The book describes the development of Ukrainian cities during the 19th century/ Το βιβλίο περιγράφει την ανάπτυξη των ουκρανικών πόλεων κατά το 19ο αιώνα. 

Studies of the nineteenth-century Ottoman and Russian Empires as well as of the numerous nation-states that came into existence around the Black Sea have mostly been pursued separately. This article attempts to offer an alternative framework of analysis for the study of the Black Sea world during the nineteenth century. It starts off from Femand Braudel's approach to the sixteenth-century Mediterranean world in order to discuss whether and to what extent the Black Sea region could also be conceived as a world. Not only structural similarities but also historically-specific circumstances are emphasized for supporting the parallel drawn between the sixteenth-century Mediterranean and the nineteenth-century Black Sea. A number of further intellectual questions are raised in order to demonstrate that a holistic perspective has much to offer for re-directing academic research into more promising problem areas.

Old Odessa, on the Black Sea, gained notoriety as a legendary city of Jewish gangsters and swindlers, a frontier boomtown mythologized for the adventurers, criminals, and merrymakers who flocked there to seek easy wealth and lead lives of debauchery and excess. Odessa is also famed for the brand of Jewish humor brought there in the 19th century from the shtetls of Eastern Europe and that flourished throughout Soviet times. From a broad historical perspective, this volume examines the hybrid Judeo-Russian culture that emerged in Odessa in the 19th century and persisted through the Soviet era and beyond. The book shows how the art of eminent Soviet-era figures such as Isaac Babel, Il'ia Ilf, Evgenii Petrov, and Leonid Utesov grew out of the Odessa Russian-Jewish culture into which they were born and which shaped their lives.

Η Οδησσός ιδρύθηκε το 1794 ως μια συνοριακή πόλη της Μαύρης θάλασσας για να μετατραπεί σύντομα σε ένα από τα πιο πολυσύχναστα λιμάνια της Ρωσίας. Έποικοι όλων των εθνικοτήτων αναζήτησαν την τύχη τους στην Οδησσό, μεταξύ των οποίων και Εβραίοι που προήλθαν από μια από τις πιο εύρωστες, πολυπληθέστερες και πολιτισμικά γόνιμες εβραϊκές κοινότητες της Ευρώπης. Η ιστορία της εβραϊκής Οδησσού εντοπίζει την άνοδο αυτή της κοινότητας από την ίδρυση της το 1794 έως τα πογκρόμ του 1881 που ξέσπασαν μετά τη δολοφονία του Αλέξανδρου ΙΙ. /Founded in 1794 as a frontier city on the Black Sea, Odessa soon grew to be one of Russia's busiest seaports. Settlers of all nationalities went there to seek their fortune, among them Jews who came to form one of the largest, wealthiest, and most culturally fertile Jewish communities in Europe. This history of Jewish Odessa traces the rise of that community from its foundation in 1794 to the pogroms of 1881 that erupted after the assassination of Alexander II. More a modern metropolis than any other Russian city with a significant Jewish population, Odessa offers a window into the diversity of Russian Jewish experience