Authors

Yevhen Yashchuk¹;  ¹ University of Oxford, UK

Discussion

This paper focuses on previously underexamined subject of the historiography of periodicals that were issued on the territory of contemporary Ukraine between the late 18^th and mid-20^th centuries. Considering general works, encyclopedias, bibliographies, and indexes of historical newspapers and journals, the paper will argue that the scholars categorized periodicals in ways that reinforced methodological nationalism and created a number of obstacles for studying Ukraine’s past through the lens of the history of media. It will also show that the approaches to organizing data decontextualized the importance of different papers by putting one-issue journals in one list with years-long publications. Additionally, it will compare scholarly works in Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and English, showing how similar patterns emerge when the classification is concerned.
The paper will start with the discussion of very first attempts to classify press in Ukraine in the late 19^th century, highlighting the exclusive principles that Ivan Franko and Ostap Makovei applied when they compounded the first overviews of the history of Ukrainian press. It will then show how their approaches resonated in the studies of the Soviet-era scholars and post-Soviet press studies in Ukraine. Additionally, the paper considers the shifts in popularity of certain periodicals among the historians of Ukraine that undermined important publications that did not fit the goals of their studies. At the same time, it will demonstrate how Polish historians chose a completely different approach when focusing on the history of periodicals in Galicia, considering first and foremost publications in Polish. Additionally, this paper will discuss how the history of press in the Romanov and Habsburg Empires added to the hierarchies of newspapers and their value for historians. While for Ukrainian or Polish historians the publications in the native languages were of utmost importance, for the scholars of empires those matter only in as much as the issues of nationalism are concerned. These observations will be followed by a reflection on the place of periodicals that were issued in Ukraine in the Anglophone history of media, where the region of East Central Europe in general and Ukraine in particular are still underrepresented. Finally, the paper will discuss how one can transcend the limits of typologies in the history of press and utilize those materials for studies that do not concern history of newspapers or journals per se, thus recontextualizing the place and value of periodicals that became instrumentalized during the past 150 years.