Ian Kershaw is among the world’s foremost scholars of Nazi Germany and of twentieth-century Europe, and I had read his two-volume biography of Adolph Hitler.
Still, I must admit I was a bit skeptical in approaching this book, which explains why Germans continued to fight when it was clear that the war was lost. Given everything we know about the insanity of the Nazi regime, the answer to this question seemed self-evident. Boy, was I wrong!
Kershaw masterfully elucidates the multiplicity of perspectives, as well as the ideological, institutional, and even personal factors, that contributed to the German people’s descent into oblivion following the failed attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944. Kershaw manages to shed new and fascinating light on what we thought was a familiar story.
Named Book of the Year by the Sunday Times, TLS, Spectator, Sunday Telegraph, Daily Mail and Scotland on Sunday, Ian Kershaw's The End is a searing account of the final months of Nazi Germany, laying bare the fear and fanaticism that drove a nation to destruction.
In almost every major war there comes a point where defeat looms for one side and its rulers cut a deal with the victors, if only in an attempt to save their own skins. In Hitler's Germany, nothing of this kind happened: in the end the regime had to be stamped out town by…
I was not previously familiar with Michael Kulikowski’s work, but I now intend to read more of it.
Kulikowski meticulously examines the slow, tortured, and almost imperceptible—to the people who experienced it— disintegration of the Roman Empire during its last two centuries.
In this seamlessly woven narrative, he dismantles the age-old notion, which refuses to die, of a decisive “fall” of the Empire, and he traces the continuities and discontinuities — in both the Empire’s western and eastern halves — between the Empire and the world that succeeded it.
The period of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages often seems impossibly remote to us, but Kulikowski makes it accessible even to non-specialists; and while his approach may be “old-school” (this is a compliment!), it is anything but old-fashioned.
A sweeping political history of the turbulent two centuries that led to the demise of the Roman Empire.
The Tragedy of Empire begins in the late fourth century with the reign of Julian, the last non-Christian Roman emperor, and takes readers to the final years of the Western Roman Empire at the end of the sixth century. One hundred years before Julian's rule, Emperor Diocletian had resolved that an empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Euphrates, and from the Rhine and Tyne to the Sahara, could not effectively be governed by one man. He had devised a system of…
Stalin’s Soviet Union never ceases to confound! If the Stalinist “show trials” of the 1930s are a depressing story, the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leadership after World War II represent an attempt to redeem humanity from the enormity of Nazism.
But as Francine Hirsch demonstrates in this brilliant work, several key figures in the show trials also played essential roles at Nuremberg. Not only were Stalin’s henchmen the driving force in preparing and conducting the cases against the Nazi leaders, but, perhaps more importantly, they were also primarily responsible for crafting many of the central tenets of international law — such as crimes against humanity or waging offensive war—under which these leaders were prosecuted.
This fascinating book upsets the conventional narrative about the reckoning with World War II.
Organized in the immediate aftermath of World War Two by the victorious Allies, the Nuremberg Trials were intended to hold the Nazis to account for their crimes - and to restore a sense of justice to a world devastated by violence. As Francine Hirsch reveals in this immersive, gripping, and ground-breaking book, a major piece of the Nuremberg story has routinely been omitted from standard accounts: the part the Soviet Union played in making the trials happen in the first place.
Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg offers the first complete picture of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), including the many ironies…
My book examines the destruction of slavery in the lower Mississippi valley during and after the U.S. Civil War, from Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 to final ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in December 1865.
Focusing on Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas, it weaves into a coherent narrative of military events, political developments in the four states and Washington, D.C., and the “on-the-ground” disintegration of slavery that was precipitated by the enslaved people themselves.
Scholars have written much on the military, political, and social aspects of the Civil War in the lower Mississippi valley. This is the first book, however, to trace the process of emancipation and abolition in this distinct and historically important region.
