Caught up in the personal and political maelstrom between his domineering grandmother Catherine the Great and his highly neurotic and volatile father, Paul I, Alexander came to the throne as a result of a coup mounted against his father in March 1801. Alexander was devastated when the takeover turned violent and his father was assassinated.".

"Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling, the first biography of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing cross-cultural personalities, traces not only the life of Princess Der Ling, in all its various transformations, but offers a fresh look at the woman she lionized and, ultimately, betrayed - the Empress Dowager Cixi, to whom, like Der Ling, many legends have been affixed over the past century. The book also depicts the changing worlds of Paris, Tokyo and the other international stages of Der Ling's development as woman and as mystery, and deals with the many teachers who made her who she was." --Book Jacket.

From the author of Europe Central, winner of the National Book Award, a journalistic tour de force along the Mexican-American border – a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award For generations of migrant workers, Imperial Country has held the promise of paradise and the reality of hell. It sprawls across a stirring accidental sea, across the deserts, date groves and labor camps of Southeastern California, right across the border into Mexico. In this eye-opening book, William T. Vollmann takes us deep into the heart of this haunted region, exploring polluted rivers and guarded factories and talking with everyone from Mexican migrant workers to border patrolmen. Teeming with patterns, facts, stories, people and hope, this is an epic study of an emblematic region.

The year of the four emperors in AD 193 shows the cosmopolitan interconnectedness of the Roman Empire, yet scholarship has long framed the Severan dynasty in a narrative of descent stressing their North African and in particular their Syrian origins. The contributions of this volume question this conventional approach and instead examine more closely actual Severan policy in the Near East to detect potential local connections that determined this policy as well as how local communities and elites reacted to it. The volume thus explores new beginnings and old connections in the Roman Near East.

This fascinating book shows how the later years of the British Empire were characterised by accidental oversights, irresponsible opportunism and uncertain pragmatism.

This book tells the story of three young men: two French, one Russian; all born the same year, when European culture was moving from Romanticism to something else in painting, music, and literature. Influenced by the environment from which they came, all three grew to take a leading role in moving the arts in a bold new direction. It was the age when Impressionism reinvented what painting could be, when Naturalism changed how fiction is written, and when Russia moved from the edges of European society to the vital role it has played ever since. Leading, guiding, determining this new course were Monet, Tchaikovsky, and Zola. Parallel biographies of these three artistic geniuses follow them from the magic year of their birth to the point when they established themselves as bold, original creators in the early 1870s. The book explores how they chose to follow careers in creative art, how each of them came to play such a central role in their respective domains, and how those arts interacted and influenced each other. As they move through the cultural world of 19th century Europe, a panorama appears of the rich intellectual environment of France and Russia in that period, as well as the unique experiences and talents that led all three to their towering position in modern culture. Often considered separately, art, music, and literature come together in this study to offer a multifaceted view of a key era in the development of modernism in all the arts.