Showing titles in 20th Century

Telling the rousing story of a Jewish boy who fled persecution and returned to prosecute the Nazi oppressors, Walter Wolff's daughter Nina has reconstructed these events from family lore and her father’s own cache of more than 700 wartime letters and 200 photographs, which he revealed to her shortly before he died.

On March 30, 1981, President Reagan walked out of a hotel in Washington, D.C. and was shot by a would-be assassin. For years, few people knew the truth about how close the president came to dying, and no one has ever written a detailed narrative of that harrowing day. Now, drawing on exclusive new interviews, Del Quentin Wilber tells the electrifying story of a moment when the nation teetered on the brink of chaos.

In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, author Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulations than to redeploy them at a global level.

We live in an age that seems eerily familiar. A time of dictators, populists, organised lying, European wars, grabs for territory, ideological extremism and even antisemitism, a time when things are falling apart and the centre is struggling to hold. It has all happened before, in the 1920s and 1930s. History is sending us a warning, and unless we heed it, history will have its revenge as we repeat the disaster of the 1940s. The world needs to learn the lessons of these decades, and fast.

The Russian Revolution had a decisive impact on the history of the 20th century. In the years following the collapse of the Soviet regime and the opening of its archives, it has become possible to step back and see the full picture. Starting with an overview of the roots of the revolution, Fitzpatrick takes the story from 1917, through Stalin's "revolution from above", to the great purges of the 1930s.

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour. World War Two was one of the most devastating conflicts the world has ever seen. Between 1939 and 1945 almost every country in the world was affected by the war in some way. World War Two: History in an Hour neatly covers all the major facts...

The 1980s was the revolutionary decade of the 20th century. From the Falklands war and the miners' strike to Bobby Sands and the Guildford Four, from Diana and the New Romantics to Live Aid and the 'big bang', from the Rubik's cube to the ZX Spectrum, McSmith's brilliant narrative account uncovers the truth behind the decade that changed Britain forever - politically, economically and culturally.

On October 14, 1943, 600 Jews imprisoned in Sobibor, a secret Nazi death camp in eastern Poland, revolted. They killed a dozen SS officers and guards, trampled the barbed wire fences, and raced across an open field filled with anti-tank mines. Against all odds, more than three hundred made it safely into the woods. Fifty of those men and women managed to survive the rest of the war. In this edition of Escape from Sobibor, fully updated in 2012, Richard Rashke tells their stories

The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, yet today it is often dismissed as Himmler's personal obsession or wildly overstated for its novelty. Preposterous though it was, however, supernatural thinking was inextricable from the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion.

Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe were philosophy students at Oxford during the Second World War when most male undergraduates (and many tutors) were conscripted. Taught by refugee scholars, women and conscientious objectors, the four friends developed a philosophy that could respond to the war's darkest revelations.

Simo Häyhä was a man of action who spoke very little, but he was respected by his men and his superiors and given many difficult missions, including taking out specific targets. Able to move silently and swiftly through the landscape, melting into the snowbound surroundings in his white camouflage fatigues, his aim was deadly and his quarry rarely escaped. The Russians learned of his reputation as a marksman and tried several times to kill him by indirect fire. He was promoted from corporal to second lieutenant and he was awarded the Cross of Kollaa.

Explore the rise of Adolf Hitler. Was Hitler, as Ian Kershaw asked, a natural consequence of German history, or an aberration? Not that Hitler had been in hiding, waiting to attack. The Führer had actually been following an aggressive and savage foreign policy for almost 10 years, and been named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1938.

Nowhere in Africa is the extraordinary tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi regime in 1938 for a remote farm in Kenya. Abandoning their once-comfortable existence in Germany, Walter Redlich, his wife Jettel, and their five-year-old daughter, Regina, each deal with the harsh realities of their new life in different ways. Attorney Walter is resigned to working the farm as a caretaker; pampered Jettel resists adjustment at every turn; while the shy yet curious Regina immediately embraces the country - learning the local language and customs.

A New Yorker staff writer, investigates his grandfather, a Nazi Party Chief, in this "unflinching, gorgeously written, and deeply moving exploration of morality, family, and war” (Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain) ‘The book we need right now’ Atul Gawande, author of Being...

From 1934 until 1944, Mussolini met Hitler numerous times, and the two developed a relationship that deeply affected both countries. While Germany is generally regarded as the senior power, Christian Goeschel demonstrates just how much history has underrepresented Mussolini's influence on his German ally. Goeschel, a scholar of 20th-century Germany and Italy, revisits all of Mussolini and Hitler's key meetings and asks how these meetings constructed a powerful image of a strong Fascist-Nazi relationship that still resonates with the general public.

A former Wall Street Journal editor and the current president and CEO of the Atlantic Council, Frederick Kempe draws on recently released documents and personal interviews to re-create the powder keg that was 1961 Berlin. In Cold War Berlin, the United States and the Soviet Union stand nose to nose, with the possibility of nuclear war just one misstep away.

Brought to you by Penguin. Just after the iron curtain fell on Eastern Europe John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer, Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune. This rare opportunity took the famous travellers not only to Moscow and Stalingrad -...

Ian Kershaw's Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-41 offers a penetrating insight into a series of momentous political decisions that shaped the course of the Second World War. The hurricane of events that marked the opening of the Second World War meant that anything could happen. For the aggressors there was no limit to their ambitions; for their victims a new Dark Age beckoned. Over the next few months their fates would be determined.

The Northern Ireland conflict is one of the most protracted, bitter, and complex campaigns of terrorism the Western world has ever seen. Since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the region has come a long way, finally achieving a hard-won peace. Yet hostility between Unionists and Nationalists is as strong as ever, communities remain divided, and sectarian violence is rife. Edwards and McGrattan’s balanced introduction skilfully dissects the “Troubles” to offer fresh perspectives on their complicated history and legacy.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is one of the world's most famous conspiracy theories. It is a statement of prejudice and paranoia, a fake historical record and a grand hoax all rolled into one.