The Making of Modern Ukraine, Yale’s famous course on Ukrainian history by Professor Timothy Snyder, available in free access

“Everyone needs a future. We need a politics of the future; we need an event that can break us out of our rut and which will point us towards a future. I believe it’s very important that Europeans and others help to offer Ukrainians a future after this war in the form of membership in the European Union, and in the form of generous aid which allows Ukrainians to rebuild,” said Professor Timothy Snyder, a famous historian in his speech at the Kyiv Security Forum on May 8, 2022. This fall, Dr. Snyder is making his lecture course on Ukraine at Yale University, The Making of Modern Ukraine, available to all interested. The course can be viewed for free on Yale University’s YouTube channel or directly in the playlist on YouTube.

As stated in Yale University’s course catalog, the course represents a “study of Ukraine from the Cossack rebellions of 1648 to the democratic revolution of 2004. Topics include the decadence of the Polish-Lithuanian Republic, Russian and Austrian imperial rule, the collapse of traditional Jewish and Polish social life, the attraction of Russian culture, the emergence of a Ukrainian national movement, civil war, modernization, terror, the consequences of Nazi occupation (including genocide and ethnic cleansing), problems of democratic reform, and European integration since 1991”. In somber times of russian invasion into Ukrainian sovereignty, the course also underlines the uniqueness of Ukraine’s national identity.

The syllabus for the course can be found here.

Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He speaks five and reads ten European languages… Snyder was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, and has received the Carnegie and Guggenheim fellowships, and holds state orders from Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland. He has appeared in documentaries, on network television, and in major films. His books have inspired posters, sculpture, punk rock, rap, film, theater, and opera. His words are quoted in political demonstrations around the world. He is currently researching a family history of nationalism and writing a philosophical book about freedom.” (Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs). In his address to the nation on September 11, 2022, President Zelensky called Professor Snyder “a great friend of Ukraine” who “did a lot to make our country, our people, and our history known and understood in the world”.