Maxwell Jay Dorsey

John Bushnell

Dixon Lloyd Bailey

Jonas Jergon Christensen

Arthur Wellesley Henry

Cyril Harold Goulden

Ferdinand Henry Steinmetz

Harvey Edgar Brewbaker

The Inheritance of Hardiness

Plum Investigations II

John Bushnell's analysis of previously unstudied church records and provincial archives reveals surprising marriage patterns in Russian peasant villages in the 18th and 19th centuries. For some villages the rate of unmarried women reached as high as 70 percent. The religious group most closely identified with female peasant marriage aversion was the Old Believer Spasovite covenant, and Bushnell argues that some of these women might have had more agency in the decision to marry than more common peasant tradition ordinarily allowed. Bushnell explores the cataclysmic social and economic impacts these decisions had on the villages, sometimes dragging entire households into poverty and ultimate dissolution. In this act of defiance, this group of socially, politically, and economically subordinated peasants went beyond traditional acts of resistance and reaction.

Spasovite Old Believers in the 18th-19th Centuries

Russian Peasant Women Who Refused to Marry

Ben Eklof

Larisa Georgievna Zakharova

"[The book] succeeds remarkably in providing a multifaceted, yet interconnected, analysis of this signal era of modern Russian history and it is heartily recommended." --The Historian This volume, the work of an international group of scholars that includes historians from Russia, maps out the major landmarks in the conceptualization and implementation of the Great Reforms during the reign of Alexander II and proposes a variety of perspectives from which to view them.

Russia's Great Reforms, 1855-1881

John Bushnell

Books

Your next favorite book is out there