"Anyone who studies nationalism, genocide, mass violence, or war in these regions, from the Enlightenment through the mid-20th century, needs to read [this]."— Central European HistoryShatterzone of Empires is a comprehensive analysis of interethnic relations, coexistence, and violence in Europe's eastern borderlands over the past two centuries.In this vast territory, extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea, four major empires with ethn...

How a German city became Polish after World War IIWith the stroke of a pen at the Potsdam Conference following the Allied victory in 1945, Breslau, the largest German city east of Berlin, became the Polish city of Wroclaw. Its more than six hundred thousand inhabitants—almost all of them ethnic Germans—were expelled and replaced by Polish settlers from all parts of prewar Poland. Uprooted examines the long-term psychological and cultural consequences of fo...

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...

The Holocaust has long seemed incomprehensible, a monumental crime that beggars our powers of description and explanation. Historians have probed the many sources of this tragedy, but no account has united the various causes into an overarching synthesis that answers the vital question: How was such a nightmare possible in the heart of western civilization?In How Could This Happen, historian Dan McMillan distills the vast body of Holocaust research into a cogent explanatio...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “[Timothy] Snyder identifies the conditions that allowed the Holocaust—conditions our society today shares. . . . He certainly couldn’t be more right about our world.”—The New RepublicA “gripping [and] disturbingly vivid” (The Wall Street Journal) portrait of the defining tragedy of our time, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of On TyrannyONE OF THE...

In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway.At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out t...

Excerpted from Niall Ferguson’s sprawling bestseller The War of the World, The Abyss now stands on its own as one of the most thrilling short histories of World War I ever written. This is not a conventional military history about battles and generals. Rather, The Abyss examines how World War I saw the birth of total war—fought between societies as much as armies—and must therefore be understood in terms of the financial crises it unleashed, the multinational emp...

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...

**An absorbing, revelatory, and definitive account of one of the greatest tragedies in human history, by the author of The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and Hitler's People“This is history in the grand style, the kind of large-scale narrative that few historians dare to write these days. It is difficult to imagine how it could be improved upon, let alone surpassed.” —The Washington Post"This superb book is n...

An epic, groundbreaking account of the ethnic and state violence that followed the end of World War I and shaped the course of the twentieth century.Winner of the Tomlinson Book PrizeA Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2016In The Vanquished, a highly original and gripping work of history, Robert Gerwarth asks us to think again about the true legacy of the First World War. In large part it was not...

**The acclaimed and comprehensive account of Germany's transformation under Hitler's total rule and the inexorable march to war, by the author of The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich at War, and Hitler's People“[A] masterpiece. Fluidly narrated, tightly organized and comprehensive.” —The New York Times“A major achievement.” —The Boston Globe**By the middle of 1933, the democracy of the Weimar Republic had been transforme...

Modern nationalism in northeastern Europe has often led to violence and then reconciliation between nations with bloody pasts. In this fascinating book, Timothy Snyder traces the emergence of Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian nationhood over four centuries, discusses various atrocities (including the first account of the massive Ukrainian-Polish ethnic cleansings of the 1940s), and examines Poland’s recent successful negotiations with its newly independent Eastern neighb...