20th Century

A number-one New York Times best seller and arguably the best business narrative ever written, Barbarians at the Gate is the classic account of the fall of RJR Nabisco....

In December 1937, in the capital of China, one of the most brutal massacres in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred.

Drawing on previously unpublished eyewitness accounts, prizewinning historian Donald L. Miller has written what critics are calling one of the most powerful accounts of warfare ever published....

Now available in audio for the first time, Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews - now with a new afterword and additional photographs....

This Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire....

In the darkest moment of history, one child found the courage and strength to survive the unimaginable. This is Henry’s true story....

In this magisterial and acclaimed history, Anne Applebaum offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag....

Night is an unmistakably autobiographical account of the author's own gruesome experiences in Nazi Germany's death camps....

The definitive account of Germany's malign transformation under Hitler's total rule and the implacable march to war....

The British Secret Service has been cloaked in secrecy and shrouded in myth since it was created 100 years ago. MI6 provides a unique and unprecedented insight into this secret world and the reality that lies behind the fiction....

Dulcie Bodsworth was the unlikeliest serial killer. She was loved everywhere she went, and the townsfolk of Wilcannia, which she called home in the late 1950s, thought of her as kind and caring....

Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch watchmaker who became a heroine of the Resistance, a survivor of Hitler's concentration camps, and one of the most remarkable evangelists of the 20h century....

Reinhard Heydrich is widely recognized as one of the great iconic villains of the 20th century, an appalling figure even within the context of the Nazi leadership....

Stuart Smith draws on years of in-depth research to uncover the truth about SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny's career and complex personality....

Blind Man's Bluff shows for the first time how the navy sent submarines wired with self-destruct charges into the heart of Soviet seas to tap crucial underwater telephone cables....

At one time, Corrie ten Boom would have laughed at the idea that she had a story to tell.....

In the inspiring tradition of Black Hawk Down, this is the riveting real-life story of how an Australian SAS signalman's courage under fire saved more than 80 lives....

In this fascinating work, winner of the Wolfson Prize for History Mark Mazower uncovers the history of the Balkans with detail and clarity....

As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics....

In 1945, after his capture at the end of the Second World War, Hermann Göring arrived at an American-run detention center in war-torn Luxembourg, accompanied by sixteen suitcases and a red hatbox.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, an iconic figure of the 20th century, was a brilliant physicist who led efforts to build an atomic bomb but later confronted the moral consequences of scientific progress....

The fighting that raged in the East during the First World War was every bit as fierce as that on the Western Front, but the titanic clashes between three towering empires....

In the early 1970s, Britain seemed to be tottering on the brink of the abyss....

In the early 1970s, Britain seemed to be tottering on the brink of the abyss....

Blood and Sand is a tale of conspiracy and revolutions, spies and terrorists, kidnappings and assassination plots, the fall of the British Empire and the rise of American hegemony....

In early 1943, three Axis defeats changed the course of World War II: at Guadalcanal in the Pacific, Stalingrad in Russia and Tunisia in North Africa. Historians have recognized the significance of the first two campaigns, but not Tunisia which they have either ignored or characterized (as the Americans did at the time) as a sideshow. Yet it ended Axis seapower in the Mediterranean, destroyed more than 2,400 Axis aircraft (40 per cent of the Luftwaffe’s strength), and resulted in the surrender of over 250,000 German and Italian troops, as many as were captured at Stalingrad.

In October 1977, an unknown German police unit made global headlines by storming a hijacked Lufthansa airliner in Mogadishu, Somalia. Operatives of GSG 9 freed eighty-six hostages, eliminated three of the four terrorists, and emerged with a near-total victory. This daring rescue left the world in awe, including the US military. President Carter asked, "Do we have the same capability as the West Germans?" The answer was no—and it was this realization that impelled the creation of Delta Force.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Leon Trotsky, Reinhard Heydrich, Mahatma Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Osama bin Laden, Qasem Soleimani: assassination—the murder of a specific individual by an organized conspiracy in pursuit of political ends—has rarely failed to grip the imagination. In this incisive new history, Simon Ball shows how targeted political murder has become a tool of democratic states but also a key strategy of those who wish to topple them.

Saudi Arabia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, a major player on the international stage and the site of Islam's two holiest cities. It is also one of the world's only absolute monarchies. How did Saudi Arabia get to where it is today?

Born in 1943, the author spent his first fourteen years on the move—across Montreal, Canada, three northern states, two southern states, and eight different schools. Each stop brought new friendships, challenges, and a front-row seat to a rapidly changing America in the years after World War II. Told with warmth, wit, and an eye for cultural detail, this memoir is a vivid portrait of boyhood in mid-century North America—complete with dormitories, classrooms, small-town streets, and the quiet moments that shape a life.