Marshall Poe

American historian

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

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.

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). 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."

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).

In 2011, Poe published A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet, a 337 page book that analyzes how media networks originate, how they function and how they shape social practices and values. Poe explains in the book's introduction that he is seeking to expand and refine the communications theories of the late Canadian scholar Harold Innis. In his 1950 book Empire and Communications, Innis conducted a sweeping historical survey of how various media influenced the rise and fall of empires from ancient to modern times. Poe advances the idea that new media are developed by inventors and tinkerers, but are not "pulled" into broad use until "organized interests" recognize their need for these new communications tools. He argues, for example, that audiovisual media such as radio, telephone, television and film were developed well before they were taken up by industrial capitalists who needed more effective ways to market the goods they produced. Audiovisual media also served the interests of bureaucrats and politicians who gained popularity by giving citizens access to modern conveniences. "Modern states are welfare states," Poe writes, "and welfare states make sure their citizens have things to listen to and watch." In turn, audiovisual media shaped social practices and values. They "pushed" societies into a hedonistic pursuit of private entertainment justified by people's need for relaxation in an otherwise stressful society. And, since evolutionary psychology suggests that human beings find it easier to listen and watch than to read and write, audiovisual media caught on rapidly. "When faced with reading a good book," Poe writes, "or watching an awful TV show, most people will watch the awful TV show."

Marshall founded New Books in History in 2007, and the New Books Network in 2011; in 2014 resigning his tenured professorship to work on it full time. The network describes itself as "a consortium of podcasts dedicated to raising the level of public discourse by introducing serious authors to serious audiences." At first, Poe himself interviewed the authors of new non fiction books for the website that was then called New Books in History. At the beginning of 2020, NBN had 104 channels, publishing 60 interviews a week, with over a million downloads a month. In December 2021 NBN podcasts were downloaded 4.77 million times. Listennotes rank NBN in the top 1% of podcasts worldwide. NBN had published more than 9,500 interviews by the end of 2020. devoted to new books on subjects ranging from African American studies and economics to philosophy and sports. Poe invites volunteers who are knowledgeable about a subject to conduct "radio interviews" with authors of new books in that subject area. "It's premised on the idea that while most people won't read serious books, they might listen to the authors of those books talk about the ideas in them," Poe told an interviewer. "Reading is hard and inconvenient; listening is easy and convenient. We interview authors with new books, make 'radio shows' out of them, and distribute them on the web as podcasts." In August, 2020, the NBN closed a seed funding round with a group of international investors." In October 2020 NBN starting producing a podcast series in partnership with Princeton University Press called the Princeton University Press Ideas Podcast. In 2021 NBN started a series with Oxford University Press called In Conversation: An OUP Podcast., and launched in Spanish. In 2022 The New Books Network announced that was going to start paying its hosts, and engaged former BBC World Service journalist Owen Bennett Jones to produce a series called "The Future of". In 2022 NBN started a series with Cambridge University Press called Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast, and a partnership with Columbia University Press called "Off the Page". In August 2022 NBN published its 15,000th podcast, stating that this made it "one of the largest podcast networks in the world". On the 3rd January 2023 the NBN informed hosts that the network had 17500 podcasts published, 4000 in 2022 alone. In 2023 the NBN started co operation with MIT Press. In 2023 the total number of podcasts published by the NBN exceeded 22,000. A new website was launched February 2024 with listener account features.

"Russian despotism" : the origins and dissemination of an early modern commonplace. Thesis (Ph. D. in history). University of California, Berkeley, 1993. Foreign descriptions of Muscovy: an analytic bibliography of primary and secondary sources. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1995
A people born to slavery: Russia in early modern European ethnography, 1476–1748. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000
(Ed.) The military and society in Russia: 1450 1917, edited by Eric Lohr and Marshall Poe. Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill, 2002. (Ed.) The resistance debate in Russian and Soviet history, edited by Michael David Fox, Peter Holquist, Marshall Poe. Bloomington, Ind. : Slavica Publishers, 2003
(Ed.) Early exploration of Russia, edited by Marshall Poe. New York: Routledge, 2003. (Ed.) Modernizing Muscovy: reform and social change in seventeenth century Russia, edited by Jarmo Kotilaine and Marshall Poe. New York : RoutledgeCurzon, 2004
The Russian elite in the seventeenth century. Vol. 1, The consular and ceremonial ranks of the Russian "Sovereigns court" 1613–1713. (Suomalaisen tiedeakatemian toimituksia. Sarja Humaniora, 322, ISSN 1239 6982). Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004
The Russian elite in the seventeenth century. Vol. 2, A quantitative analysis of the "Duma ranks" 1613–1713. (Suomalaisen tiedeakatemian toimituksia. Sarja Humaniora, 323) Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004. Electronic edition (PDF) available from Harvard University here (alternative link, at Michigan State University library)
How to Read a History Book: The Hidden History of History (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2018).