New Books In History

John Randolph, assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is our guest on the show this week. His book The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Cornell University Press, 2007) has just appeared. As a sometime Russian historian myself, I was very interested in reading the book. I knew a bit about Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist famous for running around nineteenth-century Europe fomenting revolution, but I knew virtually nothing about his family. I’d guess the same is true of many of you. John traces the Bakunins from their earliest days to the mid-nineteenth century, and along the way significantly revises the history of Russian radicalism in the period. The book is a model for historians who wish to weave together the private and the public, the personal and the political, the familial and the social. Highly recommended.

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Tags: 18th Century, 19th Century, Family Life, Intellectuals, Intelligentsia, Politics, Radicalism, Russia, Soviet Union // Add Comment »