author
Frank Alfred Golder
1877–1929
A historian of Russia who saw upheaval at close range, he helped build one of the most important collections of Russian and East European materials in the United States. His work joined scholarship, travel, and first-hand observation at a remarkable moment in modern history.
1 Audiobook
The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement
by Alexander Petrunkevitch, Frank Alfred Golder, Samuel N. (Samuel Northrup) Harper, Robert Joseph Kerner
About the author
Born near Odessa on August 11, 1877, and brought to the United States as a small child, Frank Alfred Golder became an American historian and archivist with a lasting focus on Russia. He studied at Bucknell University and later taught history at Washington State College and Stanford, building a reputation as a specialist in Russian history.
Golder is especially remembered for helping create the Russian and Eurasian holdings that became a cornerstone of the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford. In the early 1920s he traveled through Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia collecting books, newspapers, pamphlets, and archival materials at a time when much of that record could easily have been lost.
His career was shaped by direct experience as well as scholarship. He visited Russia repeatedly during the years around World War I, the Revolution, and the early Soviet period, and his diaries and letters were valued for the vivid way they recorded those changes. He died at Stanford on January 7, 1929, leaving behind both historical writing and an extraordinary documentary legacy.