We have in particular given a large place to the rôle and to the history of the Church which dominates all this period, and which has been ordinarily so neglected in our schoolbooks, and have sought to make clear how France obtained in the thirteenth century a sort of political and intellectual hegemony in Europe. We hope those who read will understand what were the great ideas and directive tendencies which determined the historical evolution of the Middle Ages. We have always kept in mind in writing the conclusion to which we were advancing." - Charles Bémont & Gabriel MonodContents: The Roman Empire at the End of the Fourth Century. The Barbarians. The Germanic Invasions – The Vandals, The Visigoths, and the Huns (376-476). The Germanic Invasions – The Ostrogoths. The Germanic Invasions – The Barbarians in Gaul – Clovis. The Frankish Kingdom from 511 to 639. Institutions of Gaul after the Invasions. The Roman Empire of the East in the Sixth Century. The Last Invasions and the Papacy – The Lombards and Gregory the Great – The Anglo-Saxons and Monasticism. The Arabs – Mohammed. Arabian Empire – Conquests and Civilization. The Fainéant Kings – Foundation of the Carolingian Dynasty – Charlemagne. Empire of the Franks – Carolingian Customs and Institutions. The Carolingian Decadence, 814-888. The Last Carolingians – Invasions of the Saracens, Hungarians, and Norsemen – Origin of Feudalism. The Feudal System. Germany and Italy (888-1056). Emperor and Pope – Church Reform – Gregory VII. The Guelfs and Hohenstaufen – Alexander III. and Frederick I. Barbarossa. End of the Hohenstaufen – Victory of the Papacy over the Empire. The Christian and Mussulman Orient from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century. The Crusades. The Country Districts and Cities of France - Emancipation of Peasants and Bourgeois. French Royalty (987-1154). French Royalty (1154-1270). Institutions of Capetian Royalty. England from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Century. Continental Europe. The Roman Church in the Thirteenth Century. The Church and Heresies. Christian and Feudal Civilization – Instruction And Sciences – Literature And Arts – Worship. General Summary.

    White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912

    This title examines climatic devastation and the uncertainty that the weather brings.

    Close to five million Poles were killed. Of these, more than half were Jews killed in the Holocaust. Ninety percent of the world's second largest Jewish community was annihilated. But despite the calamity shared by Poland's Jews and non-Jews, anti-Semitic violence did not stop in Poland with the end of the war. Jewish Holocaust survivors returning to their Polish hometowns after the war experienced widespread hostility, including murder, at the hands of their neighbors. The bloodiest peacetime pogrom in twentieth-century Europe took place in Kielce, Poland, a year after the war ended. Jan Gross's Fear is a detailed reconstruction of this pogrom and the Polish reactions to it that attempts to answer a perplexing question: How was anti-Semitism possible in Poland after the war?Gross argues that postwar Polish anti-Semitism cannot be understood simply as a continuation of prewar attitudes. Rather, it developed in the context of the Holocaust and the Communist takeover: Anti-Semitism eventually became a common currency between the Communist regime and a society filled with people who had participated in the Nazi campaign of murder and plunder, people for whom Jewish survivors were a standing reproach. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz said that Poland's Communist rulers fulfilled the dream of Polish nationalists by bringing into existence an ethnically pure state.For more than half a century, what happened to Jewish Holocaust survivors in Poland has been cloaked in guilt and shame. Writing with passion, brilliance, and fierce clarity, Gross at last brings the truth to light.

    Sebestyen’s narrative moves from the tumultuous streets of Budapest to the inner sanctums of the Kremlin and the White House, where we hear the conversations of the men and women who planned and took part in the uprising and of those who helped crush it–some actively, others through craven inaction.Sebestyen shows how Western anti-Communist rhetoric encouraged the rebels and convinced them they would receive help. We witness the thrilling first days when, armed with a few rifles, petrol bombs, and desperate courage, the people of Budapest rose up against their Soviet masters and nearly succeeded in routing the Russian forces. For a few exciting days, as the Western world watched in amazement, it looked as though the Hungarians would win and humble the Soviet Union. Russian troops withdrew. But not for long.The Soviets showed they would resort to brutal lengths to cling to their Communist empire–and the West was prepared to let them. The free world looked on in sympathy and horror, did nothing, and, finally, the Hungarians suffered a devastating defeat, and remained under Soviet occupation for three more decades. Fast-paced, vivid, and authoritative, Twelve Days adds immeasurably to our understanding of one of the most important battles of the Cold War and reminds us–through the extraordinary courage and sacrifice of the Hungarian people in their doomed fight–of the unquenchable human desire for freedom.

    Through anecdotes, stories, and notations - some as brief as "I was slapped today in Zlota Street" - there emerges the agonizing, eyewitness accounts of human beings caught in the furor of senseless, unrelenting brutality. In the Journal, there is the whole of life in the Ghetto, from the erection of the Wall, in November 1940, for hygienic reasons, through the brief period of deceptive calm to the eventual mass murders. It is a portrait of man tested by crisis, stained at times by the meanness of avarice and self-preservation, illumined more often by moments of nobility. Emmanual Ringelblum was 39 when he began his notes. When the Germans first invaded Poland, Ringelblum, who could have stayed abroad and escaped, returned to Warsaw from Switzerland knowing that his was an historical event of importance for his people and a moment in time that must be forever a part of written history. As the recognized archivist of the Ghetto he gathered around him a staff, and assigned each to cover a specific part of Ghetto life. From these reports and this notes, he assembled his Journal. On March 7, 1944, Emmanual Ringelblum was executed among the ruins of Warsaw, together with his wife, his son, and thirt-eight others who shared his hiding place.

    When they married in 1881, everyone expected that she would never concern herself with more than the traditional Prussian princess’s interests of Kirche, Küche, Kinder (church, kitchen, children). Yet within twenty years of his accession as William II, the last German Emperor, she would become in some ways the stronger character and steadying influence her increasingly neurotic and unstable husband required. This is the first biography of an often overlooked personality in modern history.

     Theo Aronson's The Kaisers is the story of six people whose bitter differences were a microcosm of, and greatly influenced, a national conflict which echoed all round the world. Kaiser Wilhelm I, born 1797, King of Prussia 1861, proclaimed Emperor of all Germany 1871, died only in 1888 an autocratic, militaristic man of the eighteenth century completely opposed to the liberalizing ideas which swept Europe in his lifetime. In contrast his Empress, Augusta, was progressive in thought, open-minded in outlook, yet with all had a taste for the theatrical and pageantry of her royal status. The best of her was seen in their son, Kaiser Frederick III, who was Crown Prince for all but the last few cancer-torn weeks of his life. He personified the best of European liberalism of the nineteenth century. In this he was supported—many said unduly influenced by his energetic and vivacious English wife Victoria, Queen Victoria's eldest and 'Dearest Child', who brought to the marriage the enlightened ideals and hopes of her shrewd, practical mother and her far-seeing father, the Prince Consort. The tragedy, the tempting speculation of Germany's history, is that this couple reigned for only three months before Frederick III's death brought their son to the throne. Kaiser Wilhelm II, 'Kaiser Bill' of the first World War, was again the antithesis of everything his parents stood for. Queen Victoria's hopes that her grandson might be 'wise, sensible, courageous — liberal-minded — good and pure', could hardly have been more misplaced. The sixth, the dominating figure in the Hohenzollern story, is Prince Otto von Bismarck, the ruthless 'Iron Chancellor', virtual dictator of Germany for nearly thirty years. He served all three Kaisers, claiming with justification that on his shoulders he had carried the first to the Imperial throne—where he manipulated him to his will despite the hatred and manoeuvrings of the Empress Augusta. He feared the reign of the short-lived second Kaiser and feared more perhaps (and never missed an opportunity to disparage) the Empress Victoria and the constant, commonsense influence from England of her mother. (`That', he said ruefully after their one meeting, 'was a woman ! One could do business with her ! ') Their son he flattered, siding with him against his parents, and in so doing brought about his own downfall, when the vainglorious young man he had schooled as Crown Prince came as Kaiser to believe that he could do without his mentor. But for Europe it was too late, and the policies of one and the vanities of the other were already leading Europe helter-skelter into the holocaust of 'the Kaiser's War'. Theo Aronson's gifts as a writer have deservedly brought him high regard as a chronicler of the complex histories of Europe's great ruling Houses. Rarely have his talents been better employed than in this study of the comet-like rise and fall of the House of Hohenzollern, the House of the Kaisers of Germany. It is a story of bitter, almost continual conflict, yet even in what can now be seen as a path to inevitable destruction Mr. Aronson finds passages of light and shade that show the Hohenzollerns not simply as Wagnerian puppets posturing on a vast European stage, but people deserving of our understanding and compassion.

    His enemies, however, met less-exalted fates. Besides those killed on the battlefield, tens of thousands were officially executed between 1936 and 1945, and as many again became "non-persons." As Spain finally reclaims its historical memory, a full picture can now be given of the Spanish Holocaust-ranging from judicial murders to the abuse of women and children. The story of the victims of Franco's reign of terror is framed by the activities of four key men-General Mola, Quiepo de Llano, Major Vallejo Najera, and Captain Don Gonzalo Aguilera-whose dogma of eugenics, terrorization, domination, and mind control horrifyingly mirror the fascism of Italy and Germany.Evoking such classics as Gulag and The Great Terror, The Spanish Holocaust sheds crucial light on one of the darkest and most unexamined eras of modern European history.

    For a hundred years and more after the Revolution, millions of peasants lived on as if in a timeless world, their existence little different from that of the generations before them.The author of this lively, often witty, and always provocative work traces how France underwent a veritable crisis of civilization in the early years of the French Republic as traditional attitudes and practices crumbled under the forces of modernization. Local roads and railways were the decisive factors, bringing hitherto remote and inaccessible regions into easy contact with markets and major centers of the modern world. The products of industry rendered many peasant skills useless, and the expanding school system taught not only the language of the dominant culture but its values as well, among them patriotism. By 1914, France had finally become La Patrie in fact as it had so long been in name.

    

    These articles describe, analyze, and evaluate the last great proletarian revolution of the past two centuries. They form indispensable supplements to Bookchin's larger work, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868–1936. Read together, these works constitute a highly informative and theoretically significant assessment of the anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movements in Spain. They are invaluable for any reader concerned with the place of the Spanish Revolution in history and with the accomplishments, insights, and failings of the anarcho-syndicalist movements.

    That is where Garmaine Pitchon was when Hitler ascended to power and unleashed a diabolical scheme to annihilate the Jewish race. Follow along as Eli Gonzalez tells Garmaine story in a vibrant, chilling, and compelling narrative. Always a rambunctious, curious girl, Garmaine found a way to not wear the yellow Star of David and got to experience more than most before Garmaine experienced loss at an epic proportion. Her entire family was murdered, beginning with her grandmother, killed in her own grocery store by a Nazi officer who forced her to make him a sandwich as she walked over her just-murdered beloved grandmother’s warm, flowing blood. Experience the horror of the 9-Day train ride to Auschwitz and become a first hand witness to when it was only Nazi’s and Jews and the veil was pulled off and absolute evil abounded. Yet, there is something about Garmaine’s story, something divine that happened. What was meant to destroy her strengthened her. What was meant to stop her lineage became a force to help desperate mothers years after. When there is a divine purpose for your life and that of your family, no one and nothing can stop it.

    Based on seventy hours of interviews with Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka (the largest of the Nazi extermination camps), Sereny's book bares the soul of a man who continually found ways to rationalize his role in Hitler's final solution.

    Titular master of central Europe from 1848 until 1916, he was centre stage throughout the dramatic era in which Italy and Germany emerged as united nation states. His personal decisions were vital both to the outcome of the Crimean War and to the onset of World War I, sixty years later.