Browse Collections (29 total)

Collections of the annotations used to reflect upon, expand upon, contextualize, link, or question the content of the site. Each annotation is linked to the material that inspired it via Item Relations.

The talents of Carlo Bossoli (1815-1884), a Swiss-born Italian artist who spent his youth in Odessa, attracted the attention of no less a figure than Count Mikhail Vorontsov, governor-general of New Russia and Bessarabia. Vorontsov commissed a series of views of Odessa, which Bossoli executed with success. Between 1840 and 1842 Bossoli lived on…

Care to look under the hood?

Illustrations from a volume held at the John Hay Library, Brown University

In simplest terms, adacha was a portion of land given out by the tsar. The apportioning of land to servitors and favorites was hardly an innovation, but over the course of the eighteenth century the dacha became ever more closely associated with the expansion of the empire. Early in the century, Peter I imbued the dacha with a distinctly strategic…

Still images of the core layers of the Vil'brekht atlas sheet. Each feature in each layer has been digitized and provided with a basic symbology. (In GIS, a layer is a container for features of the same type (points, lines, polygons).)

This collection contains six images from the volume published by Count A. S. Uvarov under the title Collection of maps and drawings for the study of the antiquities of Southern Russia and the Shores of the Black Sea. In part, this was the illustrated companion to Uvarov's Recherches sur les antiquités de la Russie méridionale et des côtes de la…

These are the core historical maps which I have mined for spatial data. I have used them to help me locate places that no longer exist, as well as to think about how Crimean space was conceptualized - and how places were defined in relation to one another - in the 19th century.

This collection contains biographical sketches of the 39 members of the Crimean Tatar elite who were registered as members of the nobility of Tavrida Province and whose noble status was recognized by the imperial government in St. Petersburg.Official recognition of noble status came via approval of the Heraldry Office and subsequent inscription in…