This anthology, edited by the Kyiv philosopher and journalist Volodymyr Yermolenko, gathers essays by Ukrainian historians, philosophers, writers, poets and political analysts with the aim of letting Ukrainians explain their country in their own words rather than through the lens of Russia or Western observers. Its premise is that Ukraine has not one history but many, and that its identity is best understood as a plural, contested story shaped by borderlands, empires and repeated struggles for self-rule. The essays move across centuries and genres. Historians revisit the deep past and the traumas of the twentieth century, including the Holodomor famine of the early 1930s, while other contributors reflect on the Maidan uprising of 2013 and 2014 and the Russian aggression that followed, from the annexation of Crimea to the war in the Donbas. Alongside analysis come personal and literary pieces that convey how this history is lived and remembered along with reflections on the country's cultural and regional diversity. Contributors range from internationally known scholars such as the Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy to poets and writers little translated into English, and the journalist Peter Pomerantsev provides a foreword. Yermolenko, who has led the English-language project UkraineWorld and served as president of PEN Ukraine, has long argued that Ukraine is defined by a culture of freedom and horizontal self-organization in contrast to Russian imperial centralism. Published before the full-scale invasion of 2022, the book offers essential background for understanding why Ukrainians resisted, and why the question of who tells their story matters so much.