Bøger af Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter

From Victory to Peace: Russian Diplomacy After Napoleon explores how Russia's diplomats understood European security as they worked to implement the edifice of pacification and peace constructed in 1814, 1815, and 1818. In response to developments across Europe and in Spanish America, Emperor Alexander I's hopes for peace, pragmatic adaptability, and commitment to act in concert with the other great powers came fully into focus. Based on sources of Russian provenance, the book challenges characterizations of Alexander's behavior as erratic and his foreign policy as heavy-handed and expansionist. Indeed, as historians assimilate the Russian perspective on European order (as well as the perspectives of other less well-studied countries), they encounter a multifaceted Restoration built upon practices of enlightened reformism and direct experience of revolution and war.

In From Victory to Peace, Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter brings the Russian perspective to a critical moment in European political history. This history of Russian diplomatic thought in the years after the Congress of Vienna concerns a time when Russia and Emperor Alexander I were fully integrated into European society and politics. Wirtschafter looks at how Russia's statesmen who served Alexander I across Europe, in South America, and in Constantinople represented the Russian monarch's foreign policy and sought to act in concert with the allies.Based on archival and published sources-diplomatic communications, conference protocols, personal letters, treaty agreements, and the periodical press-this book illustrates how Russia's policymakers and diplomats responded to events on the ground as the process of implementing peace unfolded.Thanks to generous funding from the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot and the Mellon Foundation the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other Open Access repositories.

How did enlightened Russians of the eighteenth century understand society? And how did they reconcile their professed ideals of equality and justice with the authoritarian political structures in which they lived? Historian Elise Wirtschafter turns to literary plays to reconstruct the social thinking of the past and to discover how...

Explores the Russian Enlightenment with reference to the religious Enlightenment of the mid-to late-eighteenth century. Grounded in close readings of the sermons and devotional writings of Platon Levshin, court preacher and metropolitan bishop of Moscow, this book examines the blending of European thought into the teachings of Russian Orthodoxy.

Russia's Age of Serfdom 1649-1861 offers a broad interpretive history of the Russian Empire from the time of serfdom's codification until its abolition following the Crimean War.

How did educated 18th-century Russians view society? In this study, historian Elise Wirtschafter turns to literary plays to reconstruct the social thinking of the past and to discover how Russians of the Enlightenment understood themselves.