Nicholas B. Breyfogle

** Nominated for a NAACP Image Award ** A groundbreaking collection of photographs and essays that shed new light on the history of Black America, from the Picturing Black History project. “Stunning . . . Provides fresh perspective on historical photographs and snapshots of Black life.” —NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW“An astonishing work." —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.Picturing Black History uncovers untold stories and rarely seen images of the Black experience, providing new context around culturally significant moments. This beautiful collectible volume makes a thoughtful gift and is full of rousing, vibrant essays paired with rarely seen photographs that expand our understanding of Black history. The book is a collaborative effort between Getty Images, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, and the History departments at The Ohio State and Miami Universities. It informs, educates, and inspires our current moment by exploring the past, blending the breadth and depth of Getty Images’s archives with the renowned expertise of Origins contributors and The Ohio State’s and Miami’s History departments, including Daniela Edmeier, Damarius Johnson, Nicholas Breyfogle, and Steve Conn. Created by a growing collective of professional historians, art historians, Black Studies scholars, and photographers and showcasing Getty Images’s unmatched collection of photographs, Picturing Black History embraces the power of visual storytelling to relay little-known stories of oppression and resistance, perseverance and resilience, freedom, dreams, imagination, and joy within the United States and around the world. In collecting these new photographic essays, this book furthers an ongoing dialogue on the significance of Black history and Black life, sharing new perspectives on the current status of prejudice and discrimination bias with a wider audience. Picturing Black History uses the latest academic learning and scholarship to recontextualize and dispel prejudices, while uncovering, digitizing, and preserving new archival materials to amplify a more inclusive visual landscape."Picturing Black History offers a trove of both famous and unseen photos with brief, poignant accompanying essays to show not only the centrality of Black people to American history but also how African Americans used the photographer’s lens to tell their own stories. The editors, authors, and Getty images have created a beautiful book that stands on its own as a work of art, a veritable museum in print.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

In Heretics and Colonizers, Nicholas B. Breyfogle explores the dynamic intersection of Russian borderland colonization and popular religious culture. He reconstructs the story of the religious sectarians (Dukhobors, Molokans, and Subbotniks) who settled, either voluntarily or by force, in the newly conquered lands of Transcaucasia in the nineteenth century. By ordering this migration in 1830, Nicholas I attempted at once to cleanse Russian Orthodoxy of heresies and to populate the newly annexed lands with ethnic Slavs who would shoulder the burden of imperial construction. Breyfogle focuses throughout on the lives of the peasant settlers, their interactions with the peoples and environment of the South Caucasus, and their evolving relations with Russian state power. He draws on a wide variety of archival sources, including a large collection of previously unexamined letters, memoirs, and other documents produced by the sectarians that allow him unprecedented insight into the experiences of colonization and religious life. Although the settlers suffered greatly in their early years in hostile surroundings, they in time proved to be not only model Russian colonists but also among the most prosperous of the Empire's peasants. Banished to the empire's periphery, the sectarians ironically came to play indispensable roles in the tsarist imperial agenda. The book culminates with the dramatic events of the Dukhobor pacifist rebellion, a movement that shocked the tsarist government and received international attention. In the early twentieth century, as the Russian state sought to replace the sectarians with Orthodox settlers, thousands of Molokans and Dukhobors immigrated to North America, where their descendants remain to this day.

In Heretics and Colonizers, Nicholas B. Breyfogle explores the dynamic intersection of Russian borderland colonization and popular religious culture. He reconstructs the story of the religious sectarians (Dukhobors, Molokans, and Subbotniks) who settled, either voluntarily or by force, in the newly conquered lands of Transcaucasia in the nineteenth century. By ordering this migration in 1830, Nicholas I attempted at once to cleanse Russian Orthodoxy of heresies and to populate the newly annexed lands with ethnic Slavs who would shoulder the burden of imperial construction. Breyfogle focuses throughout on the lives of the peasant settlers, their interactions with the peoples and environment of the South Caucasus, and their evolving relations with Russian state power. He draws on a wide variety of archival sources, including a large collection of previously unexamined letters, memoirs, and other documents produced by the sectarians that allow him unprecedented insight into the experiences of colonization and religious life. Although the settlers suffered greatly in their early years in hostile surroundings, they in time proved to be not only model Russian colonists but also among the most prosperous of the Empire's peasants. Banished to the empire's periphery, the sectarians ironically came to play indispensable roles in the tsarist imperial agenda. The book culminates with the dramatic events of the Dukhobor pacifist rebellion, a movement that shocked the tsarist government and received international attention. In the early twentieth century, as the Russian state sought to replace the sectarians with Orthodox settlers, thousands of Molokans and Dukhobors immigrated to North America, where their descendants remain to this day.