Today's Hours:
Black Women Taught Us by
A reclamation of essential history and a hopeful gesture toward a better political future, this is what listening to Black women looks like-from a professor of political science and columnist for Teen Vogue. "Jenn M. Jackson is a beautiful writer and excellent scholar. In this book, they pay tribute to generations of Black women organizers and set forward a bold and courageous blueprint for our collective liberation."-Imani Perry, author of South to America This is my offering. My love letter to them, and to us. Jenn M. Jackson, PhD, has been known to bring historical acuity to some of the most controversial topics in America today. Now, in their first book, Jackson applies their critical analysis to the questions that have long energized their work- Why has Black women's freedom fighting been so overlooked throughout history, and what has our society lost because of our refusal to engage with our forestrugglers' lessons? A love letter to those who have been minimized and forgotten, this collection repositions Black women's intellectual and political work at the center of today's liberation movements. Across eleven original essays that explore the legacy of Black women writers and leaders-from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to the Combahee River Collective and Audre Lorde-Jackson sets the record straight about Black women's longtime movement organizing, theorizing, and coalition building in the name of racial, gender, and sexual justice in the United States and abroad. These essays show, in both critical and deeply personal terms, how Black women have been at the center of modern liberation movements despite the erasure and misrecognition of their efforts. Jackson illustrates how Black women have frequently done the work of liberation at great risk to their lives and livelihoods. For a new generation of movement organizers and co-strugglers, Black Women Taught Usserves as a reminder that Black women were the first ones to teach us how to fight racism, how to name that fight, and how to imagine a more just world for everyone.
The Road to Dien Bien Phu by
A multifaceted history of Ho Chi Minh's climactic victory over French colonial might that foreshadowed America's experience in Vietnam On May 7, 1954, when the bullets stopped and the air stilled in Dien Bien Phu, there was no doubt that Vietnam could fight a mighty colonial power and win. After nearly a decade of struggle, a nation forged in the crucible of war had achieved a victory undreamed of by any other national liberation movement. The Road to Dien Bien Phu tells the story of how Ho Chi Minh turned a ragtag guerrilla army into a modern fighting force capable of bringing down the formidable French army. Taking readers from the outbreak of fighting in 1945 to the epic battle at Dien Bien Phu, Christopher Goscha shows how Ho transformed Vietnam from a decentralized guerrilla state based in the countryside to a single-party communist state shaped by a specific form of "War Communism." Goscha discusses how the Vietnamese operated both states through economics, trade, policing, information gathering, and communications technology. He challenges the wisdom of counterinsurgency methods developed by the French and still used by the Americans today, and explains why the First Indochina War was arguably the most brutal war of decolonization in the twentieth century, killing a million Vietnamese, most of them civilians. Panoramic in scope, The Road to Dien Bien Phu transforms our understanding of this conflict and the one the United States would later enter, and sheds new light on communist warfare and statecraft in East Asia today.
America and the Holocaust by
2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title The first comprehensive volume to teach about America's response to the Holocaust through visual media, America and the Holocaust: A Documentary History explores the complex subject through the lens of one hundred important documents that help illuminate and amplify key episodes and issues. Each chapter pivots on five key documents: two in image form and three in text form. Individual introductions that contextualize the documents are followed by explanatory text, analysis of historical implications, and suggestions for further reading. A concluding state-of-the-field essay documents how scholars have arrived at the presented information. A complementary teacher's guide with questions for discussion is available online. The twenty chapters address a broad range of subjects and events, among them America's response to Hitler's rise, U.S. public opinion about Jews, immigration policy, the Wagner-Rogers bill to save children, American rescuers, news coverage of atrocities, American Jewish and Christian responses to the Holocaust, the campaign for U.S. rescue action, the question of bombing Auschwitz, and liberation. Viewing real documents as a means to understanding core issues will deepen reader involvement with this material. High school and college students as well as general readers of all levels of knowledge will be engaged in understanding this crucial chapter in American history and weighing questions regarding mass atrocities in our own era.
In the Service of the Emperor by
Japan's war in Asia and the Pacific from 1937 to 1945 continues to be a subject of great interest, yet the wartime Japanese army remains little understood outside Japan. Most published accounts rely on English-language works written in the 1950s and 1960s. The Japanese-language sources have remained relatively inaccessible to Western scholars in part because of the difficulty of the language, a difficulty that Edward J. Drea, who reads Japanese, surmounts. In a series of searching examinations of the structure, ethos, and goals of the Japanese military establishment, Drea offers new material on its tactics, operations, doctrine, and leadership. Based on original military documents, official histories, court diaries, and Emperor Hirohito's own words, these twelve essays introduce Western readers to fifty years of Japanese scholarship about the war and Japan's military institutions. In addition, Drea uses recently declassified Allied intelligence documents related to Japan to challenge existing views and conventional wisdom about the war.
Condemned for Love in Old Virginia by
When romance was met with murder... Arthur Jordan and Elvira Corder were young and unafraid, but their love was doomed. He was black, she was white, and this was Virginia in 1880. When Elvira became pregnant, the couple fled Fauquier County to live in Maryland. But her father found them and recruited neighbors to help kidnap them. Four nights later, a mob dragged Arthur from the county jail in Warrenton and lynched him. Elvira, taken to a hotel in Williamsport, Maryland, was never heard from again. Stories of lynching are all too common in the postbellum South, but this one tells a unique tale of a couple who were willing to sacrifice everything to be together--and did. Author Jim Hall tells a classic tale of forbidden love, one of hope crushed by hate.
The Children's Republic of Gaudiopolis by
Gaudiopolis (The City of Joy) was a pedagogical experiment that operated in a post-World War II orphanage in Budapest. This book tells the story of this children's republic that sought to heal the wounds of wartime trauma, address prejudice and expose the children to a firsthand experience of democracy. The children were educated in freely voicing their opinions, questioning authority, and debating ideas. The account begins with the saving of hundreds of Jewish children during the Siege of Budapest by the Lutheran minister Gábor Sztehlo together with the International Red Cross. After describing the everyday life and practices of self-rule in the orphanage that emerged from this rescue operation, the book tells how the operation of the independent children's home was stifled after the communist takeover and how Gaudiopolis was disbanded in 1950. The book then discusses how this attempt of democratization was erased from collective memory. The erasure began with the banning of a film inspired by Gaudiopolis. The Communist Party financed Somewhere in Europe in 1947 as propaganda about the construction of a new society, but the film's director conveyed a message of democracy and tolerance instead of adhering to the tenets of socialist realism. The book breaks the subsequent silence on "The City of Joy," which lasted until the fall of the Iron Curtain and beyond.
The Ledger and the Chain by
An award-winning historian's "searing" (Wall Street Journal) account of America's internal slave trade--and its role in the making of America Slave traders are peripheral figures in most histories of American slavery. But these men--who trafficked and sold over half a million enslaved people from the Upper South to the Deep South--were essential to slavery's expansion and fueled the growth and prosperity of the United States. In The Ledger and the Chain, acclaimed historian Joshua D. Rothman recounts the shocking story of the domestic slave trade by tracing the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who built the largest and most powerful slave-trading operation in American history. Far from social outcasts, they were rich and widely respected businessmen, and their company sat at the center of capital flows connecting southern fields to northeastern banks. Bringing together entrepreneurial ambition and remorseless violence toward enslaved people, domestic slave traders produced an atrocity that forever transformed the nation.
Hamas Contained by
Hamas has ruled Gaza and the lives of the two million Palestinians who live there since 2006. Hamas Contained, first published in 2018, offers a history of the group, drawing on interviews with organization leaders and their publications. Tareq Baconi maps Hamas's thirty-year transition from fringe military resistance towards governance, culminating in Israeli efforts to contain the movement to the Gaza Strip. Baconi argues that under Israel's approach of managing rather than resolving the conflict, Hamas's demand for Palestinian sovereignty has effectively been marginalized in favor of military action against Hamas, and by implication, all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. This dynamic--a violent equilibrium between Hamas and Israel and the movement's containment in the Gaza Strip--lasted for sixteen years, until it was decidedly shattered by Hamas's offensive on October 7, 2023. Now with new material that provides an analytical framework and reflection on Hamas's offensive of October 7, 2023, and Israel's ensuing war on Gaza, Hamas Contained is an even more essential guide to understanding Hamas and the brutal violence of Israel's war on Palestinians.
Black Revolutionaries by
Black Revolutionaries is an accessible yet rigorously argued history of the Black Panther Party (BPP), one of the emblematic organizations of the 1960s. Joe Street highlights the complexity of the BPP's history through three key themes: the BPP's intellectual history, its political and social activism, and the persecution its members endured. Together, these themes confirm the BPP's importance in understanding Black America's response to white oppression in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on a wealth of archival material, Black Revolutionaries reveals the enduring importance of leftist political philosophy to 1960s and 1970s radicalism, and how the BPP helps us to understand more deeply the role of public space and public protest in the 1960s.Street shows how the BPP were key to the transformation of political activism in the post-civil rights era. As the BPP faced the psychological and organizational impacts of FBI surveillance, police repression, and imprisonment, Street examines how these negative forces helped to shape and destroy the BPP. Most significantly, Black Revolutionaries demonstrates that an understanding of African American grassroots politics and protest, racial injustice, and police brutality in the post-civil rights era is only comprehensible through engagement with the BPP's history.
John Lewis by
New York Times Book Review Top 100 Books of 2024 Explore the "comprehensive and compelling" (Jon Meacham) biography of civil rights leader John Lewis, celebrated as "the conscience of Congress," through a narrative that weaves together exclusive interviews, never-before-seen FBI files, and documents, offering profound insights into his significant role in American history and the civil rights movement. Born into poverty in rural Alabama, John Lewis rose to prominence in the civil rights movement, becoming second only to Martin Luther King, Jr. in his contributions. As a Freedom Rider, he played a crucial role in integrating bus stations across the South. Lewis was a prominent leader in the Nashville sit-in movement and delivered a historic speech at the 1963 March on Washington. As the youngest speaker and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he transformed it into a major civil rights organization. His legacy endures through the harrowing events at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he survived a brutal beating on "Bloody Sunday." David Greenberg's "authoritative...definitive biography" (David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning author) follows Lewis's journey beyond the civil rights era, highlighting his leadership in the Voter Education Project, where he helped enroll millions of African American voters across the South. This book uncovers the little-known story of his ascent in politics, first locally in Atlanta and then as a respected member of Congress. As part of the Democratic leadership, Lewis was admired on both sides of the aisle for his unwavering dedication to nonviolent integration and justice. Rich with new insights, Greenberg's work captures John Lewis's influential career through documents from numerous archives, interviews with 275 people who knew him, and rare footage of Lewis speaking from his hospital bed after Selma. John Lewis offers unparalleled details about his personal and professional relationships and stands as the definitive biography of a man whose heroism during the civil rights movement paved the way for a new era of freedom in America.
Against Exclusion by
In Against Exclusion, Audrey Wu Clark dramatically reframes Asian American resistance via the lives of five early Chinese American public figures. In contrast to later activists who sought to defy stereotypes, Ah Toy, Mary Tape, Wong Chin Foo, Yan Phou Lee, and Yung Wing deployed the model minority and yellow peril tropes to make themselves visible during a period of rampant anti-Chinese violence and legal exclusion. In making themselves visible, they sought to expose and dismantle the contradictory exceptionalism of nineteenth-century US liberalism that both required and "disavowed" the deaths of Chinese Americans. In examining these figures and the ways in which they fought their exclusion as Chinese Americans--via court cases, autobiographical writings, journalism, and other forms of activism--Clark contributes to prevailing scholarly conversations about stereotypes of Asian Americans but contextualizes them in the nineteenth century. She traces the twinned emergences of the model minority and the yellow peril, excavating the exceptionalism with which Chinese Americans were racialized and subject to death--whether by lynching, other forms of driving out, or loss of citizenship or rights--and mapping its reverberations into the present day.
November 1942 by
The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * An intimate history of the most important month of World War II, completely based on the diaries, letters and memoirs of the people who lived through it At the beginning of November 1942, it looked as if the Axis powers could still win the Second World War; at the end of that month, it was obviously just a matter of time before they would lose. In between were el-Alamein, Guadalcanal, the French North Africa landings, the Japanese retreat in New Guinea and the Soviet encirclement of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad. It may have been the most important thirty days of the twentieth century. In this hugely innovative and riveting history, Peter Englund has reduced an epoch-making event to its basic component: the individual experience. Englund's narrative is based solely on what he learned from the writings of soldiers and ordinary citizens alike. They comprise a remarkable, deeply personal resource. In thirty memorable days, among those we meet are: a Soviet infantryman at Stalingrad; an American pilot on Guadalcanal; an Italian truck driver in the North African desert; a partisan in the Belarussian forests; a machine gunner in a British bomber; a twelve-year-old girl in Shanghai; a university student in Paris; a housewife on Long Island; a shipwrecked Chinese sailor; a prisoner in Treblinka; a Korean "comfort woman" in Mandalay; Albert Camus, Vasily Grossman and Vera Brittain--forty characters in all. In addition, we experience the construction and launching of SS James Oglethorpe, a Liberty ship built in Savannah; the fate of U-604, a German submarine; the building of the first nuclear reactor in Chicago; and the making of Casablanca. Not since the publication of the author's last book, The Beauty and the Sorrow, which similarly looked at the First World War, have we had such a mesmerizing work of history.
Against Redemption by
WINNER, HELEN AND HOWARD R. MARRARO PRIZE IN ITALIAN HISTORY Discloses the richness of ideas and sheds light on the controversy that characterized the transition from fascism to democracy, examining authors, works and memories that were subsequently silenced by Cold War politics. How a shared memory of Fascism and its cultural heritage took shape is still today the most disputed question of modern Italy, crossing the boundaries between academic and public discourse. Against Redemption concentrates on the historical period in which disagreement was at its highest: the transition between the downfall of Mussolini in July 1943 and the victory of the Christian Democrats over the Left in the 1948 general elections. By dispelling the silence around the range of opinion in the years before the ideological struggle fossilized into Cold War oppositions, this book points to early postwar literary practices as the main vehicle for intellectual dissent, shedding new light on the role of cultural policies in institutionalizing collective memory. During Italy's transition to democracy, competing narratives over the recent traumatic past emerged and crystallized, depicting the country's break with Mussolini's regime as a political and personal redemption from its politics of exclusion and unrestrained use of violence. Conversely, outstanding authors such as Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, in close dialogue with remarkable but now-neglected figures, stressed the cultural continuity between the new democracy and Fascism, igniting heated debates from opposite political standpoints. Their works addressed questions such as the working through of national defeat, Italian responsibility in World War II, and the Holocaust, revealing how the social, racial, and gender biases that characterized Fascism survived after its demise and haunted the newborn democracy.
The Rise of the Western Armenian Diaspora in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire by
This book traces how Armenian migrants changed the demographic and cultural landscape of Istanbul and Western Anatolia in the course of the seventeenth century. During the centuries that followed, Ottoman Armenian merchants, financiers (sarrafs), authors, musicians, translators, printers and bureaucrats would play key roles in Ottoman trade, cultural life and even governance, that is, in most spheres of the empire's economic and cultural life. This book shows how that cosmopolitan world came into being. 　Using both Ottoman Turkish and little-known Armenian sources, Henry Shapiro provides the first systematic study of Armenian population movements that resulted in the cosmopolitan remaking of Istanbul. In the first part of the book he documents the Great Armenian Flight, showing how the global crisis of the seventeenth century (war, climate change, famine) impacted the historical Armenian population centres of the Caucasus and Eastern Anatolia and led to mass migrations and resettlement in Western Anatolia, Istanbul and Thrace. In the second part of the book Shapiro links this history of migration and the refugee crisis with the development of intellectual and cultural life in Istanbul and Western Anatolia - the rise of the Western Armenian Diaspora.
The British Home Front and the First World War by
The First World War required the mobilisation of entire societies, regardless of age or gender. The phrase 'home front' was itself a product of the war with parts of Britain literally a war front, coming under enemy attack from the sea and increasingly the air. However, the home front also conveyed the war's impact on almost every aspect of British life, economic, social and domestic. In the fullest account to-date, leading historians show how the war blurred the division between what was military and not, and how it made many conscious of their national identities for the first time. They reveal how its impact changed Britain for ever, transforming the monarchy, promoting systematic cabinet government, and prompting state intervention in a country which prided itself on its liberalism and its support for free trade. In many respects we still live with the consequences.
The Mongol Art of War by
"An authoritative study of one of history's most feared and successful armies. . . . May concludes this definitive study by tracing the Mongol legacy to modern mechanized warfare."--Publishers Weekly "They razed cities to the ground, burnt woods, pulled down castles, tore up the vine trees, destroyed gardens, and massacred the citizens and husbandmen; if by chance they did spare any who begged their lives, they compelled them, as slaves of the lowest condition, to fight in front of them against their own kindred." --Matthew Paris recounting the devastation of Poland and Hungary in 1240 During the thirteenth century, Mongol armies under Chinggis Khan and his successors established the largest contiguous land empire in history, stretching across Asia and into eastern Europe. Contemporary descriptions of their conquests have led to a popular misconception that the Mongols were an undisciplined horde of terrifying horsemen who swept over opponents by sheer force of numbers. The Mongol army actually used highly trained regiments led by brilliant tacticians, such as Subutai, that carried out planned and practiced maneuvers. It was the strength, quality, and versatility of the Mongol military organization, not unchecked ferocity, that made them the pre-eminent warriors of their time. In The Mongol Art of War, historian Timothy May overturns myths and misunderstandings that distort our understanding of Mongol warfare, and demonstrates that the armies of Chinggis Khan had more in common with modern ones than with the armies of ancient Rome and those of the medieval kingdoms they confronted. Describing the make-up of the Mongol army from its inception to the demise of the Mongol Empire, the author examines the recruitment, weaponry, and training of the Mongol warrior. He also analyzes the organization, tactics, and strategies the Mongols used, how they adapted to fighting in different conditions and terrain--such as using harsh winter weather to their advantage--and overcame a variety of opponents by steadily changing and adopting new tactics and modes of combat.
The Witch of Pungo by
The authoritative cultural history of Virginia's most famous accused witch In 1706, Grace Sherwood was "ducked" after her neighbors in Princess Anne County accused her of witchcraft. Binding and throwing her into the Lynnhaven River, they waited to see whether she would float to the top (evidence of her guilt) or sink (proof of her innocence). Incredibly, she survived. This bizarre spectacle became an early piece of Virginia folklore as stories about Sherwood, the "Witch of Pungo," spread. Her legend still looms large in Tidewater. In 2006, Governor Tim Kaine even issued an informal pardon of Sherwood, read aloud by the mayor of Virginia Beach before the annual reenactment of Sherwood's ducking. This is the first book to explore Grace Sherwood's life and cultural impact in depth. Anyone interested in colonial Virginia, American folklore, and the history and legacy of witch trials will find much to enjoy in this spellbinding book.
New Rome by
A Times of London Book of the Year Longlisted for the Runciman Award "The most compelling fusion yet of narrative history with the recent findings of environmental research and scientific data. It will change the way we understand key events and transformations in the Eastern Empire."--Anthony Kaldellis, author of Romanland "[A] major contribution...Brings the world of New Rome alive with exceptional learning and a magnificent openness to modern scientific methods that breathe life into conventional narratives of political and social history."--Peter Brown, New York Review of Books "A sweeping survey of the disintegration of the western Roman empire and the emergence of Byzantium...This impressive chronicle offers an eye-opening perspective on a period of dramatic change."--Publishers Weekly Long before Rome fell to the Ostrogoths in 476 AD, a new city had risen to take its place as the beating heart of the empire, the glittering Constantinople, known as New Rome. In this strikingly original account of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and emergence of Byzantium, Paul Stephenson offers a new interpretation of the forces that coalesced--dynastic, religious, climactic--to shift the center of power to the east. His novel, scientifically minded interpretation of antiquity's end presents evidence found not only in parchments and personalities, but also in ice cores and DNA. From 395 to 700 AD, the empire in the east was subjected to a series of invasions and pandemics, confronting natural disasters and outbreaks in pathogens previously unknown to the empire's densely populated, unsanitary cities. Politics, war, and religious strife sparked by the rise of Islam drove the transformation of Eastern Rome, but they do not tell the whole story. Deftly braiding the political history of the empire together with its material, environmental, and epidemiological history, New Rome offers a surprising new explanation of why Rome fell and how the Eastern Empire became Byzantium.
The Umayyad Empire by
The Umayyad Empire (644-750 CE) was the first Islamic empire and one of the largest empires of ancient and medieval times, extending over 5,000 miles between the Atlantic Ocean in the West and the Indian Ocean in the East. This book traces the empire's origins to the Arabian Peninsula and the Syrian Steppe in the centuries before Islam. It explores the dynamics that shaped this formative era for the history of the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. The century of Umayyad rule witnessed war with the Eastern Roman Empire, against whom the Umayyads defined their claims to rule as God's deputies on Earth. This was the period in which the Qur'an was compiled, monuments such as the Dome of the Rock were built, and new Islamic and Arab identities developed.
The Sandinista Revolution by
The Sandinista Revolution and its victory against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua gripped the United States and the world in the 1980s. But as soon as the Sandinistas were voted out of power in 1990 and the Iran Contra affair ceased to make headlines, it became, in Washington at least, a thing of the past. Mateo Jarquín recenters the revolution as a major episode in the history of Latin America, the international left, and the Cold War. Drawing on research in Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Costa Rica, he recreates the perspective of Sandinista leaders in Managua and argues that their revolutionary project must be understood in international context. Because struggles over the Revolution unfolded transnationally, the Nicaraguan drama had lasting consequences for Latin American politics at a critical juncture. It also reverberated in Western Europe, among socialists worldwide, and beyond, illuminating global dynamics like the spread of democracy and the demise of a bipolar world dominated by two superpowers. Jarquín offers a sweeping analysis of the last left-wing revolution of the twentieth century, an overview of inter-American affairs in the 1980s, and an incisive look at the making of the post?Cold War order.
Germany 1923 by
As the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig confided in his autobiography, written in exile, "I have a pretty thorough knowledge of history, but never, to my recollection, has it produced such madness in such gigantic proportions." He was referring to the situation in Germany in 1923. It was a "year of lunacy," defined by hyperinflation, a political system on the verge of collapse, and separatist movements that threatened Germany's territorial integrity. Most significantly, Adolf Hitler launched his infamous Beer Hall Putsch in Munich-a failed coup that nonetheless drew international attention and demonstrated the Nazis' ruthless determination to seize power. In Germany 1923, award-winning historian Volker Ullrich draws on letters, memoirs, newspaper articles, and other sources from the time to present a captivating new history of those explosive twelve months. The crisis began when the French invaded the Ruhr Valley in January to force Germany to pay the reparations it owed under the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended the Great War. For years, German leaders had embraced inflationary policies to finance the costs of defeat, and, as Ullrich demonstrates, the invasion utterly destroyed the value of the German mark. Before the war, the exchange rate was 4.2 marks to the dollar. By November 20, 1923, a dollar was worth an incomprehensible 4.2 trillion marks, and a loaf of bread cost 200 billion. Facing the abyss, many ordinary Germans called for a national messiah. Among the figures to vie for that role was Hitler, a thirty-four-year-old veteran who possessed a uniquely malevolent personal magnetism. Although the Nazi coup in November was put down and Hitler arrested, the putsch showed just how tenuous the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic, was at its core. As Ullrich's panoramic narrative reveals, other Germans responded to the successive crises by launching a cultural revolution: 1923 witnessed the emergence of a multitude of new movements, from Dada to Bauhaus, and of such iconoclasts as Bertolt Brecht, George Grosz, and Franz Kafka. Yet most observers were amazed that the Weimar Republic was able to survive, and the more astute realized that the feral undercurrents unleashed could lead to much worse. Publishing a century after that fateful year, Germany 1923 is a riveting chronicle of one of the most challenging times any modern democracy has faced, one with haunting parallels to our own political moment.
Vertigo by
The dramatic and consequential history of Germany's short-lived experiment with democracy between the world wars, when vibrant cultural experimentation collided with political and economic turmoil Out of the ashes of the First World War, Germany launched an unprecedented political project: its first democratic government. The Weimar Republic, named for the city where it was established, endured for only fifteen years before it was toppled by the insurgent Nazi Party in 1933. In Vertigo, prizewinning historian Harald Jähner tells the Republic's full story, capturing a nation caught in a whirlwind of uncertainty and struggling toward a better future. In the aftermath of World War I, Germany was buffeted by political partisanship, economic upheaval, and the constant threat of revolutionary violence. At the same time, many Germans embraced newly liberated lifestyles. They flouted gender norms, flooded racetracks and dance halls, and fostered a vibrant avant-garde that encompassed groundbreaking artists like filmmaker Fritz Lang, painter Wassily Kandinsky, and architect Walter Gropius. But this new Germany sparked a reactionary backlash that led to the Republic's fall to the Nazis and, ultimately, the conflagration of World War II.   Blending deeply researched political history with the firsthand experiences of everyday people, Vertigo is a vital, kaleidoscopic portrait of a pivotal moment in German history.
Rain of Ash by
A major new history of the genocide of Roma and Jews during World War II and their entangled quest for historical justice Jews and Roma died side by side in the Holocaust, yet the world did not recognize their destruction equally. In the years and decades following the war, the Jewish experience of genocide increasingly occupied the attention of legal experts, scholars, educators, curators, and politicians, while the genocide of Europe's Roma went largely ignored. Rain of Ash is the untold story of how Roma turned to Jewish institutions, funding sources, and professional networks as they sought to gain recognition and compensation for their wartime suffering. Ari Joskowicz vividly describes the experiences of Hitler's forgotten victims and charts the evolving postwar relationship between Roma and Jews over the course of nearly a century. During the Nazi era, Jews and Roma shared little in common besides their simultaneous persecution. Yet the decades of entwined struggles for recognition have deepened Romani-Jewish relations, which now center not only on commemorations of past genocides but also on contemporary debates about antiracism and Zionism. Unforgettably moving and sweeping in scope, Rain of Ash is a revelatory account of the unequal yet necessary entanglement of Jewish and Romani quests for historical justice and self-representation that challenges us to radically rethink the way we remember the Holocaust.
Klan War by
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR! A stunning history of the first national anti-terrorist campaign waged on American soil--when Ulysses S. Grant wielded the power of the federal government to dismantle the KKK The Ku Klux Klan, which celebrated historian Fergus Bordewich defines as "the first organized terrorist movement in American history," rose from the ashes of the Civil War. At its peak in the early 1870s, the Klan boasted many tens of thousands of members, no small number of them landowners, lawmen, doctors, journalists, and churchmen, as well as future governors and congressmen. And their mission was to obliterate the muscular democratic power of newly emancipated Black Americans and their white allies, often by the most horrifying means imaginable. To repel the virulent tidal wave of violence, President Ulysses S. Grant waged a two-term battle against both armed Southern enemies of Reconstruction and Northern politicians seduced by visions of postwar conciliation, testing the limits of the federal government in determining the extent of states' rights. In this book, Bordewich transports us to the front lines, in the hamlets of the former Confederate States and in the marble corridors of Congress, reviving an unsung generation of grassroots Black leaders and key figures such as crusading Missouri senator Carl Schurz, who sacrificed the rights of Black Americans in the name of political "reform," and the ruthless former slave trader and Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest. Klan War is a bold and bracing record of America's past that reveals the bloody, Reconstruction-era roots of present-day battles to protect the ballot box and stamp out resurgent white supremacist ideologies.
John Lewis by
The first full-length biography of civil rights hero and congressman John Lewis "The perfect book, at the right time."--Michael Henry Adams, The Guardian For six decades John Robert Lewis (1940-2020) was a towering figure in the U.S. struggle for civil rights. As an activist and progressive congressman, he was renowned for his unshakable integrity, indomitable courage, and determination to get into "good trouble." In this first book-length biography of Lewis, Raymond Arsenault traces Lewis's upbringing in rural Alabama, his activism as a Freedom Rider and leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, his championing of voting rights and anti-poverty initiatives, and his decades of service as the "conscience of Congress." Both in the streets and in Congress, Lewis promoted a philosophy of nonviolence to bring about change. He helped the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders plan the 1963 March on Washington, where he spoke at the Lincoln Memorial. Lewis's activism led to repeated arrests and beatings, most notably when he suffered a skull fracture in Selma, Alabama, during the 1965 police attack later known as Bloody Sunday. He was instrumental in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and in Congress he advocated for racial and economic justice, immigration reform, LGBTQ rights, and national health care. Arsenault recounts Lewis's lifetime of work toward one overarching goal: realizing the "beloved community," an ideal society based in equity and inclusion. Lewis never wavered in this pursuit, and even in death his influence endures, inspiring mobilization and resistance in the fight for social justice.
Israel's Moment by
Israel's Moment is a major new account of how a Jewish state came to be forged in the shadow of World War Two and the Holocaust and the onset of the Cold War. Drawing on new research in government, public and private archives, Jeffrey Herf exposes the political realities that underpinned support for and opposition to Zionist aspirations in Palestine. In an unprecedented international account, he explores the role of the United States, the Arab States, the Palestine Arabs, the Zionists, and key European governments from Britain and France to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Poland. His findings reveal a spectrum of support and opposition that stood in sharp contrast to the political coordinates that emerged during the Cold War, shedding new light on how and why the state of Israel was established in 1948 and challenging conventional associations of left and right, imperialism and anti-imperialism, and racism and anti-racism.
The Unseen Truth by
The award-winning art historian and founder of Vision & Justice uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation's racial regime. In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation's racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen-until now. The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War-the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War-revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive "Caucasian" for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them. To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow and segregation took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what was left out, what we have been conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations-and offers a way to begin to dismantle it.
Red Dead's History by
"Innovative and highly engaging... an inspiring example of what can be done to bring the past to life in all its weirdness and complexity." --The Wall Street Journal "This work is a trifecta - the perfect book for fans of the Red Dead Redemption series, Westerns and history alike. It is a privilege and a joy to be trusted with Tore Olsson's words and to see audiences gain new academic insight into the creation of this iconic series." --Roger Clark, actor of Arthur Morgan, Red Dead Redemption 2 Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption II, set in 1911 and 1899, are the most-played American history video games since The Oregon Trail. Beloved by millions, they've been widely acclaimed for their realism and attention to detail. But how do they fare as re-creations of history? In this engaging book, award-winning American history professor Tore Olsson takes up that question and more. Weaving the games' plots and characters into an exploration of American violence between 1870 and 1920, Olsson shows that it was more often disputes over capitalism and race, not just poker games and bank robberies, that fueled the bloodshed of these turbulent years. As such, this era has much to teach us today. From the West to the Deep South to Appalachia, Olsson reveals the gritty and brutal world that inspired the games, but sometimes lacks context and complexity on the digital screen. Colorful, fast-paced, and dramatic, Red Dead's History sheds light on dark corners of the American past for gamers and history buffs alike.
Zhou Enlai by
The definitive biography of Zhou Enlai, the first premier and preeminent diplomat of the People's Republic of China, who protected his country against the excesses of his boss--Chairman Mao. Zhou Enlai spent twenty-seven years as premier of the People's Republic of China and ten as its foreign minister. He was the architect of the country's administrative apparatus and its relationship to the world, as well as its legendary spymaster. Richard Nixon proclaimed him "the greatest statesman of our era." Yet Zhou has always been overshadowed by Chairman Mao. Chen Jian brings Zhou into the light, offering a nuanced portrait of his complex life as a revolutionary, a master diplomat, and a man with his own vision and aspirations who did much to make China, as well as the larger world, what it is today. Born to a declining mandarin family in 1898, Zhou received a classical education and as a teenager spent time in Japan. As a young man, driven by the desire for China's development, Zhou embraced the communist revolution as a vehicle of China's salvation. He helped Mao govern through a series of transformations, including the disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Yet, as Chen shows, Zhou was never a committed Maoist. His extraordinary political and bureaucratic skill, combined with his centrist approaches, enabled him to mitigate the enormous damage caused by Mao's radicalism. When Zhou died in 1976, the PRC that we know of was not yet visible on the horizon; he never saw glistening twenty-first-century Shanghai or the broader emergence of Chinese capitalism. But it was Zhou's work that shaped the nation whose influence and power are today felt in every corner of the globe.
Hitler's People by
Named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and Air Mail "A fascinating and instructive book . . . elegantly written and perceptive." --Wall Street Journal "Kaleidoscopic . . . A fascinating exploration of individual agency that never loses sight of the larger context . . . Just the kind of probing, nuanced and unsparing study to help us think things through." --The New York Times Through a connected set of biographical portraits of key Nazi figures that follows power as it radiated out from Hitler to the inner and outer circles of the regime's leadership, one of our greatest historians answers the enduring question, how does a society come to carry out a program of unspeakable evil? Richard Evans, author of the acclaimed The Third Reich Trilogy and over two dozen other volumes on modern Europe, is our preeminent scholar of Nazi Germany. Having spent half a century searching for the truths behind one of the most horrifying episodes in human history, in Hitler's People, he brings us back to the original site of the Nazi movement: namely, the lives of its most important members. Working in concentric circles out from Hitler and his closest allies, Evans forms a typological framework of Germany society under Nazi rule from the top down. With a novelist's eye for detail, Evans explains the Third Reich through the personal failings and professional ambitions of its members, from its most notorious deputies--like Goebbels, the regime's propagandist, and Himmler, the Holocaust's chief architect--to the crucial enforcers and instruments of the Nazi agenda that history has largely forgotten--like the schoolteacher Julius Streicher and the actress Leni Riefenstahl. Drawing on a wealth of recently unearthed historical sources, Hitler's People lays bare the inner and outer lives of the characters whose choices led to the deaths of millions. Nearly a century after Hitler's rise, the leading nations of the West are once again being torn apart by a will to power. By telling the stories of these infamous lives as human lives, Evans asks us to grapple with the complicated nature of complicity, showing us that the distinctions between individual and collective responsibility--and even between pathological evil and rational choice--are never easily drawn.
Making Space for the Gulf by
The Persian Gulf has long been a contested space--an object of imperial ambitions, national antagonisms, and migratory dreams. The roots of these contestations lie in the different ways the Gulf has been defined as a region, both by those who live there and those beyond its shore. Making Space for the Gulf reveals how capitalism, empire-building, geopolitics, and urbanism have each shaped understandings of the region over the last two centuries. Here, the Gulf comes into view as a created space, encompassing dynamic social relations and competing interests. Arang Keshavarzian writes a new history of the region that places Iran, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula together within global processes. He connects moments more often treated as ruptures--the discovery of oil, the Iranian Revolution, the rise and decline of British empire, the emergence of American power--and crafts a narrative populated by a diverse range of people--migrants and ruling families, pearl-divers and star architects, striking taxi drivers and dethroned rulers, protectors of British India and stewards of globalized American universities. Tacking across geographic scales, Keshavarzian reveals how the Gulf has been globalized through transnational relations, regionalized as a geopolitical category, and cleaved along national divisions and social inequalities. When understood as a process, not an object, the Persian Gulf reveals much about how regions and the world have been made in modern times. Making Space for the Gulf offers a fresh understanding of this globally consequential place.
Night Flyer by
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography * A Washington Post Notable Book * One of Smithsonian Magazine's Ten Best History Books of the Year "Though broad strokes of Tubman's story are widely known, Miles probes deeper, examining her inner life, faith and relationships with other enslaved Black women to paint a deeper, more vibrant portrait of a historical figure whose mythic status can sometimes overshadow her humanity." -The New York Times From the National Book Award-winning author of All That She Carried, an intimate and revelatory reckoning with the myth and the truth behind an American everyone knows and few really understand Harriet Tubman is among the most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she's a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero. Despite being barely five feet tall, unable to read, and suffering from a brain injury, she managed to escape from her own enslavement, return again and again to lead others north to freedom without loss of life, speak out powerfully against slavery, and then become the first American woman in history to lead a military raid, freeing some seven hundred people. You could almost say she's America's Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood. Tiya Miles's extraordinary Night Flyer changes all that. With her characteristic tenderness and imaginative genius, Miles explores beyond the stock historical grid to weave Tubman's life into the fabric of her world. She probes the ecological reality of Tubman's surroundings and examines her kinship with other enslaved women who similarly passed through a spiritual wilderness and recorded those travels in profound and moving memoirs. What emerges, uncannily, is a human being whose mysticism becomes more palpable the more we understand it--a story that offers us powerful inspiration for our own time of troubles. Harriet Tubman traversed many boundaries, inner and outer. Now, thanks to Tiya Miles, she becomes an even clearer and sharper signal from the past, one that can help us to echolocate a more just and sustainable path.
Martin Van Buren by
A new biography of the 8th president of the United States, the first chief executive not born a British citizen and the first to use the party system to chart his way from tavern-keeper's son to the pinnacle of power. Martin Van Buren was one of the most remarkable politicians not only of his time but in American presidential history. The principal architect of the party system and one of the founders of the Democratic Party, he came to dominate New York-then the most influential state in the Union-and was instrumental in electing Andrew Jackson president. Van Buren's skills as a political strategist were unparalleled (he was known as the "Little Magician"), winning him a series of high-profile offices: US senator, New York's governor, US secretary of state, US vice president, and finally the White House. In his rise to power, Van Buren sought consensus and conciliation, bending to the wishes of slave interests and complicit in the dispossession of America's Indigenous population--two of the darkest chapters in American history. This new biography of Van Buren -- the first full-scale portrait in four decades -- charts his ascent from a tavern in the Hudson Valley to the presidency, concluding with his late-career involvement in an antislavery movement. Offering vivid profiles of the day's leading figures (Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, John Quincy Adams, DeWitt Clinton, James K. Polk), James Bradley's book depicts the struggle for power in the tumultuous decades leading up to the Civil War.
Raised to Obey by
How the expansion of primary education in the West emerged not from democratic ideals but from the state's desire to control its citizens Nearly every country today has universal primary education. But why did governments in the West decide to provide education to all children in the first place? In Raised to Obey, Agustina Paglayan offers an unsettling answer. The introduction of broadly accessible primary education was not mainly a response to industrialization, or fueled by democratic ideals, or even aimed at eradicating illiteracy or improving skills. It was motivated instead by elites' fear of the masses--and the desire to turn the "savage," "unruly," and "morally flawed" children of the lower classes into well-behaved future citizens who would obey the state and its laws. Drawing on unparalleled evidence from two centuries of education provision in Europe and the Americas, and deploying rich data that capture the expansion of primary education and its characteristics, this sweeping book offers a political history of primary schools that is both broad and deep. Paglayan shows that governments invested in primary schools when internal threats heightened political elites' anxiety around mass violence and the breakdown of social order. Two hundred years later, the original objective of disciplining children remains at the core of how most public schools around the world operate. The future of education systems--and their ability to reduce poverty and inequality--hinges on our ability to understand and come to terms with this troubling history.