World History

Including original contributions from distinguished European and American historians such as Saul Friedländer, Omer Bartov, John Dower, Christopher Browning, and Marilyn Young, Crimes of War surveys wartime atrocities committed by the United States, Germany, and Japan across the twentieth century. The book presents startling new evidence of the killing of unarmed Koreans by American troops at No Gun Ri, of atrocities committed by Nazi soldiers on the Russian front, and of Japanese barbarity in China during World War II. Emerging from these accounts is a distinctive, repeated pattern, which typically includes a half-century of denial before the truth is confronted.

In this highly praised study hailed by Booklist as “disturbing, brutally honest, and scrupulously fair,” Pierre Ayçoberry, the celebrated author of The Nazi Question,combines extraordinary mastery of German history with original research for an unparalleled account of life under Hitler’s Third Reich.

Ayçoberry uncovers the struggles of individuals and social and professional groups who stood up to the pressures of the Nazi Party and often paid a high price, while he also sheds light on the attempts of others—mainly upper- and middle-class professionals—to salvage or improve their positions by casting their lot with the Fuhrer. In this complex answer to the easy judgments passed by many, Pierre Ayçoberry writes what the Washington Post Book World has called “a subtle book that eschews facile generalizations and sensational accusations, and is full of prudent qualifications and warnings that what was true in one place and one time was not necessarily true twenty miles away or one year later.”

Premier historian Eric Hobsbawm’s brilliant study of the Industrial Revolution, which sold more than a quarter of a million copies in its original edition, is now back in print, updated for a new generation. In Industry and Empire, Hobsbawm explores the origin and dramatic course of the Industrial Revolution over two hundred and fifty years and its influence on social and political institutions. He describes and accounts for Britain’s rise as the first industrial power, its decline from domination, its special relation with the rest of the world, and the effects of this trajectory on the lives of its ordinary citizens. This new edition includes a fascinating summary of events of the last twenty years, and an illuminating new conclusion.

Like Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, Richard Cobb had a gift for understanding great historic events in terms of ordinary human relations. Here for the first time Cobb’s widely admired chronicles of daily life in Revolutionary France are gathered into one volume with an illuminating introduction by his former pupil, historian David Gilmour.

Published in conjunction with the History Channel and the BBC, this prizewinning volume, now back in print, contains previously unpublished material and photographs documenting the reality of life under Nazi rule and the evolution of the ruthless slaughter of millions of people in Germany.

In this handsome edition, BBC producer and renowned historian Laurence Rees has collected the testimonies of more than fifty eyewitnesses, many of whom were committed Nazis, free to tell their stories only after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Rees offers us the compelling voices of soldiers and civilians rarely heard from—including a remorseless Lithuanian soldier who shot five hundred people and then went out to lunch, and the anguished older sister of a ten-year-old developmentally disabled boy selected for “immunization injection” (a fatal dose of morphine) at a children’s hospital. These materials cast a harsh new light on the rise and fall of the Third Reich.

Moshe Lewin’s major new book is an original and important work that clarifies the sweeping changes that transformed Russia in the twentieth century from a muzhik country to the urban power we read about today. As in his previous works, Moshe Lewin’s extraordinary breadth of knowledge and sympathy allows him to deal with the “grand narrative of cultural transformation” that goes well beyond simple studies of urban growth or industrialization.

The Soviet Union, as Lewin reminds us, was a rural country well into the post–World War II era, becoming predominantly urban only in the mid-1960s. The fascinating story that emerges from this book is one of a country that is becoming increasingly more complex even as it retains a “relatively primitive configuration of power.”

Professor Lewin goes on to show the historical roots of recent change. In the 1920s it was the government that was impatient to change, while society was transforming itself slowly. Recent years have seen a reversal of this situation, where a largely bureaucratic state simply lost its ability to govern a rapidly changing society. Professor Lewin’s analysis lays bare the underlying causes behind the present chaos in the former Soviet Union, where a government that barely understands the new forces that have been so dramatically unleashed finds itself totally unable to control them.

Bringing together E.P. Thompson’s writings and lectures delivered over a number of years, Making History covers the key debates in history and cultural theory that occupied Thompson throughout his career. Making History includes such landmark writings as Thompson’s influential and sympathetic assessments of the historians Raymond Williams and Herbert Gutman, as well as his judgments of the lasting value of classic English writers such as William Morris and Mary Wollstonecraft. Also included are Thompson’s perceptive and always witty contributions to current issues of debate, such as the role of poetry as a political act and the historical method and imagination. The book concludes with “Agenda for Radical History,” Thompson’s inspiring and oft-cited lecture on the future of history and the task of historians in years to come, a fitting conclusion to the book and to Thompson’s own exemplary career.