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A Short History of the Twentieth Century

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HARDCOVER

$24.95 • £18.95 • €22.50

ISBN 9780674725362

Publication: October 2013

Trade

240 pages

5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches

Belknap Press

World

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    • 1. “God Writes Straight with Crooked Lines”
      • “Century”
      • An American century
      • The German potentiality
      • Hitler’s primary role
      • 1989 or 1945?
      • The American superpower presence
      • Stalin and the retreat of Russian power
      • The end of colonialism
      • Recovery and rise of China
      • The end of the Modern or European Age
      • From liberal democracy to the universality of popular sovereignty
    • 2. “Now We Have Only Peoples’ Wars”
      • A European War
      • 1914: A short war?
      • But entire nations rushing at each other
      • Still a war between states
      • Mediocrity of most generals
      • Russia withdraws from the war
      • Communism: a seventy-year episode in the more than one thousand years of Russian history
      • The complicated history of America’s entry into the First World War
    • 3. “National Self-Determination”
      • A “new Europe”? Yes and no
      • The end of four great empires? Yes and no
      • Peace treaties and their grave faults
      • Consequences in Asia
      • “Central Europe” the crux, again
    • 4. “Cossacks! Brethren!”
      • Communists
      • The nature of their fears
      • The situation of the Jews
    • 5. No Nostalgia for the “World of Yesterday”
      • Uniqueness of the United States
      • Its influence different from that of other great powers
      • Its prosperity in the 1920s
      • The 1920s: the first (and perhaps the only) “modern” decade
      • “Depression” in and after 1929, but also American optimism: not much fear and not much hatred
    • 6. South of the Border and Across the Pacific
      • The Southern Hemisphere
      • The Far East
    • 7. “Middle Class” Is Not “Bourgeois”
      • The failure of liberal democracies
      • Authoritarian governments, dictatorships
      • A crisis of capitalism
      • The United States and other examples of parliamentary democracy
    • 8. “I Was a Nationalist, but I Was Not a Patriot”
      • National Socialism
      • Hitler
    • 9. The Wave of the Future
      • The Hitler decade
      • His domination of Europe
      • The coming of the Second World War
    • 10. “I Hope It Is Not Too Late”
      • The Second World War
      • The European phase, 1939 to 1941
      • Germany triumphant
      • Five leaders
    • 11. To Subdue and Conquer Germany and Japan
      • After Pearl Harbor, six months of Allied defeats
      • The naval and military turning points of the war
      • German ability to carry on
      • Mussolini eliminated
      • Turning the tide in the east
      • The Allied invasion of France
      • Hitler’s determination
      • The conquest of Japan
    • 12. The Division of Europe Almost Complete
      • Europe still the center of history
      • The new geography of the continent
      • The movements of people
      • Rigidification of the division of Europe
      • The “iron curtain”
      • First American reactions
      • Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan
      • Europe the center of the Cold War
      • Stalin and Asia
    • 13. The Brave Harry Truman
      • The Cold War at its peak
      • The Korean War
      • Death of Stalin
      • The Soviet Union begins to retreat
      • American misunderstandings
      • Russia and China
      • The so-called Third World emerges
      • The Cuban Missile Crisis
      • The tensions of the Cold War lessen
    • 14. American Nationalism, American Benevolence
      • America’s century: more than that
      • Problems rather than periods
      • Changes in the composition of the American people
      • Uniqueness during and after the Second World War
      • American nationalism
      • The emergence of American “conservatism”
      • The United States toward the end of the Cold War
    • 15. “Europe,” and the End of the Cold War
      • “Europe”: impreciseness of its definition
      • The principal object during the Second World War
      • After that, its division and the consequences
      • Attempts toward an integration of Europe
      • The decomposition of the Russian sphere in Europe
      • Its rapidity around 1989, while its consequences are not foreseeable
    • 16. “Great Leap Forward”
      • The Third World
      • Near and Middle East
      • Far East and Australia
      • Africa
      • South America and the Western Hemisphere
      • The movements of peoples
    • 17. The Limitations of Human Knowledge
      • A transitional century
      • Inheritances of the preceding one
      • Positive achievements
      • Technologies
      • Weakening enthusiasm for some of its applications
      • Cultural and civilizational decline
      • Shortcomings of scientific determinism; scattered recognitions thereof
      • We and our earth: again at the center of the universe
    • Index