Books published by Cornell University Press

Today, John Deere is remembered - some say mistakenly - as the investor of the steel plow. Who was this legendary man and how did he create the internationally renowned company that still bears his name?

This work explores how early Soviet language culture gave rise to unparalleled verbal creativity and utopian imagination, while sowing the seeds for perhaps the most notorious forms of Orwellian "newspeak" known to the modern era.

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.

Russian monarchs have long been regarded as majestic and despotic, ruling mute and servile subjects in a vast empire isolated from the rest of Europe. Challenging this view, Whittaker uncovers a political dialogue about the nature and limitations of monarchy in 18th-century Russia.

The first decade of Alexander II's reign is known in Russian history as the Era of the Great Reforms, a time recognized as the major period of social, economic, and institutional transformation between the reign of Peter the Great and the Revolution of 1905. Coming directly after the notoriously repressive last decade of the Nicholas era, the appearance of such dramatic reform has led scholars to seek its causes in dramatic events. Surely some great, even cataclysmic, force must have driven Alexander II and his advisers to initiate what appears to be such an astonishing change in policy. In their search for the origins of these Great Reforms, historians generally have focused upon two phenomena. The first of these was Russia's defeat in the Crimean War by a relatively small, ineptly commanded Allied expeditionary force. The second was the serf revolts, which increased dramatically in the 1850s. From these events, most historians have concluded that the economic failings of serfdom, the problem of preserving domestic peace, and the need to restore Russia's tarnished military prestige were the major forces that convinced Alexander II's government to embark upon a new reformist path. As Lincoln's examination of the long-unstudied Russian archival evidence shows, there are good reasons to question whether such crises of policy and failings of Russia's servile economy impelled Alexander II and his advisers along a previously uncharted reformist path after the Crimean War. Further, in light of the Russian bureaucracy's slowness in drafting much less complex administrative reforms during the previous century, Lincoln argues that the Great Reform legislation simply was too complex and required too much sophisticated knowledge about the Empire's economic, administratvive, and judicial affairs to have been formulated in the brief half-decade after the war's end.

This study challenges traditional interpretations of the roles of royal women in a patriarchial society. Drawing upon sources in anthropology, sociology, art history and literature, the author demonstrates that the wives of the early tsars played complex roles in government.

Research in Outdoor Education is a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal seeking to support and further outdoor education and its goals, including personal growth and moral development, team building and cooperation, outdoor knowledge and skill development, environmental awareness, education and enrichment, and research that directly supports...

"I love life in its living form, life that's found on the street, in human conversations, shouts, and moans." So begins this speech delivered in Russian at Cornell University by Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. In poetic language, Alexievich traces the origins of her deeply affecting blend of journalism, oral...

Intellectual history has never been more relevant and more important to public life in the United States. In complicated and confounding times, people look for the principles that drive action and the foundations that support national ideals. American Labyrinth demonstrates the power of intellectual history to illuminate our public life and...

In 1941 the magazine publishing titan Henry R. Luce urged the nation's leaders to create an American Century. But in the post-World-War-II era proponents of the American Century faced a daunting task. Even so, Luce had articulated an animating idea that, as William O. Walker III skillfully shows in The Rise and Decline of the American Century...

Historians have become increasingly interested in material culture as both a category of analysis and as a teaching tool. And yet the profession tends to be suspicious of things; words are its stock-in-trade. What new insights can historians gain about the past by thinking about things? A central object (and consequence) of modern warfare is...