For more than six decades, the term "totalitarian" was applied to everything from Franco's Spain to Stalin's Soviet Union. One of the most enigmatic and yet compelling ideas of our time, it has been both an almost meaningless political catcall and an indispensable concept for understanding the dictatorships that have marred the history of this century. Now historian Abbott Gleason provides a fascinating account of the life of this idea. Totalitarianism offers a penetrating chronic...

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour.Having suffered during World War One – not only the indignities of political betrayal and battlefield defeat but also starvation, fuel shortages and a domestic flu epidemic – the German people were left in widespread discontent. Soon inflation and economic stagnation had further sunk the nation into exhaustion, humiliation and disillusionment.Capitalizing on the nation’s instability, the Nazi Party, led by the embittered...

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. A sweeping history of the Spanish Civil War, told through a dozen characters, including Hemingway and George Orwell: A tale of idealism, heartbreaking suffering, and a noble cause that failed.For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world, as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini....

In this masterly twentieth-century history, Paul Ginsborg places the family at center stage, a novel perspective from which to examine key moments of revolution and dictatorship. His groundbreaking book spans 1900 to 1950 and encompasses five nation states in the throes of dramatic transition: Russia in revolutionary passage from Empire to Soviet Union; Turkey in transition from Ottoman Empire to modern Republic; Italy, from liberalism to fascism; Spain during the Second Republic and Civ...

The story of Raoul Wallenberg - the Swedish businessman who, at immense personal risk, rescued many of Budapest's Jews from the Holocaust and subsequently disappeared into the Soviet prison system - is one of the most fascinating episodes of World War II. Yet the complete story of his life and fate can only be told now - and for the first time in this book - following access to the Russian and Swedish archival sources, previously not used. Born into a wealthy Swedish family, Wallenberg was...

The author attempts to analyze Hitler's appeal to German farmers, workers, businessmen, industrialists, women and youth. Beginning with Germany's social situation after World War I, he demonstrates how Hitler improvised a programme that claimed to offer a classless society.

Fascism is not a thing of the past and, in this era of crisis and austerity, it is growing even stronger. The fight against it must be aggressive and unrelenting. Using a mixture of orthodox history and eyewitness accounts, "M. Testa" makes the case for a resolutely militant anti-fascism, taking us from proto-fascists in nineteenth-century Austria to modern-day street-fights in London. Provocative, unapologetic, and based on extensive research.M. Testa, un...

In some circles, a nod towards totalitarianism is enough to dismiss any critique of the status quo. Such is the insidiousness of the neo-liberal ideology, argues Slavoj iek. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? turns a specious rhetorical strategy on its head to identify a network of family resemblances between totalitarianism and modern liberal democracy. iek argues that totalitarianism is invariably defined in terms of four things: the Holocaust as the ultimate, diabolical evil...

In 2013 almost half of Africa's top aid recipients were ruled by authoritarian regimes. While the West may claim to promote democracy and human rights, in practice major bilateral and international donors, such as USAID, DFID, the World Bank and the European Commission, have seen their aid policies become ever more entangled with the survival of their authoritarian protégés. Local citizens thus find themselves at the receiving end of a compromise between aid agencies and government elites,...

In The Fascist Effect**, Reto Hofmann uncovers the ideological links that tied Japan to Italy, drawing on extensive materials from Japanese and Italian archives to shed light on the formation of fascist history and practice in Japan and beyond.** Moving between personal experiences, diplomatic and cultural relations, and geopolitical considerations, Hofmann shows that interwar Japan found in fascism a resource to develop a new order at a time of c...

The cultural and material legacies of the Roman Republic and Empire in evidence throughout Rome have made it the "Eternal City." Too often, however, this patrimony has caused Rome to be seen as static and antique, insulated from the transformations of the modern world. In Excavating Modernity, Joshua Arthurs dramatically revises this perception, arguing that as both place and idea, Rome was strongly shaped by a radical vision of modernity imposed by Mussolini's regime betw...

Since the end of the last dictatorship in 1983, Argentina’s visual artists and art-activists have been central to campaigns to demand the criminal prosecution of those initially granted amnesty and to a variety of commemorative projects. In The Art of Post-Dictatorship: Ethics and Aesthetics in Transitional Argentina Vikki Bell examines this involvement and intervention. She argues that the problematics that arise within the aesthetic realm cannot be understood solely through an a...