Author: Robert J. Kaiser The Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR is an important addition to the small library of essential works on the collapse of the Soviet empire. The first attempt to construct and test broad theoretical propositions about place and territoriality in the making of nations, it examines the critical social processes underlying the formation of nations and homelands in Russia and the USSR during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Robert Kaiser finds that for the most part national self-consciousness was only beginning to supplant a localist mentality by the time of World War I. The national problem faced by Lenin was fundamentally different from the more difficult nationalist challenge that confronted Gorbachev. In Kaiser's place-based theory, the homeland, once created in the imaginations of the indigenous masses, powerfully structured national processes and international relations. Indigenization from below became an active competitor with nationality policies that promoted Russification, resulting in the restructuring of ethnic stratification to favor indigenes in their own respective home republics and to challenge Russian dominance outside Russia. The revolutionary changes occurring since 1989, Kaiser argues, should therefore be seen as part of a longer process of indigenization.Originally published in .The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author: Amy Tyson Anyone who has encountered costumed workers at a living history museum may well have wondered what their jobs are like, churning butter or firing muskets while dressed in period clothing. In The Wages of History, Amy Tyson enters the world of the public history interpreters at Minnesotas Historic Fort Snelling to investigate how they understand their roles and experience their daily work. Drawing on archival research, personal interviews, and participant observation, she reframes the current discourse on history museums by analyzing interpreters as laborers within the larger service and knowledge economies. Although many who are drawn to such work initially see it as a privilegean opportunity to connect with the public in meaningful ways through the medium of historythe realities of the job almost inevitably alter that view. Not only do interpreters make considerable sacrifices, both emotional and financial, in order to pursue their work, but their sense of special status can lead them to avoid confronting troubling conditions on the job, at times fueling tensions in the workplace. This case study also offers insightsmany drawn from the authors seven years of working as an interpreter at Fort Snellinginto the way gendered roles and behaviors from the past play out among the workers, the importance of creative autonomy to historical interpreters, and the ways those on public historys front lines both resist and embrace the sites more difficult and painful histories relating to slavery and American Indian genocide.