Unlike his predecessors Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Dmytro Doroshenko, and Ivan Krypiakevych, who wrote national histories or histories of the Ukrainian people, Pritsak followed the Ukrainian historian of Polish background, Viacheslav Lypynsky, in proposing the ideal of writing a "territorialist" history of Ukraine which would include the Polish, Turkic, and other peoples that have inhabited the country from ancient times.