The Battle Of Konotop 1659

The battle that took place near Konotop in late June 1659 was a continuation of the Muscovite-Cossack war, which began in the fall of 1658, soon after the signing of the Union of Hadiach. Cossack and Tatar detachments trapped a significant portion of the Muscovite army, leading to enormous Russian losses. The unprecedented defeat of the previously invincible forces caused panic in Russia, but the Muscovites’ capacity to turn defeat into political victory, and the fratricidal struggle in Ukraine, known as the “Ruin”, left most of the Cossack lands on the Right Bank of the Dnieper uninhabitable. Konotop is a classic example of a battle won, but a war lost. ariusz Robert Drozdowski, Ksenia Konstantynenko, Piotr Kroll, Serhii Plokhy, Oleg Rumyantsev, Natalia Yakovenko and Tatjana Yakovleva-Tairova, the authors of this collection, hail from Poland, Italy, USA, Ukraine and Russia. They consider the military, political, social, and cultural context of the battle and also investigate its treatement in historical and literary writings from the early modern era to the present. They approach their topic from the point of view of various disciplines, traditions, and schools of thought. Their essays expand our understanding of the battle, its outcome and legacy in unexpected and historiographically productive ways.

The book in two volumes describes the evolution of Judeo Christianity and Islam and 1,300 years of warfare between them. Islam and Christianity follow gods with different characteristics and differing doctrinesfree will vs. determinism. They were engaged in bloody conflict from 632 AD until 1856 (Crimean War) when the Ottoman Empire became the sick man of Europe. It reignited with Egyptian encouragement backed by Soviet money, the arming of Fedayeen terrorists in 1956, and the Six-Day War following Egypts seizure of the Suez Canal, and has become progressively more serious ever since.

This book is based on the 1734 translation of the Koran by George Sale. This translation is in King James English, making comparisons between it and the King James Bible easily. This is a topical guide that will take a word or short phrase and find it in every verse of the Koran where it appears. These verses are placed together so that the reader can readily determine the context and, therefore, the meaning of the word or phrase. In some instances such as the word “jihad,” which does not appear in the Sale translation, it is traced in the University of Michigan’s online translation of the Koran. There it appears thirteen times, but in only two does it mean an internal struggle. In the other eleven, it means warfare. When analyzing words and phrases in the Koran, it is important to know when they were received and written. It is also important to know that the Koran includes material that seems to come from other sources. This has been outlined in volume 2 of the 1,300 Years’ War. As noted in volume 1 of the 1,300 Years’ War, Muhammad (PBUH) has been thought by many for over 150 years to have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy associated with visual and auditory hallucinations. These seizures last less than three minutes. It is, therefore, important to know which suras might have come from a single episode. A table shows this in volume 1 (table 8). Many scholars divide the Koran into four major periods: early Mecca (AD 610–615), mid-Mecca (AD 616), late Mecca (AD 617–621) and Medina (AD 622–632). The analysis of the verses in these periods found that militancy against non-Muslims progresses: 7.7 percent of the verses from early Mecca are militant. This rises to 10.6 percent in the mid-Mecca period, and 18.3 percent in the late Mecca period. It tops out at 29.3 percent in the Medina period. The colored version of the topical guide shows these periods in black, blue, green, and red. In the black and white edition, it shows these four periods of the Koran in plain italics, boldface italics, regular plain type, and boldface regular type. The reason this division is important is the doctrine of abrogation (2:106) given early in the Medina period. This states that verses given later may nullify verses given earlier. Thus, many peaceful verses given in the early parts of the Koran may be nullified by the “verse of the sword” (9:5) given later toward the end of the prophet’s life: “Slay the idolaters wherever you find them.” So far as I have been able to determine, there has been no stylistic analysis of the Koran. A person studying the Koran or the history of Islam will find this work most valuable.

First published in 1996, A History of Ukraine quickly became the authoritative account of the evolution of Europe's second largest country. In this fully revised and expanded second edition, Paul Robert Magocsi examines recent developments in the country's history and uses new scholarship in order to expand our conception of the Ukrainian historical narrative. New chapters deal with the Crimean Khanate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and new research on the pre-historic Trypillians, the Italians of the Crimea and the Black Death, the Karaites, Ottoman and Crimean slavery, Soviet-era ethnic cleansing, and the Orange Revolution is incorporated. Magocsi has also thoroughly updated the many maps that appear throughout. Maintaining his depiction of the multicultural reality of past and present Ukraine, Magocsi has added new information on Ukraine's peoples and discusses Ukraine's diasporas. Comprehensive, innovative, and geared towards teaching, the second edition of A History of Ukraine is ideal for both teachers and students.

Although present-day Ukraine has only been in existence for something over two decades, its recorded history reaches much further back for more than a thousand years to Kyivan Rus’. Over that time, it has usually been under control of invaders like the Turks and Tatars, or neighbors like Russia and Poland, and indeed it was part of the Soviet Union until it gained its independence in 1991. Today it is drawn between its huge neighbor to the east and the European Union, and is still struggling to choose its own path… although it remains uncertain of which way to turn. Nonetheless, as one of the largest European states, with considerable economic potential, it is not a place that can be readily overlooked. The problem is, or at least was, where to find information on this huge modern Ukraine, and since 2005 the answer has been the Historical Dictionary of Ukraine in its first edition, and now even more so with this second edition. It now boasts a dictionary section of about 725 entries, these covering the thousand years of history but particularly the recent past, and focusing on significant persons, places and events, political parties and institutions as well as more broadly international relations, the economy, society and culture. The chronology permits readers to follow this history and the introduction is there to make sense of it. It also features the most extensive and up-to-date bibliography of English-language writing on Ukraine.

Contrary to the prevailing opinion, the idea of Ukrainian independence did not emerge at the end of the nineteenth-century. In Brothers and Enemies, Johannes Remy reveals that the roots of Ukrainian independence were planted fifty years earlier. Remy contextualizes the Ukrainian national movement against the backdrop of the Russian Empire and its policy of oppression in the mid-nineteenth-century. Remy utilizes a wide range of unpublished archival sources to shed light on topics that are absent from current discourse including: Ilarion Vasilchikov’s alliance with Ukrainian activists in 1861, the forged revolutionary proclamation used to deport Pavlo Chubynsky (who is known today as the author of the Ukrainian national anthem), and the 1864 negotiations between Kyiv activists and the Polish National Government. Brothers and Enemies is the first systematic study of imperial censorship policies during the period and will be of interest to those who seek a better understanding of the current Ukrainian-Russian conflict.