Donald G. Ostrowski

Donald "Don" Gary Ostrowski (born 1945) is an American historian, and a lecturer in history at Harvard Extension School.

Biography Ostrowski received his PhD in history from Pennsylvania State University in 1977. Together with scholars such as Oleksiy Tolochko and (1917–2009), Ostrowski is credited with having reignited interest in textual criticism of the Primary Chronicle around the year 2000. His work in advancing this field has been praised by many, though some parts of his methodology have been questioned by fellow scholars.

Ostrowski's other publications include Who Wrote That? Authorship Controversies from Moses to Sholokhov (2020) and two other monographs, and six co-edited collections of articles. Serhii Plokhy (2006) said that Ostrowski's monograph Muscovy and the Mongols (1998) 'successfully challenged the myth of the "Tatar yoke" and persuasively identified numerous borrowings of the Muscovite political elite and society from their Qipchaq overlords.' The evidence put forth had made it 'difficult to reject the argument of Russian Eurasianists and Western scholars like Keenan and Ostrowski that the early modern Russian state was much more a product of its recent Mongol experience than of the chronologically and geographically removed Kyivan past.' The book also re-dated all of the literary works of the Kulikovo cycle to after the 1440s, a significant conclusion for dating the translatio of the Rus' land from the Middle Dnieper to Suzdalia.

Selected works Co-edited works (Harvard University Press, 2004 ).

Donald Ostrowski, "Redating the Life of Alexander Nevskii," in Rude and Barbarous Kingdom Revisited: Essays in Russian History in Honor of Robert O. Crummey, ed. Chester Dunning, Russell E. Martin, and Daniel Rowland (Bloomington: Slavica, 2008), 23–39. (co-editor with Marshall Poe) Portraits of Old Russia: Imagined Lives of Ordinary People, 1300–1725 (M.E. Sharpe, 2011).

Monographs (PhD dissertation)

Journal articles (chronological selection) “The Debate over the Authorship of the Rus’ Primary Chronicle: Compilations, Redactions, and Urtexts,” in Historioraphy and Identity, vol. 5: The Emergence of New Peoples and Polities in Europe 1000–1300, edited by Walter Pohl, Francescro Borri, and Veronika Wieser. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023, pp. 415–448.

“Second-Redaction Additions in Carpini’s Ystoria Mongalorum,” Adelphotes: A Tribute to Omeljan Pritsak by His Students, Cambridge, MA (=Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol. 14, 1990) 1991, pp. 522–550. “The Mongols in the Eyes of the Rus’,” in The Mongol World, edited by Timothy May and Michael Hope. London: Routledge, 2022, pp. 826–841. “Church Polemics and Monastic Land Acquisition in Sixteenth-Century Muscovy,” Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 64, 1986, pp. 355–379 (reprinted in Major Problems in Early Modern Russian History, edited by Nancy Shields Kollmann, New York: Garland Publishing, 1992, pp. 129–153). “Unresolved Evidentiary Issues concerning Rus’ Heretics of the Late Fifteenth–Early Sixteenth Centuries,” in Seeing Muscovy Anew: Politics—Institutions—Culture in Honor of Nancy Shields Kollmann, edited by Michael S. Flier, Valerie A. Kivelson, Erika Monahan, and Daniel Rowland. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Press, 2017, pp. 123–139. “Peter’s Dragoons: How the Russians Won at Poltava,” in Poltava 1709: The Battle and the Myth, edited by Serhii Plokhy. Cambridge, MA: Distributed by Harvard University Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2012, pp. 81–106. “The Replacement of the Composite Reflex Bow by Firearms in the Muscovite Cavalry,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 11, no. 3 (Summer 2010), pp. 513–534; reprinted with illustrations in Everyday Life in Russian History: Quotidian Studies in Honor of Daniel Kaiser, edited by Gary Marker, Joan Neuberger, Marshall Poe, and Susan Rapp, Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2010, pp. 203–227. “Alexander Nevskii’s ‘Battle on the Ice’: The Creation of a Legend.” Russian History/Histoire Russe, vol. 33 (2006), pp. 289–312. “The Return of the Rhos: Patria, Chacanus, and the Annales Bertiniani.” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, vol. 52, no. 2/3 (2018), pp. 290–311. “Was There a Riurikid Dynasty in Early Rus’?” Canadian-American Slavic Studies, vol. 52, no. 1 (2018), pp. 30–49.

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