Marshall T. Poe, Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa, is the author or editor of several books, including A People Born to Slavery: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography (2000), The Russian Elite in the Seventeenth Century (2004) and The Russian Moment in World History (2006). He is the co-founder and editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and founder and host of 'New Books in History' (http: //newbooksinhistory.com), as well as a former writer and editor for the Atlantic Monthly. Professor Poe has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced