Ruthenia is an exonym, originally used in Medieval Latin, as one of several terms for Kievan Rus'. It is also used to refer to the East Slavic and Eastern Orthodox regions of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland, and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, corresponding to the territories of modern Belarus, Ukraine, and some of western Russia. Historically, the term was used to refer to all the territories of the East Slavs.
Prehistoric Ukraine, as a part of the Pontic steppe in Eastern Europe, played an important role in Eurasian cultural events, including the spread of the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages, Indo-European migrations, and the domestication of the horse.
Little Russia, also known in English as Malorussia, Little Rus', Rus' Minor, and the French equivalent Petite Russie, is a geographical and historical term used to describe Ukraine. Since 1334, Yuri II Boleslav, the ruler of the Ruthenian Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia, signed his decrees Natus dux totius Russiæ minoris, but the expression μικρὰ Ρωσσία is found as early as 1292, in the Byzantine writer Codinus. The distinction between "Great" and "Little" Rus' probably originated among Byzantine, Greek-speaking clerics who wanted to separate the two Ruthenian ecclesiastical metropolises of Halych and Moscow.
The Pereiaslav Agreement or Pereyaslav Agreement was an official meeting that convened for a ceremonial pledge of allegiance by Cossacks to the Russian tsar, then Alexis, in the town of Pereiaslav in central Ukraine, in January 1654. The ceremony took place concurrently with ongoing negotiations that started on the initiative of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky to address the issue of the Cossack Hetmanate with the ongoing Khmelnytsky Uprising against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and which concluded the Treaty of Pereiaslav. The treaty itself was finalized in Moscow in April 1654.
Left-bank Ukraine is a historic name of the part of Ukraine on the left (east) bank of the Dnieper River, comprising the modern-day oblasts of Chernihiv, Poltava and Sumy as well as the eastern parts of Kyiv and Cherkasy.
The history of Kyiv (Kiev), officially begins when it was founded in 482, but the city may date back at least 2,000 years. Archaeologists have dated the oldest known settlement in the area to 25,000 BC. Initially a 6th-century Slavic settlement, it gradually acquired eminence as the center of East Slavic civilization. Kyiv's Golden Age as the capital of medieval Kievan Rus' came from 879 to 1240.
Count Vasily Vasilievich Kapnist, was a Russian poet, playwright and nobleman who was known as an active critic of serfdom in Russia and as a proponent of restoration of the Zaporozhian host in the region of southern Ukraine.
Oleksander Petrovych Ohloblyn was a Ukrainian politician and historian who served as mayor of Kyiv while it was under the occupation of Nazi Germany in 1941. He was one of the most important Ukrainian émigré historians of the Cold War era.
The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) is a research institute affiliated with Harvard University devoted to Ukrainian studies, including the history, culture, language, literature, and politics of Ukraine. Other areas of study include sociology, archaeology, art, economics, and anthropology.
The Wild Fields is a historical term used in the Polish–Lithuanian documents of the 16th to 18th centuries to refer to the Pontic steppe in the territory of present-day Eastern and Southern Ukraine and Western Russia, north of the Black Sea and Azov Sea. It was the traditional name for the Black Sea steppes in the 16th and 17th centuries. In a narrow sense, it is the historical name for the demarcated and sparsely populated Black Sea steppes between the middle and lower reaches of the Dniester in the west, the lower reaches of the Don and the Siverskyi Donets in the east, from the left tributary of the Dnipro — Samara, and the upper reaches of the Southern Bug — Syniukha and Ingul in the north, to the Black and Azov Seas and Crimea in the south.
Ukrainian nationalism is the promotion of the unity of Ukrainians as a people and the promotion of the identity of Ukraine as a nation state. The origins of modern Ukrainian nationalism emerge during the 17th century Cossack uprising against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Ukrainian nationalism draws upon a single national identity of culture, ethnicity, geographic location, language, politics, religion, traditions and belief in a shared singular history that dates back to the 9th century.
Oleksiy Semenovych Onyschenko is a philosopher and culture theorist, Honoured Worker of Science and Technology of Ukraine, Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (1997), Recipient of the State Prize of Ukraine in Science and Technology (2008), Professor and Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor Honoris Causa, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. He is the Head of the Division of History, Philosophy and Law of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and the General Director of V.I. Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine.
The Ruthenian nobility originated in the territories of Kievan Rus' and Galicia–Volhynia, which were incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and later the Russian and Austrian Empires. The Ruthenian nobility became increasingly polonized and later russified, while retaining a separate cultural identity.
History of Ruthenians or Little Russia also known as History of the Rus' People is an anonymous historico-political treatise, most likely written at the break of the 18th and 19th centuries. It had a great influence on the formation of the Ukrainian national identity and was even named "the most prominent historical work in Ukraine". It was written and originally published in Russian and describes the history of the Ruthenians and their state, Little Russia, from antiquity to 1769. It mostly focuses on the history of the Zaporizhian Sich and the Cossack Hetmanate.
The All-Russian nation or triune Russian nation, also called the pan-Russian nation, is the term for the Imperial Russian and later irredentist ideology that sees the Russian nation as comprising a "trinity" of sub-nations: Great Russia, Little Russia, and White Russia. Respectively, these sub-nations are contextually identified with Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. Above all, the basis of the ideology's upholding of an inclusive Russian identity is centered around bringing all East Slavs under its fold.
The Little Russian identity was a cultural, political, and ethnic self-identification of a population of Ukraine who aligned themselves as one of the constituent parts of the triune Russian nationality. The Little Russian identity combined the cultures of Imperial Russia and Cossack Hetmanate.
Frank E. Sysyn is an American historian of Ukrainian origin. His grandmother was from Ukraine.
This is a select bibliography of English-language books and journal articles about the history of Ukraine. Book entries have references to journal reviews about them when helpful and available. Additional bibliographies can be found in many of the book-length works listed below. See the bibliography section for several additional book and chapter-length bibliographies from academic publishers and online bibliographies from historical associations and academic institutions.
The Metropolis of Kiev is a metropolis of the Eastern Orthodox Church that was transferred to the Patriarchate of Moscow in 1685. From 988 AD until 1596 AD, the mother church of the Metropolis of Kiev, Galicia and all Rus' had been the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. The Moscow Patriarchate was a Caesaropapist entity that was under the control of the Russian state. While nominally ruled by a metropolitan bishop, since its inception, the secular authorities of the Tsardom of Russia altered the territorial remit of the Kyiv metropolis, stripped it of its suffragan sees and transformed the office from an ecclesiastical province to an archbishopric to an honorific or empty title.
