Building on this insight, we offer a two-and-a-half-day conference at the University of Pennsylvania on April 20-22, 2012. Moreover, there is little cross-fertilization between otherwise excellent scholarship in Russia and the West, with the result that Russia is often missing from the Western scholarship and that much of the literature inside Russia continues to deal with questions that Tolstoi would already have recognized.The historian David Bell calls the conflicts of 1792-1815 the “first total war,” when the European world developed the “modern culture of war and peace” that led eventually to Verdun, Stalingrad, and Hiroshima. Westerners still mostly stress their own national contributions to victory-hence the cult of Wellington and Waterloo-and Russians still dwell mostly on the military operations of the brief campaign of 1812. As we approach the bicentennial of the climax of those wars, many scholars continue to work within old conceptual frameworks. In his recent book Russia Against Napoleon, Dominic Lieven points out a remarkable fact: few historians of the Napoleonic Wars seem to care that Russia did more than anyone to overthrow Napoleon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |