When a scholar as careful and learned as Mr. Kennedy is prompted by contemporary issues to reexamine the great processes of the past, the result can only be an enhancement of our historical understanding.... When the study is written as simply and attractively as this work is, its publication may have a great and beneficient impact. It is to be hoped that Mr. Kennedy's will have one, at a potentially decisive moment in America's history."Michael Howard, The New York Times Book Review"Important, learned, and lucid... Paul Kennedy's great achievement is that he makes us see our current international problems against a background of empires that have gone under because they were unaible to sustain the material cost of greatness; and he does so in a universal historical perspective of which Ranke would surely have approved."James Joll, The New York Review of Books"His strategic-economic approach provides him with the context for a shapely narrative....Professor Kennedy not only exploits his framework eloquently, he also makes use of it to dig deeper and explore the historical contexts in which some 'power centers' prospered....But the most commanding purpose of his project...is the lesson he draws from 15 centuries of statecraft to apply to the present scene....[The book's] final section is for everyone concerned with the contemporary political scene."Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times"Kennedy gives epic meaning to the nation's relative economic and industrial decline." Newsweek

    Mr. Arad reports as a controlled and effective witness for the prosecution.... Mr. Arad's book, with its abundance of horrifying detail, reminds us of how far we have to go."--New York Times Book Review..". some of the most gripping chapters I have ever read.... the authentic, exhaustive, definitive account of the least known death camps of the Nazi era." --Raul HilbergArad, historian and principal prosecution witness at the Israeli trial of John Demjanjuk (accused of being Treblinka's infamous "Ivan the Terrible"), uses primary materials to reveal the complete story of these Nazi death camps.

    The philosophers of this time broke with the two central tenets of the modern Cartesian tradition: the authority of reason and the primacy of epistemology. They also witnessed the decline of the Aufkl�rung, the completion of Kant's philosophy, and the beginnings of post-Kantian idealism.Thanks to Frederick C. Beiser we can newly appreciate the influence of Kant's critics on the development of his philosophy. Beiser brings the controversies, and the personalities who engaged in them, to life and tells a story that has uncanny parallels with the debates of the present.

    Its homes were well-furnished and fanatically clean; its citizens feasted on 100-course banquets and speculated fortunes on new varieties of tulip. Yet, in the midst of plenty, the Dutch were ill at ease. In this brilliantly innovative book--which launched his reputation as one of our most perspicacious and stylish historians--Simon Schama explores the mysterious contradictions of a nation that invented itself from the ground up, attained an unprecedented level of affluence, and lived in dread of being corrupted by its happiness.Drawing on a vast array of period documents and sumptuously reproduced art, Schama re-creates, in precise and loving detail, a nation's mental furniture. He tells of bloody uprisings and beached whales, of the cult of hygiene and the plague of tobacco, of thrifty housewives and profligate tulip-speculators. He tells us how the Dutch celebrated themselves and how they were slandered by their enemies. The Embarrassment of Riches is a book that set a standard for its discipline; it throbs with life on every page.

    The Aryan Model, which is current today, claims that Greek culture arose as the result of the conquest from the north by Indo-European speakers, or "Aryans," of the native "pre-Hellenes." The Ancient Model, which was maintained in Classical Greece, held that the native population of Greece had initially been civilized by Egyptian and Phoenician colonists and that additional Near Eastern culture had been introduced to Greece by Greeks studying in Egypt and Southwest Asia. Moving beyond these prevailing models, Bernal proposes a Revised Ancient Model, which suggests that classical civilization in fact had deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures.This long-awaited third and final volume of the series is concerned with the linguistic evidence that contradicts the Aryan Model of ancient Greece. Bernal shows how nearly 40 percent of the Greek vocabulary has been plausibly derived from two Afroasiatic languages-Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic. He also reveals how these derivations are not limited to matters of trade, but extended to the sophisticated language of politics, religion, and philosophy. This evidence, according to Bernal, confirms the fact that in Greece an Indo-European people was culturally dominated by speakers of Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic.Provocative, passionate, and colossal in scope, this volume caps a thoughtful rewriting of history that has been stirring academic and political controversy since the publication of the first volume.

    Robert Blair Mayne is still regarded as one of the greatest soldiers in the history of military special operations. He was the most decorated British soldier of the Second World War, receiving four DSOs, the Croix de Guerre, and the Legion d'honneur, and he pioneered tactics used today by the SAS and other special operations units worldwide. Rogue Warrior of the SAS tells the remarkable life story of "Colonel Paddy," whose exceptional physical strength and uniquely swift reflexes made him a fearsome opponent. But his unorthodox rules of war and his resentment of authority would deny him the ultimate accolade of the Victoria Cross. Drawing on personal letters and family papers, declassified SAS files and records, together with the Official SAS Diary compiled in wartime and eyewitness accounts, this is the true story of the soldier.

    At 15, Barbara finds herself betrothed to a man 27 years her senior. Marriage propels her into a glittering, cynical society: the casual adulteries and violent politics of the age of Richelieu, Pope and Swift; of buildings by Christopher Wren; of greed, elegance, excess and cruelty. Barbara navigates these dangers with great skill; her beauty takes on polish and sophistication.

    A line of infantry would slowly march, to the beat of a drum, into a hail of enemy fire. Whole ranks would be wiped out by cannon fire and musketry. Christopher Duffy's investigates the brutalities of the battlefield and also traces the lives of the officer to the soldier from the formative conditions of their earliest years to their violent deaths or retirement, and shows that, below their well-ordered exteriors, the armies of the Age of Reason underwent a revolutionary change from medieval to modern structures and ways of thinking.

    Readers will discover a power-hungry leader who prolonged the war to advance his own career. This is a fascinating, exhaustive investigation of Churchill's intrigues and deceptions before and during WWII. This is a savage debunking of Churchill by the world's most popular revisionist historian and author.

    New Collectible Hardcover with dust jacket

    His lucid analysis of the revolution that came to Poland from abroad is based on hundreds of first-hand accounts of the hardship, suffering, and social chaos that accompanied the Sovietization of this poorest section of a poverty-stricken country. Woven into the author's exploration of events from the Soviet's German-supported aggression against Poland in September of 1939 to Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, these testimonies not only illuminate his conclusions about the nature of totalitarianism but also make a powerful statement of their own. Those who endured the imposition of Soviet rule and mass deportations to forced resettlement, labor camps, and prisons of the Soviet Union are here allowed to speak for themselves, and they do so with grim effectiveness.

     A brilliant modern history of the German invasion of Russia to their bloody crushing defeat by the re-invigorated Russian forces at the siege of Stalingrad. During 1942, the Axis advance reached its high tide on all fronts and began to ebb. Nowhere was this more true than on the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union. After receiving a disastrous setback on the approaches to Moscow in the winter of 1941-1942, the German armies recovered sufficiently to embark on a sweeping summer offensive that carried them to the Volga River at Stalingrad and deep into the Caucasus Mountains. The Soviet armies suffered severe defeats in the spring and summer of 1942 but recovered to stop the German advances in October and encircle and begin the destruction of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad in November and December. This volume describes the course of events from the Soviet December 1941 counteroffensive at Moscow to the Stalingrad offensive in late 1942 with particular attention to the interval from January through October 1942, which has been regarded as a hiatus between the two major battles but which in actuality constituted the period in which the German fortunes slid into irreversible decline and the Soviet forces acquired the means and capabilities that eventually brought them victory. These were the months of decision in the East.

    Demonstrating that religion was the period's defining force, she reveals how the clash over graven images, banned by Islam, both provoked iconoclasm in Constantinople and generated a distinct western commitment to Christian pictorial narrative. In a new preface, Herrin discusses the book's origins, reception, and influence.

    His court at the Palace of Versailles became the most dazzling on the Continent, and through his intelligence and cunning, he made France the leading power of Europe. Now, in this masterful biography, historian Olivier Bernier brilliantly recreates Louis XIV's world to reveal the secrets of this monarch's unequaled sovereignty and to explore the singular mystique that surrounds him today. Not only was Louis heir to his father's throne, he felt he was divinely chosen to rule France. From the year he became king at the age of thirteen, he oversaw every aspect of government, from waging war and making political appointments to supervising the building of his many palaces. Along with political treachery that marked Louis XIV's long reign, Bernier also brings to light the personal scandals. We witness the poignant resignation of Louis XIV's queen to her husband's parade of mistresses and illegitimate children, the infamous intrigue when the king's brother was accused of poisoning his wife in a jealous rage, and the momentous building of Versailles, not an act of monstrous self-indulgence that bankrupted the nation but the visible expression of Louis XIV's new monarchy - his ingenious methods of centering all activity around court life, thus preventing his courtiers from fomenting rebellion. Under the Sun King, architecture, painting, music, and theater flourished, making France not only a great political force but a paradigm of fashion and culture as well. Louis XIV takes us from the grandeur of Versailles to the battlefields of the countryside, from the bedrooms of the king's mistresses to the chambers of his ministers, and presents an engrossing portrait of royal life and a commanding leader.

    A former Jewish resistance fighter and double agent offers a compelling account of her work against the Nazis in her native Belgium, explaining how she penetrated Gestapo headquarters and gained information used in the rescue of Jews and Allied POWs.

    -- Publishers Weekly

    

    During this time, native populations were supplemented or replaced by the Bulgars and various Slavic tribes, who were to become the Bulgarians, Serbs, and Croats---ethnic identities whose historical conflicts have persisted to this day.The Late Medieval Balkans is an important source for those who wish to expand their knowledge of this turbulent period and who wish to broaden their understanding of the region.John V. A. Fine, Jr., is Professor of History, University of Michigan.

    . . . Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, . . . Rotman builds a viable thesis for the semiotics of zero via a thorough examination of Montaigne’s Essays, Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Kabbalah, and Vermeer’s paintings.”—Choice

    Hughes gives an account of the problems which arose when the organization of the Christian church, imported from the urban bureaucracy of the Roman Empire, had to be adapted to the heroic society of early Ireland. How was church government in Ireland brought into line with the secular law, and were the changes made without protest? Dr. Hughes finds the key to these questions in legal texts of the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries, and attempts, through them, to trace the gradual process of modification which culminated in the eighth century, when the church, now fully adjusted to Irish society, reached a so-far unprecedented height of power and influence. In the ninth century the Viking raids and settlements provided new problems: did they really bring about a decline in the spiritual vitality of the church and degeneracy in her institutions, as is often supposed? It is for answers to questions like these that Dr. Hughes searches the contemporary sources for each period that she examines, tracing the history of the church up to the twelfth century. The main emphasis of the book is on the church as an institution, but it also asks what Christianity meant to different people at different times, and illustrates some of Ireland's contacts with England and the continent.

    The personality of Hitler himself, however, can scarcely explain this immense popularity or his political effectiveness in the 1930s and '40s. His hold over the German people lay rather in the hopes and perceptions of the millions who adored him.Based largely on the reports of government officials, party agencies, and political opponents, Ian Kershaw's groundbreaking study charts the creation, growth, and decline of the "Hitler myth." He demonstrates how the manufactured "Fuhrer-cult" served as a crucial integrating force within the Third Reich and a vital element in the attainment of Nazi political aims. Masters of the new techniques of propaganda, the Nazis used "image-building" to exploit the beliefs, phobias, and prejudices of the day. Kershaw greatly enhances our understanding of the German people's attitudes and behavior under Nazi rule and the psychology behind their adulation of Hitler.

    This volume brings the history up to date and reviews U.S. efforts in the ongoing peace process.

    It has remained one of the best-known studies of the great medieval universities for over a century. Volume 1 contains detailed studies of the universities of Salerno, Bologna and Paris with in-depth analysis of their origins and constitutions, institutional development and specialised curriculum. It also includes sections on what a medieval university was; the learning and curriculum of the Dark Ages; the twelfth-century Renaissance; the respective places of Plato and Aristotle in the medieval curriculum; the development of Scholasticism; and the figures of Peter Abelard, Peter the Lombard, and John of Salisbury. Rashdall's study was one of the first comparative works on the subject. Its scope and breadth has ensured its place as a key work of intellectual history, and an indispensable tool for the study of the educational organisation of the Middle Ages.

    West's wit and clear-eyed observations explore many of the great leaders and thinkers of modern times -- from Winston Churchill and Vladimir Nabokov to Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell and many others. Essays include a wrenching description of everyday life in wartime Britain and an excerpt from her last novel, "Survivors in Mexico," which vividly imagines the life and times of Montezuma and his fateful encounter with Cortes.

    An authoritative and vivid reconstruction of the true nature of political society in late medieval England.

    Ascherson traces political and social events in Poland through the restoration of independence in 1918, the horrors of Nazi and Soviet occupation, the heroic Warsaw uprising and the creation of the Communist state, to their culmination in the rise of Solidarity in 1980 and Jaruselski's coup in 1981.

    

    

    Received with critical acclaim in both England and the United States, the volume gathered wide-ranging essays on both British and European history from the fifteenth century to the early seventeenth centuries. This sequel, Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans, is composed of five previously unpublished essays on the intellectual and religious movements which lay behind the Puritan revolution in England and Ireland.The opening essay, a skillful work of historical detection, investigates the strange career of Nicholas Hill. In "Laudianism and Political Power," Trevor-Roper returns to the subject of his first, now classic, book. He analyzes the real significance of the ecclesiastical movement associated with Archbishop Laud and speculates on what might have happened if the Stuarts had not abandoned it. "James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh" deals with a key figure in the intellectual and religious life of his time. A long essay on "The Great Tew Circle" reinstates Lord Falkland as an important influence on the continuity of ideas through the English revolution. The final essay reassesses the political ideology of Milton.English intellectual history, as Trevor-Roper constructs it here for the seventeenth century, is conditioned by its social and political context. Always engaging and fresh, these essays deal with currently interesting historical topics and up-to-date controversies.

    In this provocative study, Henry Rousso examines how this proud nation--a nation where reality and myth commingle to confound understanding--has dealt with les ann es noires. Specifically, he studies what the French have chosen to remember--and to conceal.

    Biedermeier, with its newly updated introduction and expanded bibliography, serves as an unrivaled sourcebook for those who are interested in the furniture and decor of an era that has uncanny parallels with our own. Angus Wilkie traces the complex history of this forgotten era, giving a cultural background to the work itself. Providing an overview of the astonishing variety of furniture produced by local cabinetmakers from Germany to Scandinavia, this text showcases the candlesticks, secretaries, and spittoons crafted in rich fruitwoods and subtly decorated with ebony inlay and sunburst veneer. Over 160 specially commissioned color photographs - as well as watercolors of Biedermeier interiors, original textile designs, and original drawings of furniture and draperies - illustrate this book.

    Nor have the peasants been forgotten, as we see their way of life that supported the royalty. 75 full-color illustrations.

    . . .Of the rash of Gorbachev books that have appeared in the last three years, Tucker's is the most thought-provoking and original, the one that best equips us to understand what is at stake in perestroika over the long haul." --Thane Gustafson, Georgetown University, in the New Republic

    It makes full use of a wealth of recently discovered pamphlets and periodicals which shed new light on the development of radical economic ideas in the nineteenth century.The author traces the departures made by Robert Owen and his followers from the Christian tradition of moral economy — the regulation of the economy by moral criteria. Basing his arguments upon the jurisprudence of the age, the author discusses the development of the tradition which led from Owenism and Chartism to the early ideas of Marx and Engels.This scholarly and insightful study will be of major importance to anyone interested in the history of political economy and in the history of socialism and nineteenth-century thought more generally.

    

    He examines the medical profession, attitudes to doctors and disease, and the development of state involvement in public health. Drawing together much fragmentary material and providing a detailed bibliography, this book is an important guide to the history of medicine and to English social history.

    This pervasive turn in ideology had profound effects on German history left-wing political efforts became increasingly unrelated to reality, while the right finally discovered in fascism the "third force" it had been seeking."

    It has remained one of the best-known studies of the great medieval universities for over a century. Volume 2 Part 2 is a study of the medieval universities of England with special focus on the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Rashdall provides an in-depth analysis of their origins and constitutions, institutional development, curriculum and college systems. There are additional sections on English student life; student numbers and intake; universities' relationships with local towns; relationships with local ecclesiastical structures; and a chapter on the importance of the university of Oxford in medieval thought. Rashdall's study was one of the first comparative works on the subject. Its scope and breadth has ensured its place as a key work of intellectual history, and an indispensable tool for the study of the educational organisation of the Middle Ages.