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"This first English-language synthesis of the history of Dnipro locates the city in regional, national, and transnational context. The history of a 'Ukrainian Manchester' is seen through the prism of 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"--
List of contents
Introduction: “The Unfinished City” and Its Histories
1. The Potemkin City
2. Manchester on the Dnipro
3. The Symphony of Revolutions
4. The Soviet Dnipropetrovsk
5. A City at War
6. Brezhnev’s Capital
Epilogue: Neither the City Number One nor the City Number Two
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Andrii Portnov is Professor of Entangled History of Ukraine at the European University Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder). He graduated
from Dnipro and Warsaw Universities, and defended his PhD dissertation in Lviv. He conducted research and lectured in
Amsterdam, Basel, Berlin, Brussels, Cambridge, Geneva, Lyon, Paris, Potsdam, and Vienna. His publications are devoted to
intellectual history, historiography, genocide, and memory studies in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine.
Summary
Winner of the 2022 Ab Imperio Award for the Best Study in New Imperial History and History of Diversity in Northern Eurasia
This 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.
