History - Modern - 20th Century

Spanning twenty-five years, this historic collection of writings shows Vaclav Havel's evolution from a modestly known playwright who had the courage to advise and criticize Czechoslovakia's leaders to a newly elected president whose first address to his fellow citizens begins, I assume you did...

Discover the shocking alliance involving the CIA, the Mafia, and the Vatican that emerged after WWII to prevent a Communist takeover in Europe. In Operation Gladio, investigative journalist Paul L. Williams uncovers a disturbing web of "stay-behind" armies formed across Europe, consisting of thousands...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - NOW A NETFLIX FILM STARRING COLIN FIRTH - The "brilliant and almost absurdly entertaining" (Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker) true story of the most successful--and certainly the strangest--deception carried out in World War II, from the acclaimed author of...

"A remarkable--and singularly chilling--glimpse of human behavior. . .This meticulously researched book...represents a major contribution to the literature of the Holocaust."--Newsweek Christopher R. Browning's shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews--now...

Photography and the history of extraction combine as Marty Stupich's extraordinary images map the 600 year oppression of the lands and people from the Mexican Conquest to the Guggenheims, from deep inside present-day Mexico to southern Wyoming. For centuries the Spanish Empire's conscripted laborers...

George Orwell dedicated his career to exposing social injustice and political duplicity, urging his readers to face hard truths about Western society and politics. Now, the uncanny parallels between the interwar era and our own--rising inequality, censorship, and challenges to traditional social hierarchies--make his...

Oskar Dirlewanger is one of the most reviled war criminals in history. A tall, gaunt, ghoulish-looking man, he commanded a penal unit of the Waffen-SS. The Sonderkommando "Dirlewanger" grew from a company of men previously jailed for poaching into a formation of thousands, the...

The first book to lay bare the life of a Nazi camp guard who settled in a Chicago suburb and to explore how his community and others responded to discoveries of Nazis in their midst. Reinhold Kulle seemed like the perfect school employee. But...

A provocative history of how nation states arose out of the ashes of World War II, showing how catastrophe, compromise, and contested visions forged the fragile order we still live in today. "A magnificent history . . . Necessary reading for all those who...

Available for the first time in English translation, this collection of songs is a powerful memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. In June 1945, before the full devastation of the Holocaust had emerged, a team of researchers embarked on a remarkable project. While...

Painful Joy represents five years of intensive research in the US, Poland, Sweden, Israel and Germany, seeking to unearth the real life stories of Sam and Frieda Friedman in order to discover their roots, recreate their lives and times and uncover both their remarkable...

From 1908 to 1933, the American Museum of Natural History launched more scientific field expeditions than at any other time in its existence. Sponsoring lavish trips to Africa and Central Asia, the museum filled its halls with artifacts and an aura of adventure, supported...

Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this volume explores how post-Holocaust memorial books help to reshape our understanding of Jewish life and death in Eastern Europe In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Eastern European survivors created yizker bikher--Yiddish for "memorial...

Best-selling novelist and art historian Iain Pears enchants readers with the real-life romance between Larissa Salmina, a Russian art curator, and Francis Haskell, a British art historian. His fabulous book brings into sharp focus the strange world of the Soviet Union, and the even...

Here is a continuation of selections from Flanner's celebrated "Letter from Paris," a series that appeared in the New Yorker from 1925 to 1975 over the signature " Genêt." With clarity and authority, Flanner writes about the arts, the politics, and the economy of...

"A rich and intriguing story whcih the authors disentangle with great skill."--Sunday Telegraph From Antony Beevor, the internationally bestselling author of D-Day and The Battle of Arnhem In this brilliant synthesis of social, political, and cultural history, Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper present a...

The inspiring, previously untold tale of survival, defiance, heroism, and an unlikely hero - the Jewish civil engineer and musician who led the extraordinarily successful guerilla war to liberate Ukraine from Nazi occupation during World War II. Written by the National Jewish Book Award-winning...

In the early 1960s, a peaceful world was an imaginable goal. The still-young United Nations was widely respected and regarded as humankind's best hope for resolving global conflicts. African and Asian nations, having recently won their freedom from colonial domination, sought dignity and influence...

Queerness remains one of the most stigmatized and overlooked aspects of Holocaust history, often erased due to the lingering homophobia of survivors. People Without History Are Dust challenges this silence, weaving together compelling stories of German, Dutch, Czech, and Polish Jewish Holocaust victims and...

The rise and fall of William J. Levitt, the man who made the suburban house a mass commodity Two material artifacts defined the middle-class American lifestyle in the mid-twentieth century: the automobile, which brought gas stations, highways, commercial strips, and sprawl; and the single-family...