Download or read book Alexander I written by Marie-Pierre Rey and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-15 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexander I was a ruler with high aspirations for the people of Russia. Cosseted as a young grand duke by Catherine the Great, he ascended to the throne in 1801 after the brutal assassination of his father. In this magisterial biography, Marie-Pierre Rey illuminates the complex forces that shaped Alexander's tumultuous reign and sheds brilliant new light on the handsome ruler known to his people as "the Sphinx." Despite an early and ambitious commitment to sweeping political reforms, Alexander saw his liberal aspirations overwhelmed by civil unrest in his own country and by costly confrontations with Napoleon, which culminated in the French invasion of Russia and the burning of Moscow in 1812. Eventually, Alexander turned back Napoleon's forces and entered Paris a victor two years later, but by then he had already grown weary of military glory. As the years passed, the tsar who defeated Napoleon would become increasingly preoccupied with his own spiritual salvation, an obsession that led him to pursue a rapprochement between the Orthodox and Roman churches. When in exile, Napoleon once remarked of his Russian rival: "He could go far. If I die here, he will be my true heir in Europe." It was not to be. Napoleon died on Saint Helena and Alexander succumbed to typhus four years later at the age of forty-eight. But in this richly nuanced portrait, Rey breathes new life into the tsar who stood at the center of the political chessboard of early nineteenth-century Europe, a key figure at the heart of diplomacy, war, and international intrigue during that region's most tumultuous years.

Download or read book Citizen Emperor written by Philip Dwyer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces Napoleon's rise to power, early mistakes, and military campaigns, while considering the emperor's darker side and the lengths to which he went to establish himself as a legitimate ruler.

Download or read book Extremities written by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades following the French Revolution, four artists - Girodet, Gros, Gericault, and Delacroix - painted works in their Parisian studios that vividly expressed violent events in faraway, colonial lands. This book examines six of these paintings and argues that their disturbing, erotic depictions of slavery, revolt, plague, decapitation, cannibalism, massacre, and abduction chart the history of France's empire and colonial politics. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby shows that these paintings about occurrences in the West Indies, Syria, Egypt, Senegal, and Ottoman Empire Greece are preoccupied not with mastery and control but with loss, degradation, and failure, and she explains how such representations of crises in the colonies were able to answer the artists' longings as well as the needs of the government and the opposition parties at home. Empire made painters devoted to the representation of liberty and the new French nation confront liberty's antithesis: slavery. It also forced them to contend with cultural and racial difference. Young male artists responded, says Grigsby, by translating distant crises into images of challenges to the self, making history painting the site where geographic extremities and bodily extremities articulated one another.

Download or read book Catalogue of Printed Books written by British Museum. Department of Printed Books and published by . This book was released on 1903 with total page 892 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Sale written by American Art Association, Anderson Galleries (Firm) and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 1246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Catalogue of the Printed Books in the Library of the British Museum written by British Library and published by . This book was released on 1903 with total page 888 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Burning of Moscow written by Alexander Mikaberidze and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2014-02-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As soon as Napoleon and his Grand Army entered Moscow, on 14 September 1812, the capital erupted in flames that eventually engulfed and destroyed two thirds of the city. The fiery devastation had a profound effect on the Grand Army, but for thirty-five days Napoleon stayed, making increasingly desperate efforts to achieve peace with Russia. Then, in October, almost surrounded by the Russians and with winter fast approaching, he abandoned the capital and embarked on the long, bitter retreat that destroyed his army. The month-long stay in Moscow was a pivotal moment in the war of 1812 _ the moment when the initiative swung towards the Tsar's armies and spelled doom for the invading Grand Army _ yet it has rarely been studied in the same depth as the other key events of the campaign.??Alexander Mikaberidze, in this third volume of his in-depth reassessment of the war between the French and Russian empires, emphasizes the importance of the Moscow fire and shows how Russian intransigence sealed the fate of the French army. He uses a vast array of French, German, Polish and Russian memoirs, letters and diaries as well as archival material in order to tell the dramatic story of the Moscow fire. Not only does he provide a comprehensive account of events, looking at them from both the French and Russian points of view, but he explores the Russians' motives for leaving, then burning their capital. Using extensive eyewitness accounts, he paints a vivid picture of the harsh reality of life in the remains of the occupied city and describes military operations around Moscow at this turning point in the campaign.

Download or read book Crescendo of the Virtuoso written by Paul Metzner and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-07-26 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Age of Revolution, Paris came alive with wildly popular virtuoso performances. Whether the performers were musicians or chefs, chess players or detectives, these virtuosos transformed their technical skills into dramatic spectacles, presenting the marvelous and the outré for spellbound audiences. Who these characters were, how they attained their fame, and why Paris became the focal point of their activities is the subject of Paul Metzner's absorbing study. Covering the years 1775 to 1850, Metzner describes the careers of a handful of virtuosos: chess masters who played several games at once; a chef who sculpted hundreds of four-foot-tall architectural fantasies in sugar; the first police detective, whose memoirs inspired the invention of the detective story; a violinist who played whole pieces on a single string. He examines these virtuosos as a group in the context of the society that was then the capital of Western civilization. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1999.

Download or read book American Book Prices Current written by and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 1426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A record of literary properties sold at auction in the United States.

Download or read book A Guide to Historical Literature written by Henry Robinson Shipman and published by . This book was released on 1936 with total page 1258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Napoleonic Military History written by Donald D. Horward and published by Scholarly Title. This book was released on 1986 with total page 1080 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Academy written by and published by . This book was released on 1894 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Diplomatic Spokesmen and the Tsar diplomat written by Patricia Kennedy Grimsted and published by . This book was released on 1964 with total page 1008 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Academy a Weekly Review of Literature Learning Science and Art written by and published by . This book was released on 1894 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Poetical gazette; the official organ of the Poetry society and a review of poetical affairs, nos. 4-7 issued as supplements to the Academy, v. 79, Oct. 15, Nov. 5, Dec. 3 and 31, 1910

Download or read book Catalogue written by Francis Edwards and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 830 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book In Search of Two Characters written by Dorothy Julia Baynes and published by . This book was released on 1947 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book French Books written by Maggs Bros and published by . This book was released on 1939 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: