Marshall Poe

It provides an overview of more than 1,400 years of Russian history beginning in the 6th to 9th centuries with the migration of Slavs from central Europe to the northeast.

Marshall Tillbrook Poe (born December 29, 1961) is an American historian, writer, editor and founder of the New Books Network, an online collection of podcast interviews with a wide range of non-fiction authors.

He has taught Russian, European, Eurasian and World history at various universities including Harvard, Columbia, University of Iowa, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

He has also taught courses on new media and online collaboration.

Poe is the author or editor of a number of books on early modern Russia.

He has also published A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet, a book that examines how various communications media shape social practices and values.

Marshall Poe was born in Huntsville, Alabama on December 29, 1961.

His early schooling was hampered by what he has called "pretty severe dyslexia."

As a result, he did not learn to read until the second or third grade in primary school.

Poe graduated from Wichita Southeast High School in 1980 and earned his B.A. in 1984 at Grinnell College where he was named outstanding student in history.

He earned his M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986 and his Ph.D in history at Berkeley in 1992.

He taught at Harvard University from 1989 to 1996 and again from 1999 to 2002, during which time he was appointed Allston Burr Senior Tutor at Harvard's Lowell House where he managed a college of 600 undergraduate students and 50 tutors and staff.

It ends with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Poe argues the Soviet Union did not collapse because of the failure of Communism as many pundits assert.

Rather, he contends that the Communist Party lost faith in the traditional path that had not only preserved Russian independence for almost five centuries, but had also enabled the country to build a huge empire.

That path included a reliance on autocratic leadership, a command economy, tight controls on debate in the public sphere and a state-engineered military.

"Using these means," Poe writes, "the Russian elite was able to take a primitive, premodern state and transform it in the course of two centuries into one of the most powerful enterprises on earth. It is difficult to see how such a thing could be seen as a failure."

He also taught at New York University (1999), American University (2005), the University of Iowa (2007-2013) and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2013-2014).

He has held fellowships at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard; the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey; and the Harriman Institute for Russian Studies at Columbia University.

At the Institute for Advanced Study, Poe played guitar and sang in a loud rock and roll band called "Do Not Erase," consisting entirely of fellows at the institute.

The name of the band is taken from what mathematicians write under their long theorems and proofs on chalk boards, so that janitors won't erase them, especially if their equations have discovered something new.

Marshall Poe's writing ranges from academic articles and books to magazine and Internet pieces intended for wider audiences.

He has written extensively on Russian history as well on communications, the Internet and Wikipedia.

Poe is the co-founder and a former editor of the academic journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. He is the author or editor of several books on Russia including A People Born to Slavery: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography (2000) and The Russian Elite in the Seventeenth Century (2004).

From 2003 to 2005, Poe conducted research for The Atlantic magazine and co-wrote the regular feature "Primary Sources.".

Poe has also written a number of articles for The Atlantic including "Life on Mars" (2004); "How to Beat a Drug Test" (2005); and "Colleges Should Teach Religion to Their Students" (2014).

Poe became known for his commentary on Wikipedia following the publication of his article "The Hive" in The Atlantic.

In 2005, Poe founded the now-defunct MemoryArchive, a universal wiki-type archive of contemporary memoirs.

It encouraged people to contribute written accounts of their personal memories that would be part of a searchable, online database.

There he contributed numerous personal accounts of his own, from playing basketball with Barack Obama, to stumbling onto a crime scene of Dennis Rader's, the BTK serial killer.

A typical one, in the magazine's July/August 2005 edition, provided information on a variety of studies and reports supported by online links.

For example, it included a study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences warning about the security risks posed by pools of spent fuel from nuclear power plants; a report from a Brussels-based think tank noting that in spite of fears expressed by U.S. officials, Iran did not appear to be much of a threat to Iraq and a report from the Pew Hispanic Centre showing that increased security measures since 9/11 had not stopped the flow of illegal immigrants into the U.S.

With Wikipedia "taking off" in 2005, he thought its history could be interesting, so he wrote the piece "on spec".

In 2006, Poe wrote an influential commentary on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, while serving as a writer, researcher and editor at The Atlantic magazine.

The Russian Moment in World History (2006) is a brief, 116 page book that was written for the general public.

His gamble paid off when the editors published it in the summer of 2006.

Poe's article traces the history of how the co-founders of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, gradually moved from their original idea for an online encyclopedia called Nupedia, written and edited by experts, to one in which any online user could contribute.

He concludes that Wikipedia's "communal regime" permitted rapid growth as well as organization and improvement.

"The result of this difference is there for all to see," he writes, "much of the Internet is a chaotic mess and therefore useless, whereas Wikipedia is well ordered and hence very useful."

Poe's work on Russian history has brought back from obscurity the writings of the 16th-century Austrian diplomat Sigismund von Herberstein, who was one of the first European ethnographers of Russia.