Jonathan Daly, PhD
Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of History
History (late imperial Russia and early Soviet, intellectual, comparative development)
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1019 UH
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601 S Morgan St.
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About
Jonathan Daly teaches Russian, European, and world history, focusing on Western Civilization’s shaping of the modern world and the unequal struggle between the Russian state and society.
His books, Autocracy under Siege (Northern Illinois University Press, 1998) and The Watchful State (Northern Illinois University Press, 2004), examine confrontations between revolutionaries and the security police in Russia before 1917. Daly compiled Russia in War and Revolution, 1914-1922: A Documentary History (Hackett Publishing Company, 2009) and The Russian Revolution and Its Global Impact: A Short History with Documents (Hackett Publishing Company, 2017) and co-authored Seven Myths of the Russian Revolution (Hackett Publishing Company, 2023) with his former Ph.D. student, Leonid Trofimov, for use in teaching.
The Rise of Western Power: A Comparative History of Western Civilization, 2nd ed. (Bloomsbury, 2021) interprets the West’s rise to world preeminence (for historical images, maps, and primary source documents, see the book’s companion website). Historians Debate the Rise of the West (Routledge, 2015) summarizes the arguments of two dozen scholars. How Europe Made the Modern World: Creating the Great Divergence (Bloomsbury, 2020) sums up Daly's latest thinking about the rise of the West.
Hammer, Sickle, and Soil: The Soviet Drive to Collectivize Agriculture (Hoover Institution Press, 2017) tells the harrowing story of Stalin's transformation of millions of family farms throughout the USSR into 250,000 collective farms during the period from 1929 to 1933. Daly’s Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin (Bloomsbury, 2018) surveys the evolution of Russia’s criminal justice system during the past three centuries.
Daly has completed an intellectual biography of historian and Sovietologist Richard Pipes. For this project, he has edited the correspondence of Pipes with another major Russian historian, Marc Raeff: Pillars of the Profession: The Correspondence of Richard Pipes and Marc Raeff (Brill, 2019). He is now commencing work on a new translation of Boris Savinkov’s Memoirs of a Terrorist, which his colleague Scott Smith left unfinished at the time of his death in 2017.
He is enthusiastic about working with graduate students on late Imperial and early Soviet political, institutional, and legal history and historiography.