World History

Sitewide Message

Free Shipping For All Orders Over $100

U.S. Only - $9.99 ground Shipping for Orders Less Than $100

Additional shipping charges to Hawaii and Alaska

Textbooks Available for In-store Pickup Only 

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks
$28.95

For thousands of years, people of all cultures have made and used clocks, from the city sundials of ancient Rome to the medieval water clocks of imperial China, hourglasses fomenting revolution in the Middle Ages, the Stock Exchange clock of Amsterdam in 1611, Enlightenment observatories in India, and the high-precision clocks circling the Earth on a fleet of GPS satellites that have been launched since 1978. Clocks have helped us navigate the world and build empires, and have even taken us to the brink of destruction. Elites have used them to wield power, make money, govern citizens, and control lives--and sometimes the people have used them to fight back.

Through the stories of twelve clocks, About Time brings pivotal moments from the past vividly to life. Historian and lifelong clock enthusiast David Rooney takes us from the unveiling of al-Jazari's castle clock in 1206, in present-day Turkey; to the Cape of Good Hope observatory at the southern tip of Africa, where nineteenth-century British government astronomers moved the gears of empire with a time ball and a gun; to the burial of a plutonium clock now sealed beneath a public park in Osaka, where it will keep time for 5,000 years.

Rooney shows, through these artifacts, how time has been imagined, politicized, and weaponized over the centuries--and how it might bring peace. Ultimately, he writes, the technical history of horology is only the start of the story. A history of clocks is a history of civilization.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780393867930
0
field_in_author: 
Rooney, David
Author: 
Publisher: 

Abyss

Abyss
$35.00

Bestselling author Max Hastings offers a welcome re-evaluation of one of the most gripping and tense international events in modern history--the Cuban Missile Crisis--providing a people-focused narrative that explores the attitudes and conduct of Russians, Cubans, Americans, and a terrified world that followed each moment as it unfolded.

In The Abyss, Max Hastings turns his focus to one of the most terrifying events of the mid-twentieth century--the thirteen days in October 1962 when the world stood on the brink of nuclear war. Hastings looks at the conflict with fresh eyes, focusing on the people at the heart of the crisis--America President John F. Kennedy, Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, and a host of their advisors.

Combining in-depth research with Hasting's well-honed insights, The Abyss is a human history that unfolds on a wide, colorful canvas. As the action moves back and forth from Moscow to Washington, DC, to Havana, Hastings seeks to explain, as much as to describe, the attitudes and conduct of the Soviets, Cubans, and Americans, and to recreate the tension and heightened fears of countless innocent bystanders whose lives hung in the balance. Reflecting on the outcome of these events, he reveals how the aftermath of this momentous crisis continues to reverberate today.

Powerful, and riveting, filled with compelling detail and told with narrative flair, The Abyss is history at its finest.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780062980137
0
field_in_author: 
Hastings, Max
Author: 
Publisher: 

Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War
$30.00
A Washington Post Best Book of 2021

The #1 New York Times bestselling investigative story of how three successive presidents and their military commanders deceived the public year after year about America's longest war, foreshadowing the Taliban's recapture of Afghanistan, by Washington Post reporter and three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Craig Whitlock.

Unlike the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had near-unanimous public support. At first, the goals were straightforward and clear: defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Yet soon after the United States and its allies removed the Taliban from power, the mission veered off course and US officials lost sight of their original objectives.

Distracted by the war in Iraq, the US military become mired in an unwinnable guerrilla conflict in a country it did not understand. But no president wanted to admit failure, especially in a war that began as a just cause. Instead, the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations sent more and more troops to Afghanistan and repeatedly said they were making progress, even though they knew there was no realistic prospect for an outright victory.

Just as the Pentagon Papers changed the public's understanding of Vietnam, The Afghanistan Papers contains "fast-paced and vivid" (The New York Times Book Review) revelation after revelation from people who played a direct role in the war from leaders in the White House and the Pentagon to soldiers and aid workers on the front lines. In unvarnished language, they admit that the US government's strategies were a mess, that the nation-building project was a colossal failure, and that drugs and corruption gained a stranglehold over their allies in the Afghan government. All told, the account is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who knew that the US government was presenting a distorted, and sometimes entirely fabricated, version of the facts on the ground.

Documents unearthed by The Washington Post reveal that President Bush didn't know the name of his Afghanistan war commander--and didn't want to meet with him. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that he had "no visibility into who the bad guys are." His successor, Robert Gates, said: "We didn't know jack shit about al-Qaeda."

The Afghanistan Papers is a "searing indictment of the deceit, blunders, and hubris of senior military and civilian officials" (Tom Bowman, NRP Pentagon Correspondent) that will supercharge a long-overdue reckoning over what went wrong and forever change the way the conflict is remembered.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781982159009
0
field_in_author: 
Whitlock, Craig
Publisher: 

African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Women

African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Women
$30.00

Winner of the African Photobook of the Year Award

A Choice Outstanding Title of the Year
A USA Today Must-Read for Black History Month
An NPR Goats and Soda Editors' Pick
A BookRiot Favorite Nonfiction Book of the Year

An unprecedented visual history of African women told in striking and subversive historical photographs--featuring an Introduction by Edwidge Danticat and a Foreword by Jacqueline Woodson.

Most of us grew up with images of African women that were purely anthropological--bright displays of exotica where the deeper personhood seemed tucked away. Or they were chronicles of war and poverty--"poverty porn." But now, curator Catherine E. McKinley draws on her extensive collection of historical and contemporary photos to present a visual history spanning a hundred-year arc (1870-1970) of what is among the earliest photography on the continent. These images tell a different story of African women: how deeply cosmopolitan and modern they are in their style; how they were able to reclaim the tools of the colonial oppression that threatened their selfhood and livelihoods.

Featuring works by celebrated African masters, African studios of local legend, and anonymous artists, The African Lookbook captures the dignity, playfulness, austerity, grandeur, and fantasy-making of African women across centuries. McKinley also features photos by Europeans--most starkly, striking nudes--revealing the relationships between white men and the Black female sitters where, at best, a grave power imbalance lies. It's a bittersweet truth that when there is exploitation there can also be profound resistance expressed in unexpected ways--even if it's only in gazing back. These photos tell the story of how the sewing machine and the camera became powerful tools for women's self-expression, revealing a truly glorious display of everyday beauty.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781620403532
0
field_in_author: 
McKinley, Catherine E

After the Romanovs

After the Romanovs
$29.99

From Helen Rappaport, the New York Times bestselling author of The Romanov Sisters comes After the Romanovs, the story of the Russian aristocrats, artists, and intellectuals who sought freedom and refuge in the City of Light.

Paris has always been a city of cultural excellence, fine wine and food, and the latest fashions. But it has also been a place of refuge for those fleeing persecution, never more so than before and after the Russian Revolution and the fall of the Romanov dynasty. For years, Russian aristocrats had enjoyed all that Belle Époque Paris had to offer, spending lavishly when they visited. It was a place of artistic experimentation, such as Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. But the brutality of the Bolshevik takeover forced Russians of all types to flee their homeland, sometimes leaving with only the clothes on their backs.

Arriving in Paris, former princes could be seen driving taxicabs, while their wives who could sew worked for the fashion houses, their unique Russian style serving as inspiration for designers like Coco Chanel. Talented intellectuals, artists, poets, philosophers, and writers struggled in exile, eking out a living at menial jobs. Some, like Bunin, Chagall and Stravinsky, encountered great success in the same Paris that welcomed Americans like Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Political activists sought to overthrow the Bolshevik regime from afar, while double agents from both sides plotted espionage and assassination. Others became trapped in a cycle of poverty and their all-consuming homesickness for Russia, the homeland they had been forced to abandon.

This is their story.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781250273109
0
field_in_author: 
Rappaport, Helen
Author: 
Publisher: 

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955
$30.00
How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more? This internationally acclaimed revelatory history--filled with first-person accounts from articles and diaries (The New York Times)--of the transformational decade that followed World War II illustrates how Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust.

Featuring over 40 eye-opening black-and-white photographs and posters from the period.

The years 1945 to 1955 were a raw, wild decade that found many Germans politically, economically, and morally bankrupt. Victorious Allied forces occupied the four zones that make up present-day Germany. More than half the population was displaced; 10 million newly released forced laborers and several million prisoners of war returned to an uncertain existence. Cities lay in ruins--no mail, no trains, no traffic--with bodies yet to be found beneath the towering rubble.

Aftermath received wide acclaim and spent forty-eight weeks on the best-seller list in Germany when it was published there in 2019. It is the first history of Germany's national mentality in the immediate postwar years. Using major global political developments as a backdrop, Harald Jähner weaves a series of life stories into a nuanced panorama of a nation undergoing monumental change. Poised between two eras, this decade is portrayed by Jähner as a period that proved decisive for Germany's future--and one starkly different from how most of us imagine it today.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780593319734
0
field_in_author: 
Jähner, Harald
Author: 
Publisher: 

Age of Wood

Age of Wood
$17.00
A "smart and surprising" (Booklist) "expansive history" (Publishers Weekly) detailing the role that wood and trees have played in our global ecosystem--including human evolution and the rise and fall of empires--in the bestselling tradition of Yuval Harari's Sapiens and Mark Kurlansky's Salt.

As the dominant species on Earth, humans have made astonishing progress since our ancestors came down from the trees. But how did the descendants of small primates manage to walk upright, become top predators, and populate the world? How were humans able to develop civilizations and produce a globalized economy? Now, in The Age of Wood, Roland Ennos shows for the first time that the key to our success has been our relationship with wood.

"A lively history of biology, mechanics, and culture that stretches back 60 million years" (Nature) The Age of Wood reinterprets human history and shows how our ability to exploit wood's unique properties has profoundly shaped our bodies and minds, societies, and lives. Ennos takes us on a sweeping journey from Southeast Asia and West Africa where great apes swing among the trees, build nests, and fashion tools; to East Africa where hunter gatherers collected their food; to the structural design of wooden temples in China and Japan; and to Northern England, where archaeologists trace how coal enabled humans to build an industrial world. Addressing the effects of industrialization--including the use of fossil fuels and other energy-intensive materials to replace timber--The Age of Wood not only shows the essential role that trees play in the history and evolution of human existence, but also argues that for the benefit of our planet we must return to more traditional ways of growing, using, and understanding trees.

A brilliant blend of recent research and existing scientific knowledge, this is an "excellent, thorough history in an age of our increasingly fraught relationships with natural resources" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

ISBN/SKU: 
9781982114749
0
field_in_author: 
Ennos, Roland
Author: 
Publisher: 

Agent Sonya

Agent Sonya
$18.00
The "master storyteller" (San Francisco Chronicle) behind the New York Times bestseller The Spy and the Traitor uncovers the true story behind the Cold War's most intrepid female spy.

"[An] immensely exciting, fast-moving account."--The Washington Post

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Foreign Affairs - Kirkus Reviews - Library Journal

In 1942, in a quiet village in the leafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. By all accounts, she seemed to be living a simple, unassuming life. Her neighbors in the village knew little about her.

They didn't know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. They didn't know that her husband was also a spy, or that she was running powerful agents across Europe. Behind the facade of her picturesque life, Burton was a dedicated Communist, a Soviet colonel, and a veteran agent, gathering the scientific secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the bomb.

This true-life spy story is a masterpiece about the woman code-named "Sonya." Over the course of her career, she was hunted by the Chinese, the Japanese, the Nazis, MI5, MI6, and the FBI--and she evaded them all. Her story reflects the great ideological clash of the twentieth century--between Communism, Fascism, and Western democracy--and casts new light on the spy battles and shifting allegiances of our own times.

With unparalleled access to Sonya's diaries and correspondence and never-before-seen information on her clandestine activities, Ben Macintyre has conjured a page-turning history of a legendary secret agent, a woman who influenced the course of the Cold War and helped plunge the world into a decades-long standoff between nuclear superpowers.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780593136324
0
field_in_author: 
Macintyre, Ben

All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopedia

All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopedia
$29.99

From the "deliriously clever" (Boston Globe) Simon Garfield, New York Times bestselling author of Just My Type, comes the wild and fascinating story of the encyclopedia, from Ancient Greece to the present day.

"A brilliant book about knowledge itself." --Deirdre Mask, author of The Address Book

"Magnificent. ... A perfectly styled work of literature - at times sad, at times funny, but always full of life." --Engineering & Technology Magazine

The encyclopedia once shaped our understanding of the world. Created by thousands of scholars and the most obsessive of editors, a good set conveyed a sense of absolute wisdom on its reader. Contributions from Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Orville Wright, Alfred Hitchcock, Marie Curie and Indira Gandhi helped millions of children with their homework. Adults cleared their shelves in the belief that everything that was explainable was now effortlessly accessible in their living rooms.

Now these huge books gather dust and sell for almost nothing on eBay. Instead, we get our information from our phones and computers, apparently for free. What have we lost in this transition? And how did we tell the progress of our lives in the past?

All the Knowledge in the World is a history and celebration of those who created the most ground-breaking and remarkable publishing phenomenon of any age. Simon Garfield, who "has a genius for being sparked to life by esoteric enthusiasm and charming readers with his delight" (The Times), guides us on an utterly delightful journey, from Ancient Greece to Wikipedia, from modest single-volumes to the 11,000-volume Chinese manuscript that was too big to print. He looks at how Encyclopedia Britannica came to dominate the industry, how it spawned hundreds of competitors, and how an army of ingenious door-to-door salesmen sold their wares to guilt-ridden parents. He reveals how encyclopedias have reflected our changing attitudes towards sexuality, race, and technology, and exposes how these ultimate bastions of trust were often riddled with errors and prejudice.

With his characteristic ability to tackle the broadest of subjects in an illuminating and highly entertaining way, Simon Garfield uncovers a fascinating and important part of our shared past and wonders whether the promise of complete knowledge--that most human of ambitions--will forever be beyond our grasp.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780063292277
0
field_in_author: 
Garfield, Simon
Author: 
Publisher: 

Apocalypse Factory

Apocalypse Factory
$18.95

It began with plutonium, the first element ever manufactured in quantity by humans. Fearing that the Germans would be the first to weaponize the atom, the United States marshaled brilliant minds and seemingly inexhaustible bodies to find a way to create a nuclear chain reaction of inconceivable explosive power. In a matter of months, the Hanford nuclear facility was built to produce and weaponize the enigmatic and deadly new material that would fuel atomic bombs. In the desert of eastern Washington State, far from prying eyes, scientists Glenn Seaborg, Enrico Fermi, and many thousands of others--the physicists, engineers, laborers, and support staff at the facility--manufactured plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and for the bombs in the current American nuclear arsenal, enabling the construction of weapons with the potential to end human civilization.

With his characteristic blend of scientific clarity and storytelling, Steve Olson asks why Hanford has been largely overlooked in histories of the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Olson, who grew up just twenty miles from Hanford's B Reactor, recounts how a small Washington town played host to some of the most influential scientists and engineers in American history as they sought to create the substance at the core of the most destructive weapons ever created. The Apocalypse Factory offers a new generation this dramatic story of human achievement and, ultimately, of lethal hubris.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780393868357
0
field_in_author: 
Olson, Steve
Author: 
Publisher: 

Athens: City of Wisdom

Athens: City of Wisdom
$35.00

Even on the most smog-bound of days, the rocky outcrop on which the Acropolis stands is visible above the sprawling roof-scape of the Greek capital. Athens presents one of the most recognizable and symbolically potent panoramas of any of the world's cities: the pillars and pediments of the Parthenon - the temple dedicated to Athena, goddess of wisdom, that crowns the Acropolis - dominate a city whose name is synonymous for many with civilization itself.


It is hard not to feel the hand of history in such a place. The birthplace of democracy, Western philosophy and theatre, Athens' importance cannot be understated. Few cities have enjoyed a history so rich in artistic creativity and the making of ideas; or one so curiously patterned by alternating cycles of turbulence and quietness.


From the legal reforms of the lawmaker Solon in the sixth century BCE to the travails of early twenty-first century Athens, as it struggles with the legacy of the economic crises of the 2000s, Clark brings the city's history to life, evoking its cultural richness and political resonance in this epic, kaleidoscopic history.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781643138756
0
field_in_author: 
Clark, Bruce
Author: 
Publisher: 

Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands

Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands
$30.00

Bad Mexicans tells the dramatic story of the magonistas, the migrant rebels who sparked the 1910 Mexican Revolution from the United States. Led by a brilliant but ill-tempered radical named Ricardo Flores Magón, the magonistas were a motley band of journalists, miners, migrant workers, and more, who organized thousands of Mexican workers--and American dissidents--to their cause. Determined to oust Mexico's dictator, Porfirio Díaz, who encouraged the plunder of his country by U.S. imperialists such as Guggenheim and Rockefeller, the rebels had to outrun and outsmart the swarm of U. S. authorities vested in protecting the Diaz regime. The U.S. Departments of War, State, Treasury, and Justice as well as police, sheriffs, and spies, hunted the magonistas across the country. Capturing Ricardo Flores Magón was one of the FBI's first cases.

But the magonistas persevered. They lived in hiding, wrote in secret code, and launched armed raids into Mexico until they ignited the world's first social revolution of the twentieth century.

Taking readers to the frontlines of the magonista uprising and the counterinsurgency campaign that failed to stop them, Kelly Lytle Hernández puts the magonista revolt at the heart of U.S. history. Long ignored by textbooks, the magonistas threatened to undo the rise of Anglo-American power, on both sides of the border, and inspired a revolution that gave birth to the Mexican-American population, making the magonistas' story integral to modern American life.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781324004370
0
field_in_author: 
Lytle Hernández, Kelly
Publisher: 

Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu
$18.00
To save ancient Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean's Eleven in this "fast-paced narrative that is...part intellectual history, part geopolitical tract, and part out-and-out thriller" (The Washington Post) from the author of The Falcon Thief.In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that were crumbling in the trunks of desert shepherds. His goal: preserve this crucial part of the world's patrimony in a gorgeous library. But then Al Qaeda showed up at the door. "Part history, part scholarly adventure story, and part journalist survey...Joshua Hammer writes with verve and expertise" (The New York Times Book Review) about how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist from the legendary city of Timbuktu, became one of the world's greatest smugglers by saving the texts from sure destruction. With bravery and patience, Haidara organized a dangerous operation to sneak all 350,000 volumes out of the city to the safety of southern Mali. His heroic heist "has all the elements of a classic adventure novel" (The Seattle Times), and is a reminder that ordinary citizens often do the most to protect the beauty of their culture. His the story is one of a man who, through extreme circumstances, discovered his higher calling and was changed forever by it.
ISBN/SKU: 
9781476777412
0
field_in_author: 
Hammer, Joshua
Author: 
Publisher: 

Before We Were Trans

Before We Were Trans
$30.00
A groundbreaking global history of gender nonconformity 

Today's narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people's lives.

Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Before We Were Trans transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures. 

ISBN/SKU: 
9781541603080
0
field_in_author: 
Heyam, Dr. Kit
Author: 
Publisher: 

Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation

Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation
$29.99

A New York Times Bestseller

Less a mystery unsolved than a secret well kept...

Using new technology, recently discovered documents and sophisticated investigative techniques, an international team--led by an obsessed retired FBI agent--has finally solved the mystery that has haunted generations since World War II: Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family? And why?

Over thirty million people have read The Diary of a Young Girl, the journal teen-aged Anne Frank kept while living in an attic with her family and four other people in Amsterdam during World War II, until the Nazis arrested them and sent them to a concentration camp. But despite the many works--journalism, books, plays and novels--devoted to Anne's story, none has ever conclusively explained how these eight people managed to live in hiding undetected for over two years--and who or what finally brought the Nazis to their door.

With painstaking care, retired FBI agent Vincent Pankoke and a team of indefatigable investigators pored over tens of thousands of pages of documents--some never before seen--and interviewed scores of descendants of people familiar with the Franks. Utilizing methods developed by the FBI, the Cold Case Team painstakingly pieced together the months leading to the infamous arrest--and came to a shocking conclusion.

The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation is the riveting story of their mission. Rosemary Sullivan introduces us to the investigators, explains the behavior of both the captives and their captors and profiles a group of suspects. All the while, she vividly brings to life wartime Amsterdam: a place where no matter how wealthy, educated, or careful you were, you never knew whom you could trust.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780062892355
0
field_in_author: 
Sullivan, Rosemary
Author: 
Publisher: 

Black Snow

Black Snow
$35.00

Seven minutes past midnight on March 10, 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo. Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a firestorm that reached up to 2,800 degrees, liquefying asphalt and vaporizing thousands; sixteen square miles of the city were flattened and more than 100,000 men, women, and children were killed.

Black Snow is the story of this devastating operation, orchestrated by Major General Curtis LeMay, who famously remarked: "If we lose the war, we'll be tried as war criminals." James M. Scott reconstructs in granular detail that horrific night, and describes the development of the B-29, the capture of the Marianas for use as airfields, and the change in strategy from high-altitude daylight "precision" bombing to low-altitude nighttime incendiary bombing. Most importantly, the raid represented a significant moral shift for America, marking the first time commanders deliberately targeted civilians which helped pave the way for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later.

Drawing on first-person interviews with American pilots and bombardiers and Japanese survivors, air force archives, and oral histories never before published in English, Scott delivers a harrowing and gripping account, and his most important and compelling work to date.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781324002994
0
field_in_author: 
Scott, James M.
Author: 
Publisher: 

Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945

Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945
$42.00
"Monumental... [A] vast and detailed study that is surely the finest single-volume history of World War II. Richard Overy has given us a powerful reminder of the horror of war and the threat posed by dictators with dreams of empire." - The Wall Street Journal

A thought-provoking and original reassessment of World War II, from Britain's leading military historian

A New York Times bestseller

Richard Overy sets out in Blood and Ruins to recast the way in which we view the Second World War and its origins and aftermath. As one of Britain's most decorated and respected World War II historians, he argues that this was the "last imperial war," with almost a century-long lead-up of global imperial expansion, which reached its peak in the territorial ambitions of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, before descending into the largest and costliest war in human history and the end, after 1945, of all territorial empires.

Overy also argues for a more global perspective on the war, one that looks broader than the typical focus on military conflict between the Allied and Axis states. Above all, Overy explains the bitter cost for those involved in fighting, and the exceptional level of crime and atrocity that marked the war and its protracted aftermath--which extended far beyond 1945.

Blood and Ruins is a masterpiece, a new and definitive look at the ultimate struggle over the future of the global order, which will compel us to view the war in novel and unfamiliar ways. Thought-provoking, original and challenging, Blood and Ruins sets out to understand the war anew.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780670025169
0
field_in_author: 
Overy, Richard
Author: 
Publisher: 

Bohemians

Bohemians
$16.99
"A story of love, incredible bravery and self-sacrifice . . . brilliantly told."--Antony Beevor, New York Times best-selling author of The Fall of Berlin 1945, The Second World War, and D-Day

"A taut, absorbing tale of anti-Nazi resistance."--Kirkus Reviews

Harro Schulze-Boysen already had shed blood in the fight against Nazism by the time he and Libertas Haas-Heye began their whirlwind romance. She joined the cause, and soon the two lovers were leading a network of anti-fascist fighters that stretched across Berlin's bohemian underworld. But nothing could prepare Harro and Libertas for the betrayals they would suffer in this war of secrets--a struggle in which friend could be indistinguishable from foe. Drawing on unpublished diaries, letters, and Gestapo files, Norman Ohler spins an unforgettable tale of love, heroism, and sacrifice in The Bohemians.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780358508625
0
field_in_author: 
Ohler, Norman
Author: 
Publisher: 

Bomber Mafia

Bomber Mafia
$18.99

A "truly compelling" (Good Morning America) New York Times bestseller that explores how technology and best intentions collide in the heat of war--from the creator and host of the podcast Revisionist History.

In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.

Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the "Bomber Mafia," asked: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal?

In contrast, the bombing of Tokyo on the deadliest night of the war was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose brutal pragmatism and scorched-earth tactics in Japan cost thousands of civilian lives, but may have spared even more by averting a planned US invasion. In The Bomber Mafia, Gladwell asks, "Was it worth it?"

Things might have gone differently had LeMay's predecessor, General Haywood Hansell, remained in charge. Hansell believed in precision bombing, but when he and Curtis LeMay squared off for a leadership handover in the jungles of Guam, LeMay emerged victorious, leading to the darkest night of World War II. The Bomber Mafia is a riveting tale of persistence, innovation, and the incalculable wages of war.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780316296816
0
field_in_author: 
Gladwell, Malcolm
Author: 
Publisher: 

Born in Blackness

Born in Blackness
$19.95

Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the "New World." Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity?

In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe's dehumanizing engagement with the "dark" continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not--as we are so often told, even today--Europe's yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa.

Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history.

While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories--siloed and piecemeal--were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic "rise of the West" theories that have endured to this day.

"Capacious and compelling" (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton--and of the greatest "commodity" of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the "New World," whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781324092407
0
field_in_author: 
French, Howard W.

Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next

Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
$28.00

From the bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses, an eye-opening road trip through 5,500 years of humans on the go, revealing how transportation inevitably shapes civilization.

Tom Standage's fleet-footed and surprising global histories have delighted readers and cemented his reputation as one of our leading interpreters of technologies past and present. Now, he returns with a provocative account of a sometimes-overlooked form of technology-personal transportation-and explores how it has shaped societies and cultures over millennia.

Beginning around 3,500 BCE with the wheel--a device that didn't catch on until a couple thousand years after its invention--Standage zips through the eras of horsepower, trains, and bicycles, revealing how each successive mode of transit embedded itself in the world we live in, from the geography of our cities to our experience of time to our notions of gender. Then, delving into the history of the automobile's development, Standage explores the social resistance to cars and the upheaval that their widespread adoption required. Cars changed how the world was administered, laid out, and policed, how it looked, sounded, and smelled--and not always in the ways we might have preferred.

Today--after the explosive growth of ride-sharing and years of breathless predictions about autonomous vehicles--the social transformations spurred by coronavirus and overshadowed by climate change create a unique opportunity to critically reexamine our relationship to the car. With A Brief History of Motion, Standage overturns myths, considers roads not taken, and invites us to look at our past with fresh eyes so we can create the future we want to see.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781635573619
0
field_in_author: 
Standage, Tom
Author: 
Publisher: 

Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941

Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941
$35.00
A sweeping, groundbreaking epic that combines military with social history, to illuminate the ways in which Great Britain and its people were permanently transformed by the Second World War.

Here is the many-faceted, world-historically significant story of Britain at war. In looking closely at the military and political dimensions of the conflict's first crucial years, Alan Allport tackles questions such as: Could the war have been avoided? Could it have been lost? Were the strategic decisions the rights ones? How well did the British organize and fight? How well did the British live up to their own values? What difference did the war make in the end to the fate of the nation?

In answering these and other essential questions he focuses on the human contingencies of the war, weighing directly at the roles of individuals and the outcomes determined by luck or chance. Moreover, he looks intimately at the changes in wartime British society and culture. Britain at Bay draws on a large cast of characters--from the leading statesmen and military commanders who made the decisions, to the ordinary men, women, and children who carried them out and lived through their consequences--in a comprehensible and compelling single history of forty-six million people. For better or worse, much of Britain today is ultimately the product of the experiences of 1938-1941.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780451494740
0
field_in_author: 
Allport, Alan
Author: 
Publisher: 

Bronze Lie: Shattering the Myth of Spartan Warrior Supremacy

Bronze Lie: Shattering the Myth of Spartan Warrior Supremacy
$30.00

The story of the Spartans is one of the best known in history, from their rigorous training to their dramatic feats of arms--but is that portrait of Spartan supremacy true? Renowned novelist and popular historian Myke Cole goes back to the original sources to set the record straight.

The Spartan hoplite enjoys unquestioned currency as history's greatest fighting man. Raised from the age of seven in the agoge, a military academy legendary for its harshness, Spartan men were brought up to value loyalty to the polis (the city-state) above all else, and to prize obedience to orders higher than their own lives. The last stand at Thermopylae made the Spartans legends in their own time, famous for their brevity and their ability to endure hardship, to control their emotions, and to never surrender--even in the face of impossible odds, even when it meant their certain deaths.

But was this reputation earned? Or was it simply the success of a propaganda machine that began turning at Thermopylae in 480 BC? Examining the historical record, both literary and material, paints a very different picture of Spartan arms--a society dedicated to militarism not in service to Greek unity or to the Spartan state itself, but as a desperate measure intended to keep its massive population of helots (a near-slave underclass) in line, forcing them to perform the mundane work of farming, cleaning, building and crafting to permit the dandified Spartan citizens (spartiatai) the time they needed to focus on their military training.

Covering Sparta's full classical history, The Bronze Lie examines the myth of Spartan warrior supremacy against the historical record, delving into the minutiae of Spartan warfare from arms and armor to tactics and strategy. With a special focus on previously under-publicized Spartan reverses that have been left largely unexamined, it looks at the major battles as well as re-examining major Spartan victories. Most importantly, it re-examines Thermopylae itself, a propaganda victory utterly out of proportion to its actual impact--a defeat that wasn't even accomplished by 300 Spartans, but rather by thousands of allied Greeks, all for the net effect of barely slowing a Persian advance that went on to roam Greece unchecked and destroy Athens itself.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781472843753
0
field_in_author: 
Cole, Myke
Author: 
Publisher: 

Can We Talk about Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted

Can We Talk about Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted
$27.00

From the expert who understands both sides of one of the world's most complex, controversial topics, a modern-day Guide for the Perplexed-a primer on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Can't you just explain the Israel situation to me? In, like, 10 minutes or less? This is the question Daniel Sokatch is used to answering on an almost daily basis as the head of the New Israel Fund, an organization dedicated to equality and democracy for all Israelis, not just Jews, Sokatch is supremely well-versed on the Israeli conflict.

Can We Talk About Israel? is the story of that conflict, and of why so many people feel so strongly about it without actually understanding it very well at all. It is an attempt to grapple with a century-long struggle between two peoples that both perceive themselves as (and indeed are) victims. And it's an attempt to explain why Israel (and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) inspires such extreme feelings-why it seems like Israel is the answer to "what is wrong with the world" for half the people in it, and "what is right with the world" for the other half. As Sokatch asks, is there any other topic about which so many intelligent, educated and sophisticated people express such strongly and passionately held convictions, and about which they actually know so little?

Complete with engaging illustrations by Christopher Noxon, Can We Talk About Israel? is an easy-to-read yet penetrating and original look at the history and basic contours of one of the most complicated conflicts in the world.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781635573879
0
field_in_author: 
Sokatch, Daniel
Author: 
Publisher: 

Chernobyl

Chernobyl
$19.99

A Chernobyl survivor and award-winning historian "mercilessly chronicles the absurdities of the Soviet system" in this "vividly empathetic" account of the worst nuclear accident in history (The Wall Street Journal).

On the morning of April 26, 1986, Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine. Dozens died of radiation poisoning, fallout contaminated half the continent, and thousands fell ill.

In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy draws on new sources to tell the dramatic stories of the firefighters, scientists, and soldiers who heroically extinguished the nuclear inferno. He lays bare the flaws of the Soviet nuclear industry, tracing the disaster to the authoritarian character of the Communist party rule, the regime's control over scientific information, and its emphasis on economic development over all else.

Today, the risk of another Chernobyl looms in the mismanagement of nuclear power in the developing world. A moving and definitive account, Chernobyl is also an urgent call to action.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781541617070
0
field_in_author: 
Plokhy, Serhii
Author: 
Publisher: 

China After Mao

China After Mao
$30.00

From internationally renowned historian Frank Dikötter, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, a myth-shattering history of China from the death of Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping.

Through decades of direct experience of the People's Republic combined with extraordinary access to hundreds of hitherto unseen documents in communist party archives, the author of The People's Trilogy offers a riveting account of China's rise from the disaster of the Cultural Revolution. He takes us inside the country's unprecedented four-decade economic transformation--from rural villages to industrial metropoles and elite party conclaves--that vaulted the nation from 126t -largest economy in the world to second -largest. A historian at the pinnacle of his field, Dikötter challenges much of what we think we know about how this happened. Casting aside the image of a society marching unwaveringly toward growth, in lockstep to the beat of the party drum, he recounts instead a fascinating tale of contradictions, illusions, and palace intrigue, of disasters narrowly averted, shadow banking, anti-corruption purges, and extreme state wealth existing alongside everyday poverty. He examines China's navigation of the 2008 financial crash, its increasing hostility towards perceived Western interference, and its development into a thoroughly entrenched dictatorship with a sprawling security apparatus and the most sophisticated surveillance system in the world. As this magisterial book makes clear, the communist party's goal was never to join the democratic world, but to resist it--and ultimately defeat it.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781639730513
0
field_in_author: 
Dikotter, Frank
Author: 
Publisher: 

China in One Village: The Story of One Town and the Changing World

China in One Village: The Story of One Town and the Changing World
$26.95
A global future in the history of a single village

After a decade away from her ancestral family village, during which she became a writer and literary scholar in Beijing, Liang Hong started visiting her rural hometown in landlocked Henan Province. What she found was an extended family riven by the seismic changes in Chinese society and a village turned inside out by emigration, neglect, and environmental despoliation. Combining family memoir, literary observation, and social commentary, Liang's by turns lyrically poetic and movingly raw investigation into the fate of her village became a bestselling book in China and brought her fame.

For many months, Liang walked the roads and fields of her village, recording the stories of her relatives--especially her irascible, unforgettable father--and talking to everyone from high government officials to the lowest of village outcasts. Across China, many saw in Liang's riveting interviews with family members and childhood acquaintances a mirror of their own lives, and her observations about the way the greatest rural-to-urban migration of modern times has twisted the country resonated deeply. China in One Village tells the story of contemporary China through one clear-eyed, literary observer, one family, and one village.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781839761775
0
field_in_author: 
Hong, Liang
Author: 
Publisher: