- Trotsky
- Robert Service completes his masterful trilogy on the founding figures of the Soviet Union in an eagerly anticipated, authoritative biography of Leon Trotsky. Although Trotsky’s followers clung to the stubborn view of him as a pure revolutionary and a powerful intellect unjustly hounded into exile by Stalin, the reality is very different. This illuminating portrait of the man and his legacy sets the record straight.
- Hardcover November 2010
- About Faces
- When nineteenth-century Londoners looked at each other, what did they see, and how did they want to be seen? Sharrona Pearl reveals the way that physiognomy, the study of facial features and their relationship to character, shaped the way that people understood one another and presented themselves. By showing how physiognomy gave people permission to judge others, Pearl holds up a mirror both to Victorian times and our own.
- Hardcover February 2010
- One Country, Two Societies
- This timely and important collection of original essays analyzes China’s foremost social cleavage: the rural-urban gap. The contributors, many of whom conducted extensive fieldwork, examine the historical background of rural-urban relations; aspects of inequality apart from income (access to education and medical care, the digital divide, housing quality and location); experiences of discrimination, particularly among urban migrants; and conceptual and policy debates in China regarding the status and treatment of rural residents and urban migrants.
- Hardcover February 2010
- Defining Engagement
- Presenting fresh insights on the internal dynamics and global contexts that shaped foreign relations in early modern Japan, Robert I. Hellyer challenges the still largely accepted wisdom that the Tokugawa shogunate, guided by an ideology of seclusion, stifled intercourse with the outside world, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
- Hardcover November 2009
- Superstitious Regimes
- We live in a world shaped by secularism—the separation of numinous power from political authority and religion from the political, social, and economic realms of public life. This book explores the modern recategorization of religious practices and people and examines how state power affected the religious lives and physical order of local communities.
- Hardcover November 2009
- Kristallnacht 1938
- Kristallnacht revealed to the world the intent and extent of Nazi Judeophobia. However, it was seen essentially as the work of the Nazi leadership. Now, Alan Steinweis counters that view in his vision of Kristallnacht as a veritable pogrom—a popular cathartic convulsion of anti-Semitic violence that was manipulated from above but executed from below by large numbers of ordinary Germans rioting in the streets, heckling and taunting Jews, cheering Stormtroopers’ hostility, and looting Jewish property on a massive scale.
- Hardcover November 2009
- Lipstick Traces
- This is a secret history of modern times, told by way of what conventional history tries to exclude. Lipstick Traces tells a story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself.
- Paperback November 2009
- Gender Struggles
- In the formative years of the Japanese labor movement after World War II, the socialist unions affiliated with the General Council of Trade Unions (the labor federation known colloquially as Sohyo) formally endorsed the principles of women’s equality in the workforce. However, union leaders did not embrace the legal framework for gender equality mandated by their American occupiers. Christopher Gerteis demonstrates that organized labor’s discourse on womanhood not only undermined women’s status within the labor movement but also prevented unions from linking with the emerging woman-led, neighborhood-centered organizations that typified social movements in the 1960s—a misstep that contributed to the decline of the socialist labor movement in subsequent decades.
- Hardcover October 2009
- Wretched Rebels
- This book, a condensed translation of the prize- winning Jacqueries et révolution dans la Chine du XXe siècle, focuses on “spontaneous” rural unrest, uninfluenced by revolutionary intellectuals. The author shows that the predominant forms of protest were directed not against the landowning class but against agents of the state, and suggests that twentieth-century Chinese peasants were less different from seventeenth- or eighteenth-century French peasants than might be imagined and points to continuities between pre- and post-1949 rural protest.
- Hardcover October 2009
- America's Cold War
- In a brilliant new interpretation, Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall reexamine the successes and failures of America’s Cold War. This provocative book lays bare the emergence of a political tradition in Washington that feeds on external dangers, real or imagined, a mindset that inflames U.S. foreign policy to this day.
- Hardcover October 2009
- A History of Modern Russia
- Russia had an extraordinary twentieth century, undergoing upheaval and transformation. Updating his acclaimed History of Modern Russia, Robert Service provides a panoramic perspective on a country whose Soviet past encompassed revolution, civil war, mass terror, and two world wars. This new edition takes the story from 2002 through the entire presidency of Vladimir Putin to the election of his successor, Dmitri Medvedev.
- Paperback October 2009
- Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution
- Between 1917 and 1921, as revolution convulsed Russia, Jewish intellectuals and writers across the crumbling empire threw themselves into the pursuit of a “Jewish renaissance.” Here is a brilliant, revisionist argument about the nature of cultural nationalism, the relationship between nationalism and socialism as ideological systems, and culture itself, the axis around which the encounter between Jews and European modernity has pivoted over the past century.
- Hardcover October 2009
- The Monkey and the Inkpot
- This is the story of a Chinese doctor, his book, and the creatures that danced within its pages. The Monkey and the Inkpot introduces natural history in sixteenth-century China through the iconic Bencao gangmu (Systematic materia medica) of Li Shizhen (1518–1593). In the first book-length study in English of Li’s text, Carla Nappi reveals a “cabinet of curiosities” of gems, beasts, and oddities whose author was devoted to using natural history to guide the application of natural and artificial objects as medical drugs.
- Hardcover October 2009
- The Thirty Years War
- A deadly continental struggle, the Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world.
- Hardcover October 2009
- China's Last Empire
- In a brisk revisionist history, William Rowe challenges the standard narrative of Qing China as a decadent, inward-looking state that failed to keep pace with the modern West. This original, thought-provoking history of China’s last empire is a must-read for understanding the challenges facing China today.
- Hardcover October 2009
- Prague in Black
- Six months after the Munich Agreement delivered the Sudetenland to Germany, Hitler's troops marched unopposed into Prague and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the first non-German territory to be occupied under Nazi rule. Although Czechs outnumbered Germans thirty to one, Nazi leaders were determined to make the region entirely German. Bryant explores the origins and implementation of these plans as part of a wider history of Nazi rule and its eventual consequences for the region.
- Paperback September 2009
- Zhivago's Children
Among the least-chronicled aspects of post–World War II European intellectual and cultural history is the story of the Russian intelligentsia after Stalin. Vladislav Zubok turns a compelling subject into a portrait as intimate as it is provocative. Zhivago’s children, the spiritual heirs of Boris Pasternak’s noble doctor, were the last of their kind—an intellectual and artistic community committed to a civic, cultural, and moral mission.
- Hardcover May 2009
- Twice a Stranger
- In the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, nearly two million citizens in Turkey and Greece were expelled from homelands. In this evocative book, Bruce Clark draws on new archival research in Turkey and Greece as well as interviews with surviving participants to examine this unprecedented exercise in ethnic engineering.
- Paperback May 2009
- Shaping the Industrial Century
- The dean of business historians continues his masterful chronicle of the transforming revolutions of the twentieth century. He argues that only with consistent attention to research and development and an emphasis on long-term corporate strategies could firms remain successful over time. He details these processes for nearly every major chemical and pharmaceutical firm, demonstrating why some companies forged ahead while others failed.
- Paperback April 2009
- Orphans of the Republic
On July 10, 1940, by a 570 to 80 margin, the representatives in the French parliament voted full powers to Philippe Pétain, ending the Third Republic and paving the way for the collaborationist Vichy regime. Recreating the tense atmosphere of summer 1940, Olivier Wieviorka shows how pressures brought on by defeat could affect even the most hardened republicans. He illuminates the complex moral issues inherent in accommodation and collaboration in a time of crisis.
- Hardcover March 2009
- The Jamestown Project
- Despite the original settlers' dependence on the Chesapeake Algonquians and strained relations with their London backers, they forged a colony that survived where others had failed. Reconfiguring the myth of Jamestown's failure, Kupperman shows how the settlement's messy first decade actually represented a period of ferment in which individuals were learning how to make a colony work.
- Paperback February 2009
- Rulers and Victims
- In this illuminating book, Geoffrey Hosking explores what the Soviet experience meant for Russians. Hosking analyzes how the Soviet state molded Russian identity, beginning with the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war. At the heart of this penetrating work is the fundamental question of what happens to a people who place their nationhood at the service of empire. There is no surer guide than Geoffrey Hosking to reveal the historical forces forging Russian identity in the post-communist world.
- Paperback February 2009
- The Two Princes of Calabar
- In 1767, two "princes" of a ruling family in the port of Old Calabar, on the slave coast of Africa, were ambushed and captured by English slavers. The princes were themselves slave traders who were betrayed by African competitors--and so began their own extraordinary odyssey of enslavement. Their story, written in their own hand, survives as a rare firsthand account of the Atlantic slave experience. Sparks made the remarkable discovery of the princes' correspondence and has managed to reconstruct their adventures from it.
- Paperback February 2009
- Constructing the Monolith
- This book not only explains the cold war mindset that determined global policy for much of the twentieth century, but reveals how the search to define a foreign threat can shape the ways in which that threat is actually met.
- Hardcover February 2009
- The Declaration of Independence
- Not only did the Declaration announce the entry of the United States onto the world stage, it became the model for other countries to follow. This unique global perspective demonstrates the singular role of the United States document as a founding statement of our modern world.
- Paperback December 2008
- Democracy Denied, 1905-1915
- Kurzman proposes that the collective agent most directly responsible for democratization was the emerging class of modern intellectuals, a group that had gained a global identity and a near-messianic sense of mission following the Dreyfus Affair of 1898. Each chapter of this book focuses on a single angle of this story, covering all six cases by examining newspaper accounts, memoirs, and government reports.
- Hardcover December 2008
- Journey to the East
- It was one of the great encounters of world history: highly educated European priests confronting Chinese culture for the first time in the modern era. This “journey to the East” is explored by Brockey as he retraces the path of the Jesuit missionaries who sailed from Portugal to China.
- Paperback December 2008
- Mazarin's Quest
- Sonnino examines the diplomatic negotiations that took place in Westphalia from 1643 to 1648, which brought an end to the agonizing civil and religious conflict of the Thirty Years’ War.
- Hardcover November 2008
See also: All Books in HISTORY.