Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize - Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award - One of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority. --The Wall Street Journal

Magisterial . . . It is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and yes, readable postwar history. --The Boston Globe

Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy.

New English translation of this classic work by Adolf Hitler, in fully readable American English. Includes numbered section headings, helpful footnotes, index, and bibliography. Mein Kampf has not appeared in a new English version since the 1940s, and all existing editions are poorly translated. This new edition will become the standard translation.

Drawing on half a century of firsthand experience and exemplary scholarship, Timothy Garton Ash tells the story of postwar Europe's triumphs and tragedies

Winner of the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize - A Financial Times Best Book of 2023

An irresistibly well-written book, fluent, witty, and intelligent.--Neal Acherson, New York Review of Books

Timothy Garton Ash, Europe's historian of the present, has been breathing Europe for the last half century. In Homelands he embarks on a journey in time and space around the postwar continent, drawing on his own notes from many great events, giving vivid firsthand accounts of its leading actors, revisiting the places where its history was made, and recalling its triumphs and tragedies through their imprint on the present.

Garton Ash offers an account of events as seen from the ground--history illustrated by memoir. He describes how Europe emerged from wartime devastation to rebuild, to triumph with the fall of the Berlin Wall, to democratize and unite. And then to falter. It is a singular history of a period of unprecedented progress along with a clear-eyed account of how so much went wrong, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the war in Ukraine. From the pen of someone who, in spite of Brexit, emphatically describes himself as an English European, this is both a tour d'horizon and a tour de force.

New English translation of this classic work by Adolf Hitler, in fully readable American English. Includes numbered section headings, helpful footnotes, index, and bibliography. Mein Kampf has not appeared in a new English version since the 1940s, and all existing editions are poorly translated. This new edition will become the standard translation.

Celebrated historian John Hirst draws from his own lectures to deliver this ultra-accessible master class on the making of modern Europe, from Ancient Greece through World War II. With over 600,000 copies sold worldwide, this brief history is a global sensation propelled by a thesis of astonishing simplicity: Just three elements--German warfare, Greek and Roman culture, and Christianity--come together to explain everything else, from the Crusades to the Industrial Revolution. Hirst's razor-sharp grasp of cause and effect helps us see with sparkling clarity how the history of Europe--the crucible of liberal democracy--shapes the way we live today.

A foundational moment in the history of modern European thought, the Enlightenment continues to be a reference point for philosophers, scholars and opinion-formers. To many it remains the inspiration of our commitments to the betterment of the human condition. To others, it represents the elevation of one set of European values to the world, many of whose peoples have quite different values. But what is the relationship between the historical Enlightenment and the idea of 'Enlightenment', and can these two understandings be reconciled?

In this Very Short Introduction, John Robertson offers a concise historical introduction to the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement of eighteenth-century Europe. Discussing its intellectual achievements, he also explores how its supporters exploited new ways of communicating their ideas to a wider public, creating a new 'public sphere' for critical discussion of the moral, economic and political issues facing their societies.

ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year
How the modern world understood the ancient Greeks and why they matter today.

This majestic book by Oswyn Murray has been long and eagerly awaited...and its quality and scope exceed expectations. --Edith Hall, BBC History Magazine

The study of ancient Greece has been central to Western conceptions of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History traces the shifting patterns of this preoccupation in the last three centuries, in which successive generations have reinterpreted the Greeks in the light of their contemporary worlds. Thus, in the eighteenth century, the conflict between Athens and Sparta became a touchstone in the development of republicanism, and in the nineteenth, Athens came to represent the democratic ideal. Amid the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century, the Greeks were imagined in an age of suffering, inspiring defenses against nationalism, Nazism, communism, and capitalism.

Oswyn Murray draws powerful conclusions from this historiography, using the ever-changing narrative of ancient Greece to illuminate grand theories of human society. Analyzing the influence of historians and philosophers including Hegel, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and Braudel, Murray also considers how coming generations might perceive the Greeks. Along the way, The Muse of History offers rare behind-the-scenes glimpses of figures who shaped the study of ancient Greece, some devotedly cited to this day and others forgotten. We sit in on a class with Arnaldo Momigliano; meet Moses Finley after his arrival in England; eavesdrop on Paul Veyne, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet; and rediscover Michel Foucault.

A thrilling work that rewrites established scholarly traditions and locates important ideas in unexpected places, The Muse of History reminds us that the meaning of the past is always made in and for the present.

Faced with an endless supply of mass-manufactured products, we find ourselves nostalgic for goods bearing the mark of authenticity--hand-made tools, local brews, and other objects produced by human hands. Archaeologist and medieval historian Alexander Langlands reaches as far back as the Neolithic period to recover our lost sense of cr ft, combining deep history with detailed scientific analyses and his own experiences making traditional crafts. Cr ft brims with vivid storytelling, rich descriptions of natural landscape, and delightful surprises that will convince us to introduce more cr ft into our lives.

New English translation of this classic work by Adolf Hitler, in fully readable American English. Includes numbered section headings, helpful footnotes, index, and bibliography. Mein Kampf has not appeared in a new English version since the 1940s, and all existing editions are poorly translated. This new edition will become the standard translation.

New English translation of this classic work by Adolf Hitler, in fully readable American English. Includes numbered section headings, helpful footnotes, index, and bibliography. Mein Kampf has not appeared in a new English version since the 1940s, and all existing editions are poorly translated. This new edition will become the standard translation.

New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice - From the bestselling author of The Sleepwalkers comes an epic history of the 1848 revolutions that swept Europe, and the charismatic figures who propelled them forward

Refreshingly original . . . Familiar characters are given vibrancy and previously unknown players emerge from the shadows.--The Times (UK)

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: New Yorker, The Economist, Financial Times

As history, the uprisings of 1848 have long been overshadowed by the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian revolutions of the early twentieth century. And yet in 1848 nearly all of Europe was aflame with conflict. Parallel political tumults spread like brush fire across the entire continent, leading to significant changes that continue to shape our world today. These battles for the future were fought with one eye kept squarely on the past: The men and women of 1848 saw the urgent challenges of their world as shaped profoundly by the past, and saw themselves as inheritors of a revolutionary tradition.

Celebrated Cambridge historian Christopher Clark describes 1848 as the particle collision chamber at the center of the European nineteenth century, a moment when political movements and ideas--from socialism and democratic radicalism to liberalism, nationalism, corporatism, and conservatism--were tested and transformed. The insurgents asked questions that sound modern to our ears: What happens when demands for political or economic liberty conflict with demands for social rights? How do we reconcile representative and direct forms of democracy? How is capitalism connected to social inequality? The revolutions of 1848 were short-lived, but their impact on public life and political thought throughout Europe and beyond has been profound.

Meticulously researched, elegantly written, and filled with a cast of charismatic figures, including the social theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, the writer George Sand, and the troubled priest Félicité de Lamennais, who struggled to reconcile his faith with politics, Revolutionary Spring offers a new understanding of 1848 that suggests chilling parallels to our present moment. Looking back at the revolutions from the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it is impossible not to be struck by the resonances, Clark writes. If a revolution is coming for us, it may look something like 1848.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 2001

The highly-acclaimed first edition of this book chronicled the rise and fall of witchcraft in Europe between the twelfth and the end of the seventeenth centuries. Now greatly expanded, the classic anthology of contemporary texts reexamines the phenomenon of witchcraft, taking into account the remarkable scholarship since the book's publication almost thirty years ago.

Spanning the period from 400 to 1700, the second edition of Witchcraft in Europe assembles nearly twice as many primary documents as the first, many newly translated, along with new illustrations that trace the development of witch-beliefs from late Mediterranean antiquity through the Enlightenment. Trial records, inquisitors' reports, eyewitness statements, and witches' confessions, along with striking contemporary illustrations depicting the career of the Devil and his works, testify to the hundreds of years of terror that enslaved an entire continent.

Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Thomas Hobbes, and other thinkers are quoted at length in order to determine the intellectual, perceptual, and legal processes by which folklore was transformed into systematic demonology and persecution. Together with explanatory notes, introductory essays--which have been revised to reflect current research--and a new bibliography, the documents gathered in Witchcraft in Europe vividly illumine the dark side of the European mind.

A new English translation of the classic work by Adolf Hitler. This edition brings together the best, timeliest, and most interesting passages from the original two-volume work. It includes a detailed Introduction, section headings, helpful footnotes, bibliography, and a useful index.

Mein Kampf is the autobiography and articulated worldview of one of the most consequential leaders in world history. It is also one of the most maligned and least understood texts of the 20^th century. A major problem in the Anglophone world has been the poor state of English translations. The new Dalton translation is clear, lucid, and highly readable--and yet true to the original. Unlike every other edition, this version has authentic section headings embedded in the text, which serve to both organize Hitler's ideas and to parse long sections of text into manageable units. Finally, this edition edits out the long tangents and ancillary comments that would only be of interest to academic historians.

The Essential Mein Kampf captures the 'best of the best, ' and presents it in modern, highly-readable English. A truly compelling read, as relevant today as when it was written.

Tracing an ancient pilgrimage route from Canterbury to Rome, the bestselling and virtuosic (The Wall Street Journal) writer explores the past and future of Christianity

Moved by his mother's death and his Irish Catholic family's complicated history with the church, Timothy Egan decided to follow in the footsteps of centuries of seekers to force a reckoning with his own beliefs. He embarked on a thousand-mile pilgrimage through the theological cradle of Christianity, exploring one of the biggest stories of our time: the collapse of religion in the world that it created. Egan sets out along the Via Francigena, once the major medieval trail leading the devout to Rome, and makes his way overland via the alpine peaks and small mountain towns of France, Switzerland and Italy.

Making his way through a landscape laced with some of the most important shrines to the faith, Egan finds a modern Canterbury Tale in the chapel where Queen Bertha introduced Christianity to pagan Britain; parses the supernatural in a French town built on miracles; and journeys to the oldest abbey in the Western world, founded in 515 and home to continuous prayer over the 1,500 years that have followed.

A thrilling journey, a family story, and a revealing history, A Pilgrimage to Eternity looks for our future in its search for God.

This is Yockey's famous masterpiece. It is inspired by Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. Imperium advocates the creation of a pan-European empire governed by sound principles or 'absolute politics'. It is divided into five parts, which are concerned with History, Politics, 'Cultural Vitalism', America and the World Situation. Imperium deals with doctrinal matters as well giving a survey of the 'world situation' in the 20th century. In this book, writes Yockey, are the precise, organic foundations of the Western soul, and in particular, its Imperative at the present stage. ...What is written here is also for the true America, even though the effective America of the moment, and of the immediate future is a hostile America, an America of willing, mass-minded tools in the service of the Culture-distorting political and total enemy of the Western Civilization. The mission of this generation is the most difficult that has ever faced a Western generation. It must break the terror by which it is held in silence, it must look ahead, it must believe when there is apparently no hope, it must obey even if it means death, it must fight to the end rather than submit. ...The men of this generation must fight for the continued existence of the West... The soil of Europe, rendered sacred by the streams of blood which have made it spiritually fertile for a millennium, will once again stream with blood until the barbarians and distorters have been driven out and the Western banner waves on its home soil from Gibraltar to North Cape, from the rocky promontories of Galway to the Urals. The book's Chicago-born author, Francis P. Yockey, was just 30 years old when he wrote Imperium in six months in a quiet village on Ireland's eastern coast. His masterpiece continues to shape the thinking and steel the will of readers around the world.

Chilling... To Hell and Back should be required reading in every chancellery, every editorial cockpit and every place where peevish Euroskeptics do their thinking.... Kershaw documents each and every 'ism' of his analysis with extraordinary detail and passionate humanism.--The New York Times Book Review

The Penguin History of Europe series reaches the twentieth century with acclaimed scholar Ian Kershaw's long-anticipated analysis of the pivotal years of World War I and World War II.

The European catastrophe, the long continuous period from 1914 to 1949, was unprecedented in human history--an extraordinarily dramatic, often traumatic, and endlessly fascinating period of upheaval and transformation. This new volume in the Penguin History of Europe series offers comprehensive coverage of this tumultuous era. Beginning with the outbreak of World War I through the rise of Hitler and the aftermath of the Second World War, award-winning British historian Ian Kershaw combines his characteristic original scholarship and gripping prose as he profiles the key decision makers and the violent shocks of war as they affected the entire European continent and radically altered the course of European history. Kershaw identifies four major causes for this catastrophe: an explosion of ethnic-racist nationalism, bitter and irreconcilable demands for territorial revisionism, acute class conflict given concrete focus through the Bolshevik Revolution, and a protracted crisis of capitalism.

Incisive, brilliantly written, and filled with penetrating insights, To Hell and Back offers an indispensable study of a period in European history whose effects are still being felt today.

From the bestselling author of The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower

In his rich and nuanced portrait of the remarkable, elusive Rothschild family, Oxford scholar and bestselling author Niall Ferguson uncovers the secrets behind the family's phenomenal economic success. He reveals for the first time the details of the family's vast political network, which gave it access to and influence over many of the greatest statesmen of the age. And he tells a family saga, tracing the importance of unity and the profound role of Judaism in the lives of a dynasty that rose from the confines of the Frankfurt ghetto and later used its influence to assist oppressed Jews throughout Europe. A definitive work of impeccable scholarship with a thoroughly engaging narrative, The House of Rothschild is a biography of the rarest kind, in which mysterious and fascinating historical figures finally spring to life.

The contested creation of free movement--for people and goods--in the Schengen area of Europe

Europe is a place of free movement among nations--or is it? The Schengen area, established in 1985 and today encompassing twenty-nine European countries, allows people, goods, and capital to cross borders without restraint. Schengen transformed European life, advancing both a democratic project of transnational citizenship and a neoliberal project of international free trade. But the right of free movement always excluded non-Europeans, especially migrants of color from former colonies of the Schengen states. In Europe without Borders, Isaac Stanley-Becker explores the contested creation of free movement in Schengen, from treatymaking at European summits and disputes in international courts to the street protests of undocumented immigrants who claimed free movement as a human right.

Schengen laid the groundwork for the making of a single market and the founding of the European Union. Yet its emergence is one of the great untold stories of modern European history, one hidden in archives long embargoed. Stanley-Becker is among the first to have access to records of the treatymaking--such as letters between France's François Mitterrand and West Germany's Helmut Kohl--and Europe without Borders offers a pathbreaking account of Schengen's creation. Stanley-Becker argues that Schengen gave a humanist cast to a market paradigm; but even in pairing the border crossing of human beings with the principles of free-market exchange, this vision of free movement was hedged by alarm about foreign migrants. Meanwhile, these migrants--the sans-papiers--saw in the promise of a borderless Europe only a neocolonial enterprise.

In this lively and ambitious book, James Sheehan, former president of the American Historical Association, charts what is perhaps the most radical shift in Europe's history: its transformation from war-torn battlefield to peaceful, prosperous society.

For centuries, war was Europe's defining narrative, affecting every aspect of political, social, and cultural life. But after World War II, Europe began to reimagine statehood, rejecting ballooning defense budgets in favor of material well-being, social stability, and economic growth.

Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? reveals how and why this happened, and what it means for America and the rest of the world.

With remarkable insight and clarity, Sheehan covers the major intellectual and political events in Europe over the past one hundred years, from the pacifist and militarist movements of the early twentieth century and two catastrophic world wars to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the heated debate over Iraq. This authoritative history provides much-needed context for understanding the fractured era in which we live.