of that political emigration of Ukrainians who were “displaced” and fled the westward march of the Red Army towards the end of the Second World War – he is an extremely prolific author and well known as an eminent professor of library science at Kent State University in Ohio and a professor of history at the Ukrainian Free University...

Gabrielle Roy (1909–1983) was one of the most outstanding and beloved French Canadian writers of the twentieth century. Her early work as a journalist displayed an eye for the relevant and important, and a sensitivity for her subjects that was immediately noticed by her readers; her path-breaking novels marked a turn in French Canadian literature from the traditional, rural, and romantic to the modern, urban, and realistic; and her moving autobiography, written towards the end of her life and published posthumously, revealed a psychological depth and honesty to a younger generation that already knew her as a Canadian and...

Jaroslav B. Rudnyckyj (1910–1995) was a leading Ukrainian émigré scholar during the period of the Long Cold War, which began with the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 and ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. A philologist and linguist by training, he made significant contributions to Ukrainian scholarship in many areas, including Ukrainian dialectology, lexicography, etymology, onomastics, folklore studies, and library science and bibliography. Although he is mainly known in scholarship for his important but unfinished two-volumeEtymological Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language, his Ukrainian-German dictionary, and his extensive study of the term and name...

I have always been interested in history and, even during my first years in graduate school at the University of Manitoba, I paid some attention to my eastern European background, doing several essays on Russian subjects for a general course on nineteenth-century Europe under Professor Michael Kinnear at the Fort Garry campus of the university. But it was only after the completion of my MA thesis on the medieval Crusades to the Holy Land, which I wrote under the wise supervision of L. A. Desmond, a conservative Catholic of Irish Canadian background, that I firmly decided to turn to the...

The Ukrainian Canadians are one of Canada’s major ethnic groups. According to the national census of 2006, Canadians of Ukrainian origin number some 1.2 million and rank tenth on the list of Canadian ethnicities, ninth if those who count themselves only “Canadian” are omitted; throughout most of the twentieth century, however, they were even more prominent, generally ranking fourth after the British groups, the French, and the Germans. Thus, from almost the onset of their settlement in Canada, which had identifiable roots by 1891 and began in earnest in 1896, they attracted the attention of various Canadian writers, journalists, and...

Some years ago, I attended an unusual conference at the University of Toronto. It was unusual because it dealt in a comparative way with the Ukrainian experience in Canada and the United States. Although, in casual conversations, members of the two Ukrainian communities often make comparisons between the United States and Canada, this is seldom done in the context of a formal academic conference. “Cross-Stitching Cultural Borders,” as this particular conference was titled, was held 29–31 October 1998 and drew numerous visitors from Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa, and various places in the United States, mainly in New England and the...