In Oceans of Grain, Scott Reynolds Nelson shows how the territory of present-day Ukraine has been strategically essential since the days of ancient Greece, when shipping magnates called aristoi controlled the routes that brought grain from the northern ports of the Black Sea to the city-states of Greece that had outgrown their own agricultural hinterlands. and Ukraine have been swept along in intersecting currents of history. It reveals that, in important ways, the U.S.

One of the best scholarly corrections of the record has Ukraine nowhere in its title, yet it is as enlightening about the history of that nation as it is about the development of the United States grain empire that is its main theme. The condescending name for Ukraine, Little Russia, almost disappeared a century ago as the cultures differentiated, yet Vladimir Putin has shown how persistent and pernicious the idea has been of Ukrainians as junior siblings of the so-called Great Russians. The challenge of understanding Ukraine’s evolution is the sheer number and variety of nations and peoples who have played parts in its history - not only Ukrainian speakers but Crimean Tatars, Cossacks, Turks, Poles, Jews, Greeks (as owners of grain ships) and, of course, Russians. (Though he did successfully conceal his years as a young fascist demagogue in the 1930s, but never mind.) “You cannot not know history,” said the American architect Philip Johnson.

World of warships nelson review