20th Century

Max Hastings presents a worldwide cast of characters and some extraordinary sagas of intelligence and resistance to create a new perspective on the greatest conflict in history....

Based on the newly released personal letters of Albert Einstein, Walter Isaacson explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos....

If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky....

Erik Larson has been widely acclaimed as a master of narrative non-fiction, and in his new book, turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler’s rise to power....

J. Robert Oppenheimer, an iconic figure of the 20th century, was a brilliant physicist who led efforts to build an atomic bomb but later confronted the moral consequences of scientific progress....

Many books have been written on the tragic decisions regarding Vietnam made by the stars of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Yet despite many words of analysis and reflection, no historian has been able to explain why such decent and previously successful men stumbled so badly...

On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants....

This is the definitive story of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, based on original reporting and new archival research. Through two decades of reporting, new archival information, and firsthand interviews with witnesses, Adam Higginbotham tells the full dramatic story....

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, historian Barbara Tuchman brings to life the people and events that led up to World War I....

In the first major biography of Bonhoeffer in 40 years, New York Times best-selling author Eric Metaxas takes both strands of Bonhoeffer's life - the theologian and the spy - to tell a searing story of incredible moral courage in the face of monstrous evil....

A powerful, moving memoir - and a practical guide to healing - written by Dr. Edith Eva Eger, an eminent psychologist whose own experiences as a Holocaust survivor help her treat patients....

In this uplifting memoir in the vein of The Last Lecture and Man’s Search for Meaning, a Holocaust survivor pays tribute to those who were lost by telling his story, sharing his wisdom, and living his best possible life....

Blind Man's Bluff shows for the first time how the navy sent submarines wired with self-destruct charges into the heart of Soviet seas to tap crucial underwater telephone cables....

As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics....

Thunderstruck tells the stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication....

The year is 1943, and the three Allied leaders - Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin - are meeting for the first time at a top-secret conference in Tehran. But the Nazis have learned about the meeting, and Hitler sees it as his last chance to turn the tide....

Late in the night of April 14, 1912, the mighty Titanic, a passenger liner traveling from Southampton, England, to New York City....

From age 15 to 40, David Hackworth devoted himself to the US Army and fast became a living legend. In 1971, however, he appeared on television to decry the doomed war effort in Vietnam....

When Henry Kissinger was made secretary of state in 1973, he had already become the most admired person in the US and one of the most unlikely celebrities to capture the world’s imagination....

This Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire....

These selections from the many writings of Thomas Sowell over a period of half a century cover social, economic, cultural, legal, educational, and political issues....

A vital, comprehensive international military history of the Cold War which views the decades-long superpower struggles as one of the three great conflicts of the 20th century alongside the two World Wars, and reveals how bloody the "Long Peace" actually was....

As the true horrors of the Third Reich began to be exposed immediately after World War II, the Nazi war criminals who committed genocide went on the run....

The Passage of Power follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career - 1958 to 1964....

This is the story of two men and the two decisions that transformed world history in a single tumultuous year, 1917: Wilson's entry into World War I and Lenin's Bolshevik Revolution....

More than its many adventures, the Peking-to-Paris Motor Challenge took place on the precipice of a new world. As the twentieth century dawned, imperial regimes in China and Russia were crumbling, paving the way for the rise of communist ones. The electric telegraph was rapidly transforming modern communication, and with it, the news media, commerce, and politics. Suspended between the old and the new, the Peking-to-Paris, as bestselling historian Kassia St. Clair writes, became a critical tipping point.

The Beatles came onto the scene like a force of nature. Their songs became the anthems of generations of fans, and their emergence marked a high-water mark of popular music. But beyond the Beatles themselves, there is one man who can be credited with engineering this perfect maelstrom of musical majesty, and that man is former Beatles manager Brian Epstein.

Between 1930 and 1932, Henry Ford sent 450 of his Detroit employees plus their families to live in Gorky, Russia, to operate a new manufacturing facility. This is the true story of one of those families—Carl and Elisabeth Werner and their young daughter Margaret—and their terrifying life in Russia under brutal dictator Joseph Stalin.

In this book, bestselling historian Jonathan Dimbleby describes and analyses this momentous year, covering the military, political and diplomatic story in his evocative style. Drawing on previously untranslated German, Russian and Polish sources, we see how sophisticated new forms of deception and ruthless Partisan warfare shifted the Soviets’ fortunes, how their triumphs effectively gave Stalin authority to occupy Eastern Europe and how it was the events of 1944 that enabled Stalin to dictate the terms of the post-war settlement, laying the foundations for the Cold War . . .

Operation Biting was one of the most thrilling British commando raids of World War II, and probably the most successful. In February 1942 RAF intelligence was baffled by a newly-identified radar network on the coast of Nazi-occupied Europe, codenamed Würzburg. The brilliant scientist Dr RV Jones proposed an assault to capture key components. The nearest accessible enemy set stood upon a steep cliff at Bruneval in Normandy. Winston Churchill enthused, as did Lord Louis Mountbatten, chief of Combined Operations.

Filling a massive gap in D-Day literature, marine historian Stephen Fisher provides fresh insight and unrivalled coverage of one of the least well know of the D-Day landings. Although they are well known, coverage of the action on Sword, Juno and Gold beaches is relatively sparse and overshadowed by the more famous American landing at Omaha. In fact, the capture of all the beaches were events in their own right, full of drama and incident, and in particular, Sword Beach turned out to be crucial in securing the Normandy Landings.

Written by Robert Hannigan, the former Director of GCHQ, this book explores the role of the counter-intelligence services in history and today’s world – from the codebreakers and problem solvers, to innovation and creativity, secrecy and transparency and the global tech community. It will trace the history of counter-intelligence – from the early days of Bletchley Park, to the ongoing work of GCHQ – while reflecting on some of the unique characteristics of the engineers, mathematicians and other problem-solvers that make up the world’s intelligence community.

The story of the twentieth century is largely the story of the power of science and technology. Within that story is the incredible tale of the human conflict between Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller—the scientists most responsible for the advent of weapons of mass destruction. How did science—and its practitioners—enlisted in the service of the state during the Second World War, become a slave to its patron during the Cold War?

Prepare for success on the CLEP Western Civilization II: 1648 to the Present exam with this comprehensive study guide. Covering key topics from Absolutism and Constitutionalism to contemporary Europe, this guide offers a thorough review of essential historical events, developments, and themes. Inside, you'll find: Absolutism and Constitutionalism, 1648–1715: Explore the rise of absolute monarchies, the balance of power in Europe, and the emergence of constitutional governments. Competition for empire and economic expansion: Learn about the age of exploration, colonialism, and the economic...

On August 20, 1942, twelve Marine dive-bombers and nineteen Marine fighters landed at Guadalcanal. Their mission: defeat the Japanese navy and prevent it from sending more men and supplies to "Starvation Island," as Guadalcanal was nicknamed. The Japanese were turning the remote, jungle-covered mountain in the south Solomon Islands into an air base from which they could attack the supply lines between the U.S. and Australia.

Children of concentration camp survivors are also known as "memorial candles" because they are usually named after relatives who have been killed in the Holocaust. This is Volume II of an autobiography and is dedicated exclusively to how a son of Concentration Camp survivors dealt with the ever-present topic in such people's life: the Holocaust.

On June 4,1924 George Mallory donned an oxygen set and set off for the summit of Everest with his young partner Andrew Irvine. Next day they were glimpsed through clouds heading upwards, but after that they were never seen again. Whether they died on the way up or on the way down no one knows. In the years following his disappearance, Mallory was elevated into an all-British hero. Dubbed by his friends the 'Galahad' of Everest, he was lionized in the press as the greatest mountaineer of his generation who had died while taking on the ultimate challenge

Following the Western Allies' overwhelming victory on D-Day, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin are all prepared to shape the future, and Operation Market Garden is Britain's attempt to beat the Russians to Berlin and be the first to help craft the new world order. With 10,000 men dropped into Arnhem and another 20,000 in Grave, the British are set to secure the area and declare victory. However, Dutch resistance hero Christian Lindemans has other plans. Lindemans is determined to help the Germans gain the lead in the war and begins to dismantle the operation from within.

Departing from a simple linear history, The Soviet Century traces all the continuities and ruptures that led from the founding revolution of October 1917, to the final collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s, passing through the Stalinist dictatorship, the impossible reforms of the Khrushchev years, and the glasnost and perestroika policies of Gorbachev.

In Why the Nineties Matter, Terry Anderson provides a broad-ranging history of America in that decade. Not simply a chronological account, the book focuses on key trends that either began or gained steam then and which have had lasting effects until this day. Threading together politics, economic transformations, and sociocultural trends, he focuses on what mattered most in retrospect.