John Paul Himka
is a professor emeritus in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta (Edmonton). He is author of four monographs on “Ukrainian history: Socialism in Galicia” (1983), “Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth Century” (1988), “Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine” (1999), “Last Judgment Iconography in the Carpathians” (2009). He is the co-editor, jointly with Joanna Michlic, of the collection “Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Post-Communist Europe” (2014). He is currently working on two research projects – on Ukrainian sacral culture in the Canadian prairies and on the participation of the OUN and UPA in the Holocaust.
Historians constitute a rather conservative breed, and of course some historians are more conservative than others. The comfort zone of a conservative historian is a document, that is a preserved text, especially one that has some kind of official provenance. Memoirs, testimonies, oral history — the conservative historian considers them at best to be second-rank sources, too subjective and uncertain. This kind of historian does not even recognize visual materials as sources and makes no use of them. But this is unfortunate, because we live at a time in which all sorts of information is presented ever more frequently by visual means. Our students have become accustomed to acquire information in a form...