A sweeping narrative history of Eastern Europe from the late eighteenth century to todayIn the 1780s, the Habsburg monarch Joseph II decreed that henceforth German would be the language of his realm. His intention was to forge a unified state from his vast and disparate possessions, but his action had the opposite effect, catalyzing the emergence of competing nationalisms among his Hungarian, Czech, and other subjects, who feared that their languages and cultures w...

This comparative history of the higher education systems in Poland, East Germany, and the Czech lands reveals an unexpected diversity within East European stalinism. With information gleaned from archives in each of these places, John Connelly offers a valuable case study showing how totalitarian states adapt their policies to the contours of the societies they rule.The Communist dictum that universities be purged of “bourgeois elements” was accomplished most fully in East Germany,...

In 1965 the Second Vatican Council declared that God loves the Jews. Before that, the Church had taught for centuries that Jews were cursed by God and, in the 1940s, mostly kept silent as Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. How did an institution whose wisdom is said to be unchanging undertake one of the most enormous, yet undiscussed, ideological swings in modern history?The radical shift of Vatican II grew out of a buried history, a theological struggle in Central Europe in the y...

On June 25th, 2016, John Connelly became the first to both canoe the Northern Forest Canoe Trail and kayak the Maine Island Trail, but went a step further connecting them with the Saint John River and Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, Canada; 1500 miles in 75 days. This solo expedition launched in the Adirondack Mountains on April 16th proved challenging, rewarding, eye-opening and was tracked in real-time by satellite and was followed by thousands online. Find out how he met the Royal Canadi...

Welcome to the Kuiperverse, a riveting, hard science fiction universe co-created and written by Matthew Medney (Heavy Metal Magazine CEO, NYU adjunct professor) and John Connelly (Lockheed Martin Aerospace Engineer).Starring the vocal talents of Kyle Perrin, Dylan Sprouse, and George C. Romero.Beyond Kuiper is brought to the audio medium as an immersive sound designed and scored audiobook. Includes twenty-one original tracks (writt...

A great historian crowns a lifetime of thought and research by answering a question that has haunted us for more than 50 years: How did one of the most industrially and culturally advanced nations in the world embark on and continue along the path leading to one of the most enormous criminal enterprises in history, the extermination of Europe's Jews?Giving considerable emphasis to a wealth of new archival findings, Saul Friedlander restores the voices of Jews who, after the 1933 Na...

The "monumental" New York Times bestseller in which a Catholic explores the problem of anti-Semitism through Church history ( The Washington Post).A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable BookIn this "masterly history" ( Time), National Book Award-winning author James Carroll maps the profoundly troubling two-thousand-year course of the Church's battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of ...

This book is the culmination of more than three decades of meticulous historiographic research on Nazi Germany by one of the period’s most distinguished historians. The volume brings together the most important and influential aspects of Ian Kershaw’s research on the Holocaust for the first time. The writings are arranged in three sections-Hitler and the Final Solution, popular opinion and the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the Final Solution in historiography-and Kershaw provides an introducti...

For fascination, influence, inspiration, and controversy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison is unmatched by any other book of Christian reflection written in the twentieth century. A Lutheran pastor and theologian, Bonhoeffer spent two years in Nazi prisons before being executed at age thirty-nine, just a month before the German surrender, for his role in the plot to kill Hitler. The posthumous Letters and Papers from Prison has had a tremendous impact ...

Karl Marx is a magisterial and defining biography that vividly explores not only the man himself but also the revolutionary times in which he lived.Between his birth in 1818 and his death sixty-five years later, Karl Marx became one of Western civilization’s most influential political philosophers. Two centuries on, he is still revered as a prophet of the modern world, yet he is also blamed for the darkest atrocities of modern times. But no matter in what light he is cast, the shor...

A new comprehensive biography of this hugely important Christian martyr, 60 years after his execution at the hands of the NazisBonhoeffer has gained a position as one of the most prominent Christian martyrs of the last century. His influence is so widespread that even 60 years after his execution by the Nazis, Bonhoeffer's life and work are still the subject of fresh and lively discussion. As a pastor and theologian, Bonhoeffer decided to resist the Nazis in Germany, but his resista...

Hitler and the Holocaust is the product of a lifetime’s work by one of the world’s foremost authorities on the history of anti-Semitism and modern Jewry. Robert S. Wistrich begins by reckoning with Europe’s long history of violence against the Jews, and how that tradition manifested itself in Germany and Austria in the early twentieth century. He looks at the forces that shaped Hitler’s belief in a "Jewish menace" that must be eradicated, and the process by which, once Hit...