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    Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America
    Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America
    Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America
    Ebook532 pages9 hours

    Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

    By Owen Matthews

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    About this ebook

    Two centuries ago, shortly after the U.S. was formed, a Russian expedition set its sights on the Pacific Northwest. It could have changed history.

    At the dawn of the nineteenth century two empires met on the far side of North America. Spain was the tired and hidebound colonial master of much of the Americas. Russia was the upstart, hungry for America's Pacific Northwest coast, a prize left unclaimed after the golden age of exploration.

    The dream of a Russian America became the goal of the Russian America Company, championed and led by Nikolai Rezanov, aristocratic adventurer and diplomat and courtier to Tsar Alexander I. At a time when John Jacob Astor was amassing his own fortune in the fur trade, Rezanov envisioned transforming fur-hunting stations on the Alaskan coast into the hub of a Pacific empire stretching from Siberia to California. The distances were vast-thousands of miles overland across the endless Russian steppes, thousands more by sea to Alaska and down to San Francisco bay. His men were unreliable-disorderly, dissolute, disease-ridden-and the dangers ever-present. Yet Rezanov persisted, and in 1806-just as Lewis and Clark were discovering the Columbia River to the north-he came close to realizing his dream. Had he done so, the history of the United States might have been very different.

    Owen Matthews brilliantly chronicles a hitherto untold story of adventure and colonial ambition, brought to life by vivid first-hand accounts and his own travels across Russia, recalling a time when dreams of glory pushed men to the limits of human endurance.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateNov 12, 2013
    ISBN9781620402412
    Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America
    Author

    Owen Matthews

    Owen Matthews studied Modern History at Oxford University before beginning his career as a journalist in Bosnia. He has written for the Moscow Times, The Times, the Spectator and the Independent. In 1997, he became a correspondent at Newsweek magazine in Moscow where he covered the second Chechen war, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. His first book on Russian history, Stalin's Children, was translated into 28 languages and shortlisted for The Guardian First Books Award and France's Prix Medicis. Owen's first book on Russian history was Stalin's Children, a family memoir, which was published to great critical acclaim in 2008. The book was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Orwell Prize for political writing, and selected as one of the Books of the Year by the Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator. It has been translated into twenty-eight languages and was shortlisted for France's Medici Prize and French Elle Magazine's Grand Prix Litteraire, as well as being selected as one of the FNAC chain's twenty featured titles for the Rentree Litteraire of 2009. Owen is currently a contributing editor for Newsweek magazine, based in Istanbul and Moscow.

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    • 5/5
      This is one of the most entertaining histories I have ever read. Glorious Misadventures is the perfect title because Nikolai Rezanov was so far ahead of his time in terms of his vision of what could be done with the "new world" and yet kept skittering off the mark. A perfect example of brilliant ideas coupled with arrogance, egomania, and short-sightedness making a perfect recipe for failure. That Russia twice sold land that provided the two biggest gold rushes of the 19th century pretty much says it all. I enjoyed this right to the last page of the epilogue.
    • 4/5
      An entirely serviceable, if workmanlike, account of Nikolai Rezanov's life and adventures in Russian America. The narrative gets a bit plodding at a few points, but generally moves along quite nicely and is filled with interesting historical tidbits about Russian settlements in North America, and about Rezanov's disastrous embassy to Japan. A useful example of "what might have been," had Rezanov been more successful with his schemes.

    Book preview

    Glorious Misadventures - Owen Matthews

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