Georges Lefebvre was one of the most highly-regarded historians of the 20th century – and a key reason for the high reputation he enjoys can be found in The Coming of the French Revolution.Lefebvre's key contribution to the debate over what remains arguably one of history's most contentious and significant events in history was to deploy the critical thinking skill of evaluation to reveal weaknesses in existing arguments about the causes of the Revolution, and analytical s...

Offering a broad and vivid survey of the culture of collecting from the French Revolution to the Belle Époque, The Purchase of the Past explores how material things became a central means of accessing and imagining the past in nineteenth-century France. By subverting the monarchical establishment, the French Revolution not only heralded the dawn of the museum age, it also threw an unprecedented quantity of artworks into commercial circulation, allowing private individuals to pose as custod...

Four social groups brought down the French monarchy. ¶Why? Because in 1789 each of these very different groups had compelling reasons to defy royal authority. Lefebvre, renowned as a pioneer of ‘history from below,’ believed that the origins of the revolution had to be sought not just in the maneuvering of the elites, but in the unpredictable actions of the common people. He argues that the revolution was the unforeseen consequence of four different social classes—the aristocracy, the bour...

In The Age of Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm focuses on the tumultuous late 18th and early 19th centuries. He argues that the “dual revolutions” of the time —the French Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution — changed the way the whole world thought about politics and power, and fundamentally shaped the modern era. ¶Hobsbawm explains how these dual revolutions created conditions in which capitalism and liberalism could rise and dominate. But while values such as liberty, free trade an...

Richard Evans wrote In Defence of History at a time when the historian's profession was coming under heavy attack as a result of the ‘cultural turn’ taken by the discipline during the late 1980s and the 1990s. Historians were being forced to face up to postmodern thinking, which argued that, because all texts were the product of biased writers who had incomplete information, none could be privileged above others. In this reading, there could be no objective history, merely the stu...

Daniel Goldhagen's study of the Holocaust offers conclusions that run directly counter to those reached by Christopher Browning, whose book Ordinary Men is also the subject of a Macat analysis. As such, the two analyses make possible some interesting critical thinking exercises focused on evaluation of the evidence used by the two historians. For Goldhagen, a chief reason for German actions was not the mundane good comradeship stressed by Browning, but a longstanding hatred of Jew...

John Lewis Gaddis had written four previous books on the Cold War by the time he published We Now Know – so the main thrust of his new work was not so much to present new arguments as to re-examine old ones in the light of new evidence that began emerging from behind the Iron Curtain after 1990. In this respect, We Now Know can be seen as an important exercise in evaluation; Gaddis not only undertook to reassess his own positions – arguing that this was the only intellectually hon...

“A tour de force.”—Gordon S. Wood, New York Times Book ReviewHow were human rights invented, and how does their tumultuous history influence their perception and our ability to protect them today? From Professor Lynn Hunt comes this extraordinary cultural and intellectual history, which traces the roots of human rights to the rejection of torture as a means for finding the truth. She demonstrates how ideas of human relationships portrayed in novels and art helped spread th...

"A lucid, muscular, and often sly reflection" on the worth and purpose of historical scholarship by the award-winning author of The Third Reich Trilogy ( Kirkus).In this volume, the renowned historian Richard J. Evans offers a fervent and deeply insightful defense of his craft and its importance to civilization. At a time when fact and historical truth are under unprecedented assault, Evans shows us why history is necessary. Taking us into the historians' ...

This groundbreaking biography continues the story begun in Young Trudeau, taking Canada's legendary Prime Minister from his pro-fascist youth all the way to his entry into federal politics as a crusading Liberal democrat.When he went to Harvard in 1944, Pierre Trudeau was twenty-five, a recent graduate of the University of Montreal Law School; true to his elite Catholic-French education, he had been till recently pro-fascist, and he disliked democracy. Years of gra...

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...

A fascinating and comprehensive history, 'Demanding the Impossible' is a challenging and thought-provoking exploration of anarchist ideas and actions from ancient times to the present day.Navigating the broad 'river of anarchy', from Taoism to Situationism, from Ranters to Punk rockers, from individualists to communists, from anarcho-syndicalists to anarcha-feminists, 'Demanding the Impossible' is an authoritative and lively study of a widely misunderstood subject. It explores the ...