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)
The colour photographs of Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii fascinated the imperial public of the early 20th century, persuading Emperor Nicholas II to sponsor expeditions across the...
On 1 December 1911, the priest's wife Zinaida Troitskaia was found murdered in the backwoods village of Alajõe in eastern Estland province. This episode...
In this episode, we look at the story of the oddly refined peasant wanderer Fedor Kuzmich, who was claimed by many to be the...
