20th Century

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....

Night is an unmistakably autobiographical account of the author's own gruesome experiences in Nazi Germany's death camps....

From actor, comedian, writer, and host of the hit history podcast SNAFU, Ed Helms brings you an absurdly entertaining look at history’s biggest blunders.

The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century....

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

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....

The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the 10 years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today....

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....

The #1 New York Times bestseller, now in an expanded audiobook edition that includes detailed historical context for the democracy-threatening Ukrainian conflict and a call to action for modern times....

At one time, Corrie ten Boom would have laughed at the idea that she had a story to tell.....

The America we live in today was born on December 7, 1941, when almost 400 Japanese planes attacked the US Pacific fleet, killing 2,400 men and sinking or damaging 16 ships....

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

This is the remarkable story of Josef Lewkowicz—Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor who became a Nazi hunter.

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....

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....

The Golden Age of Aviation is brought to life in this story of the giant Zeppelin airships that once roamed the sky—a story that ended with the fiery destruction of the Hindenburg....

An incisive portrait of the two little-known 20th-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whose diametrically opposed views shaped our ideas about the environment.....

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....

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....

The Pity of War makes a simple and provocative argument: the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England's fault. According to Niall Ferguson, England entered into war based on naive assumptions of German aims....

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....

A number-one New York Times best seller and arguably the best business narrative ever written, Barbarians at the Gate is the classic account of the fall of RJR Nabisco....

Stephen E. Ambrose draws from hundreds of interviews with US Army veterans and the brave Allied soldiers who fought alongside them to create this exceptional account of the day that shaped the twentieth century....

When America entered World War II, Ernie Pyle followed the soldiers into the trenches....

Antony Beevor has reconstructed the terrible reality of the fighting, which General Student called "The Last German Victory." Yet The Battle of Arnhem, written with Beevor's inimitable style, is about much more than a single dramatic battle - it looks into the very heart of war....

From actor, comedian, writer, and host of the hit history podcast SNAFU, Ed Helms brings you an absurdly entertaining look at history’s biggest blunders.

How could the SS have committed the crimes they did? How were the killers who shot Jews at close quarters able to perpetrate this horror? Why did commandants of concentration and death camps willingly—often enthusiastically—oversee mass murder? How could ordinary Germans have tolerated the removal of the Jews? In The Nazi Mind, bestselling historian Laurence Rees seeks answers to some of the most perplexing questions surrounding the Second World War and the Holocaust.

In a highly inventive style, Cockerell captures history as it unfolds, weaving together letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles, and interviews into a vivid account. Melting Point follows Zangwill and the Jochelmann family through two world wars, to London, New York, and Jerusalem—as their lives intertwine with some of the most memorable figures of the twentieth century, and each chooses whether to cling to their history or melt into their new surroundings. It is a story that asks what it means to belong, and what can be salvaged from the past.

In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order. In Scorched Earth, historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin dispatches the myth of World War II as a good war. Instead, he depicts the conflict as it truly was: a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe.

For the doomed stand American forces made in the Philippines at the start of World War II, two generals received their country’s highest military award, the Medal of Honor. One was the charismatic and controversial Douglas MacArthur, whose orders forced him to leave his soldiers on the islands to starvation and surrender but whose vow to return echoed around the globe. The other was the gritty Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, who became a hero to the troops whose fate he insisted on sharing even when it meant becoming the highest-ranking American prisoner of the Japanese.

Charlotte Beradt began having unsettling dreams after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. She envisioned herself being shot at, tortured and scalped, surrounded by Nazis in disguise, and breathlessly fleeing across fields with storm troopers at her heels. Shaken by these nightmares and banned as a Jew from working, she began secretly collecting dreams from her friends and neighbors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Disguising these "diaries of the night" in code and concealing them in the spines of books from her extensive library, she smuggled them out of the country one by one.

In this comprehensive guide to the most widespread conflict in contemporary history, Vladislav Zubok traces the origins of the Cold War in post-war Europe, through the tumultuous decades of confrontation, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond. Drawing on years of research and informed by Zubok’s three decades in the USSR followed by three decades in the West, The Cold War paints a striking portrait of a world on the brink.

In The People's War, John Willis unearths untold stories of everyday bravery, moments of terror, and tales of life-affirming community, that guide us through the years of the Second World War. From soldiers in North Africa and prisoners of war in East Asia, to evacuees in the British countryside and women in the factories, The People's War is a truly ambitious and comprehensive journey through a devastating and pivotal period of our history, as you've never read before.

The last battle of World War II was not for military victory but for the technology of the Third Reich. In American Raiders, Wolfgang Samuel assembles from official Air Force records and survivors' interviews the largely untold stories of the disarmament of the Luftwaffe and of Operation Lusty—the hunt for Nazi technologies.

On May 28, 1914, the RMS Empress of Ireland began her 192nd trip across the Atlantic from Quebec City, Canada, en route to Liverpool, England, carrying 1,056 passengers and a crew of 423. In the early hours of May 29, fog descended on the St. Lawrence River, and the ocean liner was rammed by the Storstad, a Norwegian coal ship. In the fourteen minutes it took for the Empress of Ireland to sink, there was time to launch only four of the forty lifeboats, and rather than women and children first, it was everyone for themselves.

More than a Holocaust memoir, The Risk of Sorrow is an intimate look at two women of different generations, religions, and cultures who forge an extraordinary friendship as together they examine deep questions of survival, faith, humanity, and love. This is a story for today's world.

February, 1945. Eight months have passed since the D-Day landings, when the Allies gained their foothold in North-West Europe. Since then the British Army has fought near continuously against the German military. Now, they stand ready for their greatest test: the battle for the German homeland. Drawing on the archive of the Imperial War Museums, this often-overlooked period of the war is brought vividly to life in the words of British soldiers who were there, from war-weary men who have survived many months of combat to new recruits facing Hitler's fanatic Panzer divisions for the first time.

In this poignant and deeply moving memoir, Sigal Magen reflects on her life as a second-generation descendant of Holocaust survivors. Through vivid recollections and heartfelt introspection, she weaves together stories of childhood fears, inherited trauma, and the resilience that shaped her into a beacon of hope and connection. From climbing a playground slide to carrying the weight of generational fears, Sigal shares how her father’s unspoken pain and her grandfather’s symbolic train journeys shaped her view of the world. Her journey takes her from moments of personal struggle to a ...

En la primavera de 1944, gendarmes nazis irrumpieron violentamente en la vida de Max Eisen y su familia, arrancándolos de su hogar. Los subieron a vagones de ganado, atestados de gente, rumbo al fatídico campo de concentración de Auschwitz-Birkenau. A los quince años, Eisen, junto con su padre y su tío, logró sobrevivir al despiadado proceso de selección y fue enviado al campo de concentración como trabajador esclavo. Posteriormente, su padre y su tío fueron seleccionados para los experimentos que se llevaban a cabo ahí y nunca más los volvió a ver.

Heirs to the renowned German-American Bergdoll Beer fortune at a young age, the Bergdoll boys used their millions to become champion race car drivers and pioneer aviation heroes in the early 1900s. Then, just as Grover is trying to buy a bigger plane to set more records and attempt to fly to Europe a decade before Lindbergh, they're snared by vengeful local military draft officials. Running and hiding from their war duty, the fugitives are so reviled by nationalistic Americans that two older brothers change their names to avoid infamy.