In this course students will read, discuss, and write about relations between the United States and Ukraine from the creation of a Ukrainian republic in 1917 to the Russian-Ukrainian war that began in February 2022. Students will learn the historical background to the contemporary crisis. They will examine the tensions between ideals and interests in US policies toward Ukraine and Russia/the Soviet Union. In addition, they will analyze the influence of Ukrainian-Americans in the wider context of the impact of immigrant or ethnic groups on US foreign policies.
Among the questions to be addressed in the seminar are: Why did US leaders not recognize Ukraine as an independent nation from 1917 to 1991 despite the commitment of the US to the principle of self-determination in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and Franklin Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter? How did Jewish Americans respond to news of pogroms in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War? What did Americans know at the time about the terrible famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933? Why did Franklin Roosevelt disregard the famine and establish diplomatic relations with the USSR in 1933? How did Ukrainian-Americans appeal for sympathy, support, and recognition in the years before the US entered the Second World War? Were there foundations for accusations that Ukrainian nationalists and Ukrainian-American leaders sympathized with fascism in those years? How and why did the US support Ukrainian insurgents fighting Soviet forces after 1945? How successful were Ukrainian-Americans in lobbying Congress during the Cold War? Why did President George H. W. Bush oppose Ukrainian independence in 1991? Why did President George W. Bush push for Ukraine’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 2008, despite the fact that most Ukrainians did not want to be in NATO then? What were the origins and consequences of the revolution in Kyiv in 2014? Why did Russia invade Ukraine in February 2022?
About Professor Foglesong
David Foglesong is a historian of American foreign relations. Most of my research has focused on American-Soviet and American-Russian relations, though I am also interested in other dimensions of the history of the US in the World, especially US military occupations of foreign nations and “nation building” missions since 1898.
David’s primary current research project concerns citizen activism and the end of the Cold War. It challenges the widespread misconception that the Cold War ended when the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991 and shows that the American-Soviet Cold War ended in the eyes of most Americans between 1987 and 1990. In contrast to much scholarship that concentrates on the roles of “great men” (Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, and George H.W. Bush), I show how American and Soviet citizens contributed to the ending of the Cold War, particularly through ambitious citizen diplomacy projects that overcame ideological hostility and shattered negative stereotypes.