At the time of writing in January 2022, American activity in the Crimean War has received little scholarly attention. To date, Matthew Moten’s work on the Delafield Commission, published in 2000, remains the most significant examination of the subject. Prior to Moten’s book, the most substantive treatment of the topic existed in articles by Frank Golder (1926) and Eufrosina Dvoichenko-Markov (1954). Subsequently, Joseph Bradely and Norman Saul elaborated elements of the Russian-American wartime relationship around weapons manufacturing and trade.  More recently, Lee A. Farrow’s work on the Catacazy Affair addressed the Benjamin Perkins claim in detail, while William Benton Whisenhunt has investigated American doctors. Finally, Chuck Veit’s work on the salvage expedition in Sevastopol offers fascinating insight into post-war American-Russian relations, and should not be missed.

See also Frank Golder’s 1917 A Guide to Materials for American History in Russian Archives, which records the locations and types of correspondence between the American and Russian embassies during the Crimean War.

Select Secondary Sources

1. Bradley, Joseph. Guns for the Tsar: American Technology and the Small Arms Industry in Nineteenth-Century Russia. DeKalb, ILL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990.
2. Dvoichenko-Markov, Eufrosina. “Americans in the Crimean War.” Russian Review 13, no. 2 (April 1954): 137–45.
3. Golder, Frank A. “Russian-American Relations During the Crimean War.” The U. America Historical Review 31, no. 3 (April 1926): 462–76.
4. Golder, Frank. A Guide to Materials for American History in Russian Archives. Washington, D.C.: the Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917.
5. Farrow, Lee A. “A Reexamination of the Perkins Claim,” in New Perspectives in Russian-American Relations, vol. 1 (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), pp. 74-87.
6. Farrow, Lee A. The Catacazy Affair and the Uneasy Path of Russian American Relations. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2022.
7. Moten, Matthew. The Delafield Commission and the American Military Profession. College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 2000.
8. Saul, Norman E. Distant Friends: The United States and Russia: 1763-1867. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1991.
9. Veit, Chuck. The Yankee Expedition to Sebastopol: John Gowen and the Raising of the Black Sea Fleet, 1857-1862. Attleboro, MA: Lulu.com, 2015.
10. Whisenhunt, William Benton. “In Service to the Tsar: American Surgeons in the Crimean War, 1853-1856.” In New Perspectives in Russian American Relations, 51-63, edited by William Benton Whistenhunt and Normal Saul. London: Routledge Studies in Cultural History, 2015.