History - Modern - 20th Century

Pink Triangle Legacies traces the transformation of the pink triangle from a Nazi concentration camp badge and emblem of discrimination into a widespread, recognizable symbol of queer activism, pride, and community. W. Jake Newsome provides an overview of the Nazis' targeted violence against LGBTQ+...

Written by a Holocaust survivor whose family collected art, Plunder and Survival tells the stories of principal figures, events, and artworks that contribute to the intricate story of the ruthless Nazi attack on modern art and the art world's subsequent repositioning in America.Each chapter...

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring The Second World War was the most destructive conflict in history. It left Europe in ruins, its economies severely damaged and millions of its people facing malnutrition, its political systems shaken if not destroyed. Yet three decades later...

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize - Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award - One of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century "Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority." --The Wall Street...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The "entertaining [and] often-moving account" (The Wall Street Journal) of the remarkable POWs whose relentlessly creative attempts to escape a notorious Nazi prison embodied the spirit of resistance against fascism, from the author of The Spy and the Traitor"Macintyre...

A sweeping history of America during the tumultuous decades between the ends of World War I and World War II, when a mainly rural, isolationist republic was transformed into a nuclear superpower and the leader of the free world.Through the prosperous 1920s and its...

"A beautifully written, clear-eyed biography of a very Russian tragedy."--Dan Jones, The Sunday Times From one of our most acclaimed historians, a major new biography of one of history's most disturbing, dubious masterminds, showing how a Siberian peasant, through his seduction of the imperial...

Months before the outbreak of World War II, Heinrich Himmler--prime architect of the Holocaust--designed a special concentration camp for women, located fifty miles north of Berlin. Only a small number of the prisoners were Jewish. Ravensbrück was primarily a place for the Nazis to...

Annemarie Schwarzenbach was one of the twentieth century's most remarkable women, possibly the greatest sexual and political radical of the 1930s. But until now she's been largely ignored. Born to a wealthy family in Switzerland, as a teenager she rebelled against her domineering pro-Nazi...

A Financial Times and Foreign Policy Most Anticipated Book of 2026 A Barnes & Noble Reads Best Book of February 2026 From renowned, prize-winning historian Frank Dikötter, a commanding new history of China's path to Communism. The history of modern China has long been...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes, the consequences of which still resonate today, as Russia has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more--from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award...

From the bestselling author of The Spy and the Traitor comes the ultimate true-life Cold War thriller: the untold story of a Russian double agent with a desperate secret--and the key to stopping a nuclear apocalypse. "Ben Macintyre has a rare ability to turn...

As a young teenager in Oradea, Romania, Hedy Bohm leads a sheltered life, oblivious to the events of World War II and the Holocaust. When Nazi Germany occupies Hungary in 1944, Hedy still feels relatively safe, even when she and her parents are forced...

A revealing account of how German Protestant leaders embraced democratic ideals after WWII, while firmly and consequentially refusing to account for their earlier complicity with Nazism. Germany's Protestant churches, longtime strongholds of nationalism and militarism, largely backed the Nazi dictatorship that took power in...

"In its form, this book is a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony. It did not seem possible to proceed otherwise. At a certain point, it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna; in other words, the survivors bore witness...

"To resist, therefore. But how, when and where? There were no laws, no guidelines, no precedents to show the way . . ." --Dutch resister Herman FriedhoffIn every country that fell to the Third Reich during the Second World War, from France in the...

Nazism has always faced resistance: from the German artists who caricatured the Nazis in the 1920s, or the man who infiltrated the SS to try and expose the Holocaust in the 1940s, or the people who uncovered former Nazis as part of a groundbreaking...

Originally published just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life offered a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the "society of the spectacle" from the point of view of individual experience. Whereas Debord's masterful analysis of the...

What is it like to have lived through six years of Holocaust slave labor and survive? Bluma Tishgarten and Felix Goldberg were torn from their families and communities and cast into Hell... Adolf Hitler was the devil that presided over Germany's descent into madness...

A searing account of the French Catholic Church's complicity in the Holocaust, revealing how the nation's most influential bishops shaped the course of Nazi persecution through closed-door negotiations and hollow promises. When German occupiers rolled into Paris in June 1940, they arrived wary of...