This book is about the dramatic changes that the world is witnessing in its attitude toward the past. For the first time in many generations, ordinary citizens around the globe have burst into disputes about history that were previously the province of politicians and scholars. These people are demolishing monuments, creating new myths for themselves and restoring the memory of names long forgotten. Everyone needs a past to build on, and people are no longer satisfied with history written ...

This bold, sweeping history of the turbulent American-Russian relationship is unique in being written jointly by American and Russian authors. David Foglesong, Ivan Kurilla and Victoria Zhuravleva together reveal how and why America and Russia shifted from being warm friends and even tacit allies to being ideological rivals, geopolitical adversaries, and demonic foils used in the construction or affirmation of their national identities. As well as examining diplomatic, economic, and milita...

The new world order as it stood after the apparent end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR was greeted with enthusiasm and optimism almost everywhere, but especially in the West. Less than a quarter century later that optimism has faded dramatically, with the rise of populism, nationalism, religious extremism and civil discord disrupting political and social norms around the world. This book reveals the extent to which events that began as internal political crises in Europe, the ...

In post-Soviet Russia, there is a persistent trend to repress, control, or even co-opt national history. By reshaping memory to suit a politically convenient narrative, Russia has fashioned a good future out of a "bad past."While Putin's regime has acquired nearly complete control over interpretations of the past, The Future of the Soviet Past reveals that Russia's inability to fully rewrite its Soviet history plays an essential part in its current politic...

The contributors in this interdisciplinary collection address the problem of interconnection between the study of the “Other,” either Russian or American, and the shaping of national identities in the two countries at different stages of US–Russian relations. The focus of research interests were typically determined by the political and social debates in scholars’ native countries. In this book, leading Russian and American scholars analyze the problems arising from these intersections of ...

Through a constructivist approach, this book views the era of the American Civil War as a transnational phenomenon, emphasizing its role in shaping national identities and historical memory worldwide.Extending identity narratives across time, contributors from Brazil, Canada, France, Mexico, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States analyze a wide range of primary sources, including diplomatic correspondence, periodicals, memoirs, intellectual writings, fict...

A special correspondent of The New York Times, Carl W. Ackerman traveled from Vladivostok to Irkutsk to Omsk to Ekaterinburg in the fall of 1918 in the midst of the Russian Civil War. He met with officers of the American and Japanese expeditionary forces, with members of the Czecho-Slovak corps fighting the Red Army, with ministers of the democratic Russian government in Omsk, and with military dictator Admiral Alexander Kolchak, who became the ruler of anti-Bolshevik Russia after a coup t...