LATEST DISCOUNTS & SALES: PROMOTIONS

Close Notification

Your cart does not contain any items

The Four Horsemen

Riding to Liberty in Post-Napoleonic Europe

Richard Stites

$127.95

Hardback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

QTY:

English
Oxford University Press
12 January 2014
In a series of revolts starting in 1820, four military officers rode forth on horseback from obscure European towns to bring political freedom and a constitution to Spain, Naples, and Russia; and national independence to the Greeks. The men who launched these exploits from Andalusia to the snowy fields of Ukraine--Colonel Rafael del Riego, General Guglielmo Pepe, General Alexandros Ypsilanti, and Colonel Sergei Muraviev-Apostol--all hoped to overturn the old order. Over the next six years, their revolutions ended in failure. The men who led them became martyrs.

In The Four Horsemen, the late, eminent historian Richard Stites offers a compelling narrative history of these four revolutions. Stites sets the stories side by side, allowing him to compare events and movements and so illuminate such topics as the transfer of ideas and peoples across frontiers, the formation of an international community of revolutionaries, and the appropriation of Christian symbols and language for secular purposes. He shows how expressive behavior and artifacts of all kinds--art, popular festivities, propaganda, and religion--worked their way to various degrees into all the revolutionary movements and regimes. And he documents as well the corruption, abandonment of liberal values, and outright betrayal of the revolution that emerged in Spain and Naples; the clash of ambitions and ideas that wracked the unity of the Decembrists' cause; and civil war that erupted in the midst of the Greek struggle for independence.

Richard Stites was one of the most imaginative and broad-ranging historians working in the United States. This book is his last work, a classic example of his dazzling knowledge and idiosyncratic yet accessible writing style. The culmination of an esteemed career, The Four Horsemen promises to enthrall anyone interested in nineteenth-century Europe and the history of revolutions.

By:  
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 236mm,  Width: 163mm,  Spine: 36mm
Weight:   720g
ISBN:   9780199978083
ISBN 10:   0199978085
Pages:   416
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Editors' Preface Preface I. Before the Barricades Went Up II. Rafael Del Riego: The Ride through Andalusia III. Guglielmo Pepe: Marching into Naples IV. Alexandros Yspilanti: Across the River Pruth V. Sergei Muraviev-Apostol: Into the Steppe VI. The Torn Cloth of Memory Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index

<br>Richard Stites was Professor of History and International Affairs at Georgetown University. A groundbreaking historian who opened up new territory with landmark works on the Russian women's movement and on Russian and Soviet mass culture, he also translated and edited a three-volume account of the Russian Revolution by Pavel Miliukov, and was a co-author of the widely used textbook A History of Russia: Peoples, Legends, Events, Forces.<br>

Reviews for The Four Horsemen: Riding to Liberty in Post-Napoleonic Europe

...astute and engagingly written Gabriel Paquette, The Time Literary Supplement


See Also