History

Aleksei Evstaf´ev’s 1852 book, The Great Republic Tested by the Touch of Truth, is an early work in English by a native of Ukraine who identified as a Russian. Drawing from his years of Russian diplomatic service in the United States, Evstaf´ev presented a critique of American democracy as well as Russian despotism, preferring British constitutional monarchy instead. Writing from a...

Long overlooked in the established literature, historical investigations of Russian Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine (STEM) have recently benefitted from newfound interest among academic specialists. Informed by a broad range of innovative methodological and theoretical approaches, historians from the US, Europe, and Russian Federation have turned their attention to exploring the myriad political, cultural, social, and economic factors that shaped...

The nineteenth century in Serbia began with two uprisings against an Ottoman overlordship that had oppressed not only the Serbs, but all of Southeastern Europe for almost four hundred years. Fired by memories of their medieval empire and determined to restore Serbia as a Christian state with European-style institutions, Serbia’s two princely families, the Karadordevices and the Obrenovices, vied with...

Eli Gumener’s 1921 Yiddish memoir, A Ukrainian Chapter, is a rare historical source about relief work spanning the two most devastating years of the pogroms in the Russian Civil War. He concentrates on the collapse of Jewish communities in Podolia, a region in southwest Ukraine. Gumener worked for the major Russian and American organizations that were active in providing aid to Jewish victims...

This volume investigates how the revolutionary events of 1917–21 shaped biographies both in Russia and Western Europe and how people tried to make sense of the political developments during these years in self-testimonies like diaries and memoirs. What was the impact of individuals on the course of the revolution? What do we know about the personal experiences during 1917 of...

Historians devote a great deal of attention to the diplomacy that led Russia into the Great War, but have tended to neglect the course of this diplomacy once the fighting erupted. This volume addresses that lacuna with a broad range of essays examining the foreign relations of the empire, as well as its republican and early Soviet successors, from the...

Historians devote a great deal of attention to the diplomacy that led Russia into the Great War, but have tended to neglect the course of this diplomacy once the fighting erupted. This volume addresses that lacuna with a broad range of essays examining the foreign relations of the empire, as well as its republican and early Soviet successors, from the...

This volume brings together the work of researchers in North America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Turkey, who are generating important, archivally based scholarship in their respective fields, languages, and nations of study. The larger goal of this volume is to sit in conversation with the others in this series that directly deal with Russia and its Great War and...

Ivan the Terrible continues to fascinate and confuse historians. In Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish Charles J. Halperin presented a new and comprehensive interpretation of Ivan’s personality and reign. In his second book on Ivan, Ivan IV and Muscovy, Halperin both explores in depth conclusions adumbrated only briefly in his first and more often provides...

Empress Catherine II, building on the military and diplomatic successes of Emperor Peter I and Empress Elizabeth, in less than two decades of rule brought Russia to the forefront among European powers. Her creation of a League of Armed Neutrality, uniting several mercantile states of Northern Europe, was intended to guarantee the security of maritime shipping on the high seas...