Biography
Biography
My specialization is Russian to 1917. My research and teaching interests include the History of Imperial Russia (1649-1917); social, intellectual, political and diplomatic.
Education
Ph.D., Columbia
M.A., Toronto
B.A., Toronto
Books
United Government and Russian Foreign Policy, 1900-1914
David McDonald. United Government and Russian Foreign Policy, 1900-1914. Harvard University Press, 1992.
In 1904 a small, distant war brought Russia to the brink of internal collapse – and yet within ten years the country embroiled itself in an incomparably larger conflict close to home. How the war with Japan and its aftermath actually steered Russia toward such an unlikely, fateful decision is the subject of David McDonald’s book, an analysis of Russian foreign policy on the eve of World War I. The revolutions that followed the Russo-Japanese War confirmed Russian statesmen in their belief that complications abroad threatened the domestic order. McDonald shows how this perceived connection prompted the institutional measures intended to minimize the risks of foreign entanglements, principally the reform of the Council of Ministers as a “United Government” that would share the emperor’s role in forming foreign policy. These measures, as McDonald demonstrates, had a decisive effect on Russia’s restrained response to trouble in the Balkans, and consequently, on the course of world history. McDonald’s analysis integrates the history of Russian foreign policy at this critical juncture with accounts of the “crisis of autocracy” that marked the early 20th century. Depicting Nicholas II’s struggle with his ministers over the direction of foreign policy, the book offers insight into the evaluation of the bureaucratic state and its relation to domestic society in late imperial Russia.
Selected Publications
- “Dreams of Dukhoboriia: The Russian Revolution and Canada’s Dukhobors,” forthcoming in M. Neuberger, C. Chatterjee, S. Marks and S. Sabol, The Wider Arc of Revolution [working title of volume in series Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914- 1922 (Slavica Publishers).
- “Sport History and the Historical Profession,” in R. Edelman et alii, eds., The Oxford Handbook to Sport History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 61-78.
- “The State, Domestic Factors and the World Outside, 1700-2005,” in Robert Legvold, ed., Russian Foreign Policy in the 21st Century & the Shadow of the Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007): 145-205
Books
[uw_publications]
History Courses
- History 120 – Europe and the Modern World 1815 to the Present
- History 200 – Historical Studies
- History 201 – The Historian’s Craft: “Cold War On Ice – The 1972 ‘Summit Series’ in Context’
- History 201 – The Historian’s Craft: “Crisis in Canada: October 1970”
- History 201 – The Historian’s Craft: “The July Crisis, 1914 and the Coming of the Great War”
- History 253 – Russia: An Interdisciplinary Survey
- History 417 – History of Russia to 1801, The Making of Modern Russia
- History 418 – History of Russia
- History 420 – Russian Social and Intellectual History
- History 600 – Women in Imperial Russia
- History 600 – Major League Baseball & American Society since World War II
- History 600 – Imperial Russia 1649-1917
- History 680/690 – Honors Thesis Colloquium History 825 – Europe & the Coming of the Great War
- History 753 – Readings in Transnational Military Culture & Thought, a.k.a. “Classics & Culture”
- History 849 – Russia and the World 1815-2005
- History 849 – Imperial Russia 1649-1917