In 1852, the novelist and government bureaucrat Ivan Goncharov set sail on the frigate Pallada for a mission to closed-off Japan. This episode follows Goncharov as he encountered Africans and Asians across an imperial world dominated by the British, Dutch, and Spanish.
This episode is based on translations and information provided by Edyta M. Bojanowska, A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)
In 1889, a small band of unlikely Russian colonists seized the abandoned fortress of Sagallo in today's Djibouti. Led by the would-be Cossack Nikolai...
In this episode, we look at the story of the oddly refined peasant wanderer Fedor Kuzmich, who was claimed by many to be the...
In 1904, a shepherd and his daughter created a new religion in the Altai mountain ranges, leading to a violent confrontation with Russian settlers...