Search query: oxford history russia

Product: Stealth: The Secret Contest to Invent Invisible Aircraft
Description: On a moonless night in January 1991, a dozen U.S. aircraft appeared in the skies over Baghdad. To the Iraqi air defenses, the planes seemed to come from nowhere. Their angular shape, making them look like flying origami, rendered them virtually undetectable. Each aircraft was more than 60 feet in length and with a wingspan of 40 feet, yet its radar footprint was the size of a ball bearing. Here was the first extensive combat application of Stealth technology. And it was devastating.
Peter Westwick's new book illuminates the story behind these aircraft, the F-117A, also known as the Stealth Fighter, and their close cousin the B-2, also known as the Stealth Bomber. The development of Stealth unfolded over decades. Radar has been in use since the 1930s and was essential to the Allies in World War Two, when American investment in radar exceeded that in the Manhattan Project. The atom bomb ended the war, conventional wisdom has it, but radar won it. That experience also raised a question: could a plane be developed that was invisible to radar? That question, and the seemingly impossible feat of physics and engineering behind it, took on increasing urgency during the Cold War, when the United States searched for a way both to defend its airspace and send a plane through Soviet skies undetected. Thus started the race for Stealth.
At heart, Stealth is a tale of not just two aircraft but the two aerospace companies that made them, Lockheed and Northrop, guided by contrasting philosophies and outsized personalities. Beginning in the 1970s, the two firms entered into a fierce competition, one with high financial stakes and conducted at the highest levels of secrecy in the Cold War. They approached the problem of Stealth from different perspectives, one that pitted aeronautical designers against electrical engineers, those who relied on intuition against those who pursued computer algorithms. The two different approaches manifested in two very different solutions to Stealth, clearly evident in the aircraft themselves: the F-117 composed of flat facets, the B-2 of curves. For all their differences, Lockheed and Northrop were located twenty miles apart in the aerospace suburbs of Los Angeles, not far from Disneyland. This was no coincidence. The creative culture of postwar Southern California-unorthodox, ambitious, and future-oriented-played a key role in Stealth.
Combining nail-biting narrative, incisive explanation of the science and technology involved, and indelible portraits of unforgettable characters, Stealth immerses readers in the story of an innovation with revolutionary implications for modern warfare.
Relevance (ESCI, E=Exact S=Substitute C=Complement I=Irrelevant): I

Product: Russia in World History (New Oxford World History)
Description: Over the course of twelve centuries, Russia's peoples overcame the constant challenges posed by geography, climate, availability of natural resources, and devastating foreign invasions to become the world's second largest land empire and the largest in modern history. This energetic introduction to Russia's history follows the development of local tribes into a federation of principalities centered at Kiev, the shift of power to Moscow and the centralization of the state, and Russia's pursuit of imperial ambitions. It examines the circumstances that led to the foundation of the world's first communist society in 1917, and traces the global consequences of Russia's extensive confrontation with the United States. Russia's arduous and costly climb to great power gains a personal dimension through the stories of individual women and men-pivotal figures as well as common people-illuminating the human consequences of sweeping historical change. Peoples of many ethnicities became part of the Russian empire and suffered or benefitted from its leaders' efforts to meld a multiethnic polity into a coherent political entity. This book examines how Russia served as a conduit for people, ideas, and commodities - owing between east and west, north and south and how it came to play an increasingly important role on a global scale.
Relevance (ESCI, E=Exact S=Substitute C=Complement I=Irrelevant): E

Product: Crime and Punishment: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Description: “A truly great translation . . . This English version . . . really is better.” —A. N. Wilson, The Spectator
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
This acclaimed new translation of Dostoyevsky’s “psychological record of a crime” gives his dark masterpiece of murder and pursuit a renewed vitality, expressing its jagged, staccato urgency and fevered atmosphere as never before. Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders alone through the slums of St. Petersburg, deliriously imagining himself above society’s laws. But when he commits a random murder, only suffering ensues. Embarking on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden prostitute, can offer the chance of redemption.
For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Relevance (ESCI, E=Exact S=Substitute C=Complement I=Irrelevant): E

Product: Russia: A History
Description: `a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma'
Churchill's assessment has for years typified many people's attitude towards Russia, this great land of bewildering contrasts. What other country has seen such extremes of imperial opulence and abject poverty, tyrannical power and subversive resistance, artistic achievement and economic crisis, glittering cities and desolate, frozen wastes? Where else has such dramatic political change occurred with such dizzying rapidity? Now, for the first time, the true story of this fascinating land is
revealed.
Russia: A History cuts through the myths and mystery that have surrounded Russia from its earliest days to the present, with startling revelations from classified archives that until recently were not even known to exist. Using the most recently available sources, with many pictures that have never before been published, a distinguished team of historians have stripped away the propaganda and preconceptions of the past to tell the definitive story of Russia, from Kiev and Muscovy
through empire and revolution to communism and Perestroika, and the `new order' of the present day. The result is an absorbing account of the rise and fall of a superpower, and its impact on the peoples both within and beyond its borders.
Relevance (ESCI, E=Exact S=Substitute C=Complement I=Irrelevant): E

Product: By Nicholas Valentine Riasanovsky - A History of Russia: 6th (sixth) Edition
Relevance (ESCI, E=Exact S=Substitute C=Complement I=Irrelevant): E

Product: War and Peace (Oxford World's Classics)
Description: 'If life could write, it would write like Tolstoy.' Isaac Babel
Tolstoy's epic masterpiece intertwines the lives of private and public individuals during the time of the Napoleonic wars and the French invasion of Russia. The fortunes of the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys, of Pierre, Natasha, and Andrei, are intimately connected with the national history that is played out in parallel with their lives. Balls and soirées alternate with councils of war and the machinations of statesmen and generals, scenes of violent battles with everyday human passions in
a work whose extraordinary imaginative power has never been surpassed. The prodigious cast of characters, both great and small, seem to act and move as if connected by threads of destiny as the novel relentlessly questions ideas of free will, fate, and providence. Yet Tolstoy's portrayal of marital
relations and scenes of domesticity is as truthful and poignant as the grand themes that underlie them.
In this revised and updated version of the definitive and highly acclaimed Maude translation, Tolstoy's genius and the power of his prose are made newly available to the contemporary reader.
ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Relevance (ESCI, E=Exact S=Substitute C=Complement I=Irrelevant): E

Product: Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia's Cold War Generation (Oxford Oral History Series)
Description: Donald Raleigh's Soviet Baby Boomers traces the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of Russia into a modern, highly literate, urban society through the fascinating life stories of the country's first post-World War II, Cold War generation.
For this book, Raleigh has interviewed sixty 1967 graduates of two "magnet" secondary schools that offered intensive instruction in English, one in Moscow and one in provincial Saratov. Part of the generation that began school the year the country launched Sputnik into space, they grew up during the Cold War, but in a Soviet Union increasingly distanced from the excesses of Stalinism. In this post-Stalin era, the Soviet leadership dismantled the Gulag, ruled without terror, promoted consumerism, and began to open itself to an outside world still fearful of Communism. Raleigh is one of the first scholars of post-1945 Soviet history to draw extensively on oral history, a particularly useful approach in studying a country where the boundaries between public and private life remained porous and the state sought to peer into every corner of people's lives. During and after the dissolution of the USSR, Russian citizens began openly talking about their past, trying to make sense of it, and Raleigh has made the most of this new forthrightness. He has created an extraordinarily rich composite narrative and embedded it in larger historical narratives of Cold War, de-Stalinization, "overtaking" America, opening up to the outside world, economic stagnation, dissent, emigration, the transition to a market economy, the transformation of class, ethnic, and gender relations, and globalization.
Including rare photographs of daily life in Cold War Russia, Soviet Baby Boomers offers an intimate portrait of a generation that has remained largely faceless until now.
Relevance (ESCI, E=Exact S=Substitute C=Complement I=Irrelevant): E

Product: Russian History: A Very Short Introduction
Brand: imusti
Oxford University Press USA
Relevance (ESCI, E=Exact S=Substitute C=Complement I=Irrelevant): E

Product: The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford Handbooks)
Brand: OUP Oxford
Relevance (ESCI, E=Exact S=Substitute C=Complement I=Irrelevant): E

Product: The Russian Empire 1801-1917 (Oxford History of Modern Europe)
Brand: Clarendon Press
Relevance (ESCI, E=Exact S=Substitute C=Complement I=Irrelevant): E

Product: A History of Russia
Brand: Oxford University Press
Relevance (ESCI, E=Exact S=Substitute C=Complement I=Irrelevant): E

Product: The Balkans in World History (New Oxford World History)
Brand: Oxford University Press
Relevance (ESCI, E=Exact S=Substitute C=Complement I=Irrelevant): E

Product: A History of Russia: Volume 2: Since 1855
Brand: Oxford University Press
Relevance (ESCI, E=Exact S=Substitute C=Complement I=Irrelevant): E

Product: A History of Russia: Volume 1: To 1855
Brand: Oxford University Press
Relevance (ESCI, E=Exact S=Substitute C=Complement I=Irrelevant): E

Product: A History of Russia
Brand: Oxford University Press
Relevance (ESCI, E=Exact S=Substitute C=Complement I=Irrelevant): E

Product: The Russian Empire 1450-1801 (Oxford History of Early Modern Europe)
Brand: Oxford University Press, USA
Relevance (ESCI, E=Exact S=Substitute C=Complement I=Irrelevant): E