tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33852411531526889182011-07-08T00:14:39.253-07:00Henry Tolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10055279561905753852noreply@blogger.comBlogger21100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3385241153152688918.post-59958814380442447882009-04-25T11:31:00.001-07:002009-04-25T11:46:14.544-07:00Hello,<div>    I've decided to make another blog for my grandfather's story.  I took a trip to England this month, Oxford in particular, and it got me thinking about graduate schools.  So, I'm going to try to present his project in a more professional manner.  That project will be located here: <a href="http://vlasovite.blogspot.com">vlasovite.blogspot.com</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div>We All Make History will be my personal blog, whatever that may imply.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Henry</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3385241153152688918-5995881438044244788?l=weallmakehistory.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Henry Tolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10055279561905753852noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3385241153152688918.post-81779286019532079062009-04-05T11:40:00.000-07:002009-04-06T13:24:36.214-07:00Hello, <div><br /></div><div>My name is Henry Toland.  I am a recent graduate of Stetson University who's currently pursuing more than a few ambitions.  I hear this is common; it's got something to do with the America's love of success stories and a seemingly attainable aristocratic lifestyle.  Disney movies, super-heroes, the Beatles and William Manchester's biography of Churchill haven't helped quell these pursuits.</div><div><br /></div><div>Maybe it's the fact I was raised in middle class North America or that I just spent the better part of four and a half years at a private university.  The ambitions are, as of yet, unexplained in my mind; but, they are here, and that's what I'm working with.</div><div><br /></div><div>One of the vaguest of these ambitions is to understand humanity and foster that understanding.  I received a grant last summer in order to pursue this.  In a way.  I was to record an oral history of my grandfather, Michael Mytnik.  He grew up as a peasant in the Byelorussian SSR under the terror of Stalin and through about every hardship historically recorded in that period.      </div><div><br /></div><div>His story is not unique to human history.  Millions of others were displaced from Eastern Europe by the Second World War.  Hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were labeled traitors for living or working outside of the USSR, in German territories, and faced execution or imprisonment if they could not escape repatriation after the war.  Still thousands were partisans and thousands fought in Andrey Vlasov's Russian Liberation Army against Stalinism.  Many of those people moved with their families to the United States.  Though very few from his division avoided repatriation, one of war's great atrocities.</div><div><br /></div><div>Still this situation is unique to me and probably you too in another way.  To hear an eyewitness confirm and expound upon written history grants a matchless opportunity.<br /></div><div><div><div><br /></div><div>I know the work is a bit novice now.  But, some of the best advice I've ever taken was to 'just do it.'</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Henry<br /></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/3385241153152688918-8177928601953207906?l=weallmakehistory.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Henry Tolandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10055279561905753852noreply@blogger.com1