A landmark account of the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler, based on award-winning research, and recently discovered archival material.

In the 1930s, Germany was at a turning point, with many looking to the Nazi phenomenon as part of widespread resentment towards cosmopolitan liberal democracy and capitalism. This was a global situation that pushed Germany to embrace authoritarianism, nationalism and economic self-sufficiency, kick-starting a revolution founded on new media technologies, and the formidable political and self-promotional skills of its leader.

Based on award-winning research and recently discovered archival material, The Death Of Democracy is a panoramic new survey of one of the most important periods in modern history, and a book with a resounding message for the world today.

This practical and inspirational guide to healing from the bestselling author of The Choice shows us how to release your self-limiting beliefs and embrace your potential.

The prison is in your mind. The key is in your pocket. In the end, it's not what happens to us that matters most - it's what we choose to do with it.

We all face suffering - sadness, loss, despair, fear, anxiety, failure. But we also have a choice; to give in and give up in the face of trauma or difficulties, or to live every moment as a gift. Celebrated therapist and Holocaust survivor, Dr Edith Eger, provides a hands-on guide that gently encourages us to change the imprisoning thoughts and destructive behaviours that may be holding us back.

Accompanied by stories from Eger's own life and the lives of her patients her empowering lessons help you to see your darkest moments as your greatest teachers and find freedom through the strength that lies within.

The remarkable story of a woman's journey out of Auschwitz to find her family, told to her son for the very first time.

As a reporter, Jacques Peretti has spent his life investigating important stories. But there was one story, heard in scattered fragments throughout his childhood, that he never thought to investigate. The story of how his mother survived Auschwitz.

In the few last months of the War, thirteen-year-old Alina Peretti, along with her mother and sister, was one of thirteen thousand non-Jewish Poles sent to Auschwitz, in the wake of the Warsaw Uprising. Her experiences there, which she rarely discussed, cast a shadow over the rest of her life.

Now ninety, Alina has been diagnosed with dementia. Together, mother and son begin a race against time to record her memories and preserve her family's story. For the first time, Alina recalls her experiences as a child during the Second World War, the horrors that she witnessed in Auschwitz and the miraculous story of how she survived a firing squad.

Along the way, Jacques learns long-hidden secrets about his mother's family; his mysterious grandfather who lived a double-life, his grandmother who read tarot cards in a Soviet labour camp, and his aunt and uncles, whose fate he never knew. He also gains an understanding of his mother through retracing her past, learning more about the woman who would never let him call her 'Mum'.

For seventy years, Queen Elizabeth has ruled over an institution and a family. She has been constant in her desire to provide a steady presence and to be a trustworthy steward of the British people and the Commonwealth. In the face of her uncle's abdication, in the uncertainty of the Blitz, and in the tentative exposure of her family and private life to the public via the press, Elizabeth has become synonymous with the crown.

But times change. Recent years have brought grief and turmoil to the House of Windsor, and even as England prepares to celebrate the Queen's Platinum Jubilee, there are calls for a changing of the guard.

In The New Royals, journalist Katie Nicholl provides a nuanced look at Elizabeth's remarkable and unrivalled reign, with new stories from Palace courtiers and aides, documentarians, and family members. She examines Charles and Camilla's decades in waiting and beyond-where "The Firm" is headed as William and Kate present the modern faces of an ancient institution. In the wake of Harry and Meghan leaving the Royal Family and Andrew's spectacular fall from grace, the royal family must reckon with its history, the light and the dark, in order to chart a course for Britain beyond its Queen and to show that it is an institution capable of leadership in an ever changing modern world.

Winner of the European Book Prize.

On 10 July 1941 a horrifying crime was committed in the small Polish town of Jedwadbne. Early in the afternoon, the town's Jewish population - hundreds of men, women and children - were ordered out of their homes, and marched into the town square. By the end of the day most would be dead. It was a massacre on a shocking scale, and one that was widely condemned. But only a few people were brought to justice for their part in the atrocity. The truth of what actually happened on that day was to be suppressed for more than sixty years.

Part history, part memoir, part investigation, The Crime And The Silence is an award-winning journalist's account of the events of that day: both the story of a massacre told through oral histories of survivors and witnesses, and a portrait of a Polish town coming to terms with its dark past.

A newly discovered classic: a collection of inspirational lectures on embracing life from worldwide bestseller Viktor Frankl.

Just months after his liberation from Auschwitz renowned psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl delivered a series of talks revealing the foundations of his life-affirming philosophy. The psychologist, who would soon become world famous, explained his central thoughts on meaning, resilience and his conviction that every crisis contains opportunity.

Published here for the very first time in English, Frankl's words resonate as strongly today as they did in 1946. Despite the unspeakable horrors in the camp, Frankl learnt from his fellow inmates that it is always possible to say ‘yes to life’ – a profound and timeless lesson for us all.

A book for finding purpose and strength in times of great despair, the international best-seller is still just as relevant today as when it was first published.

Man's Search for Meaning is more relevant than ever, Viktor Frank's message provides hope even in the darkest of times. It has sold more than 16 million copies in fifty languages. A reader survey for the Library of Congress that asked readers to name a "book that made a difference in your life" found Man's Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America.

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of others he treated later in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl's theory-known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos ("meaning")-holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.

How the most powerful country in the UK was forged by invasion and conquest, and is fractured by its north-south divide.

England – begetter of parliaments and globe-spanning empires, star of beloved period dramas, and home of the House of Windsor – is not quite the stalwart island fortress that many of us imagine. Riven by an ancient fault line that predates even the Romans, its fate has ever been bound up with that of its neighbours; and for the past millennia, it has harboured a class system like nowhere else. There has never been a better time to understand why England is the way it is – and there is no better guide. With over 100 illustrations, maps and charts. Over 150 000 sold internationally.

An acclaimed international bestseller which tells the story of Europe’s most admired and feared country, from the Roman age to Charlemagne to von Bismarck to Merkel. A country both admired and feared, Germany has been the epicentre of world events time and again: the Reformation, both World Wars, the fall of the Berlin Wall. It did not emerge as a modern nation until 1871 – yet today, Germany is the world’s fourth-largest economy and a standard-bearer of liberal democracy. With more than 100 maps and images, this is a fresh, concise and entertaining history which since release has sold over 300 000 copies internationally.

The turbulent decade of the 60s CE brought Rome to the brink of collapse. It began with Nero's ruthless elimination of Julio-Claudian rivals and ended in his suicide and the civil wars that followed. Suddenly Rome was forced to confront an imperial future as bloody as its Republican past and a ruler from outside the house of Caesar. The anonymous historical drama Octavia is the earliest literary witness to this era of uncertainty and upheaval. In this book, Ginsberg offers a new reading of how the play intervenes in the wars over memory surrounding Nero's fall. Though Augustus and his heirs had claimed that the Principate solved Rome's curse of civil war, the play reimagines early imperial Rome as a landscape of civil strife in which the ruling family waged war both on itself and on its people. In doing so, the Octavia shows how easily empire becomes a breeding ground for the passions of discord. In order to rewrite the history of Rome's first imperial dynasty, the Octavia engages with the literature of Julio-Claudian Rome, using the words of Rome's most celebrated authors to stage a new reading of that era and its ruling family. In doing so, the play opens a dialogue about literary versions of history and about the legitimacy of those historical accounts. Through an innovative combination of intertextual analysis and cultural memory theory, Ginsberg elucidates the roles that literature and the literary manipulation of memory play in negotiating the transition between the Julio-Claudian and Flavian regimes. Her book claims for the Octavia a central role in current debates over both the ways in which Nero and his family were remembered as well as the politics of literary and cultural memory in the early Roman empire.

A powerful account of Jewish resistence in Nazi-occupied Europe and why such resistance was so remarkable. Most popular accounts of the Holocaust typically cast Jewish victims as meek and ask, "Why didn't Jews resist?" But we know now that Jews did resist, staging armed uprisings in ghettos and camps throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. In Hope and Honor, Rachel L. Einwohner illustrates the dangers in attempting resistance under unimaginable conditions and shows how remarkable such resistance was. She draws on oral testimonies, published and unpublished diaries and memoirs, and other written materials produced both by survivors and those who perished to show how Jews living under Nazi occupation in the ghettos of Warsaw, Vilna, and Lodz reached decisions about resistance. Using methods of comparative-historical sociology, Einwohner shows that decisions about resistance rested on Jews' assessments of the threats facing them, and somewhat ironically, armed resistance took place only once activists reached the critical conclusion that they had no hope for survival. Rather than ask the typical question of why Jews generally didn't resist, this powerful account of Jewish resistance seeks to explain why they resisted at all when there was no hope for success, and they faced almost certain death.

"It is safer to be feared than loved." These words embody the spirit of The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli's classic work of political philosophy. Machiavelli's advice for how a ruler should acquire and ruthlessly exercise power over others continues to be relevant to contemporary readers more than five centuries after it was first published. This is one of Barnes & Noble's 'Collectible Editions' classics. Each volume features authoritative texts by the world's greatest authors in an elegantly designed bonded-leather binding, with distinctive gilt edging. Durable and collectible, these volumes are an indispensable cornerstone of every home library.

This volume offers a lively introduction to Russia's dramatic history and the striking changes that characterize its story. Distinguished authors Barbara Alpern Engel and Janet Martin show how Russia's peoples met the constant challenges posed by geography, climate, availability of natural resources, and devastating foreign invasions, and rose to become the world's second largest land empire. The book describes the circumstances that led to the world's first communist society in 1917, and traces the global consequences of Russia's long confrontation with the United States, which took place virtually everywhere and for decades provided a model for societies seeking development independent of capitalism. This book also brings the story of Russia's arduous and costly climb to great power to a personal level through the stories of individual women and men-leading figures who played pivotal roles as well as less prominent individuals from a range of social backgrounds whose voices illuminate the human consequences of sweeping historical change. As was and is true of Russia itself, this story encompasses a wide variety of ethnicities, peoples who became part of the Russian empire and suffered or benefited from its leaders' efforts to meld a multiethnic polity into a coherent political entity. The book examines how Russia served as a conduit for people, ideas, and commodities flowing between east and west, north and south, and absorbed and adapted influences from both Europe and Asia and how it came to play an increasingly important role on a regional and, ultimately, global scale.

Vincent de Paul, the Lazarist Mission, and French Catholic Reform offers a major re-assessment of the thought and activities of the most famous figure of the seventeenth-century French Catholic Reformation, Vincent de Paul. Confronting traditional explanations for de Paul's prominence in the devot reform movement that emerged in the wake of the Wars of Religion, the volume explores how he turned a personal vocational desire to evangelize the rural poor of France into a congregation of secular missionaries, known as the Congregation of the Mission or the Lazarists, with three inter-related strands of pastoral responsibility: the delivery of missions, the formation and training of clergy, and the promotion of confraternal welfare. Alison Forrestal further demonstrates that the structure, ethos, and works that de Paul devised for the Congregation placed it at the heart of a significant enterprise of reform that involved a broad set of associates in efforts to transform the character of devotional belief and practice within the church. The central questions of the volume therefore concern de Paul's efforts to create, characterize, and articulate a distinctive and influential vision for missionary life and work, both for himself and for the Lazarist Congregation, and Forrestal argues that his prominence and achievements depended on his remarkable ability to exploit the potential for association and collaboration within the devot environment of seventeenth-century France in enterprising and systematic ways. This is the first study to assess de Paul's activities against the wider backdrop of religious reform and Bourbon rule, and to reconstruct the combination of ideas, practices, resources, and relationships that determined his ability to pursue his ambitions. A work of forensic detail and complex narrative, Vincent de Paul, the Lazarist Mission, and French Catholic Reform is the product of years of research in ecclesiastical and state archives. It offers a wholly fresh perspective on the challenges and opportunities entailed in the promotion of religious reform and renewal in seventeenth-century France.

This is a history not of an Enlightenment but rather the Enlightenment-the rights-oriented, formalist, secularizing, freedom-inspired eighteenth-century movement that defined modern Western law. Its principal protagonists, rather than members of a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, are non-literate, poor, and enslaved litigants who sued their superiors in the royal courts of Spain's American colonies. Despite growing evidence of the Hispanic world's contributions to Enlightenment science, the writing of history, and statecraft, it is conventionally believed to have taken an alternate route to modernity. This book grapples with the contradiction between this legacy and eighteenth-century Spanish Americans' active production of concepts fundamental to modern law. The book is intensely empirical even as it is sly situated within current theoretical debates about imperial geographies of history. The Enlightenment on Trial offers readers new insight into how legal documents were made, fresh interpretations of the intellectual transformations and legal reform policies of the period, and comparative analysis of the volume of civil suits from six regions in Mexico, Peru and Spain. Ordinary litigants in the colonies-far more often than peninsular Spaniards-sued superiors at an accelerating pace in the second half of the eighteenth century. Three types of cases increased even faster than a stunning general rise of civil suits in the colonies: those that slaves, native peasants and women initiated against masters, native leaders and husbands. As they entered court, these litigants advanced a new law-centered culture distinct from the casuistic, justice-oriented legal culture of the early modern period. And they did so at precisely the same time that a few bright minds of Europe enshrined them in print. The conclusion considers why, if this is so, the Spanish empire has remained marginal to the story of the advent of the modern West.

Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations in the Spanish Civil War.

In 1636, residents at the convent of Santa Chiara in Carpi in northern Italy were struck by an extraordinary illness that provoked bizarre behavior. Eventually numbering fourteen, the afflicted nuns were subject to screaming fits, throwing themselves on the floor, and falling abruptly into a deep sleep. When medical experts' cures proved ineffective, exorcists ministered to the women and concluded that they were possessed by demons and the victims of witchcraft. Catering to women from elite families, the nunnery suffered much turmoil for three years and, remarkably, three of the victims died from their ills. A maverick nun and a former confessor were widely suspected to be responsible, through witchcraft, for these woes. Based primarily on the exhaustive investigation by the Inquisition of Modena, The Scourge of Demons examines this fascinating case in its historical context. The travails of Santa Chiara occurred at a time when Europe witnessed peaks in both witch-hunting and in the numbers of people reputedly possessed by demons. Female religious figures appeared particularly prone to demonic attacks, and Counter-Reformation Church authorities were especially interested in imposing stricter discipline on convents. Watt carefully considers how the nuns of Santa Chiara understood and experienced alleged possession and witchcraft, concluding that Santa Chiara's diabolical troubles and their denouement -- involving the actions of nuns, confessors, inquisitorial authorities, and exorcists -- were profoundly shaped by the unique confluence of religious, cultural, judicial, and intellectual trends that flourished in the 1630s. Jeffrey R. Watt is professor of history at the University of Mississippi.

The definitive survey of the countries and territories of Western Europe, comprising expert analysis and commentary, up-to-date economic and socio-political data and extensive directory information. General Survey Essays by leading experts on the area cover issues of regional importance. Country Surveys Individual chapters on each country, comprising: an introductory survey, containing essays on the geography, history and economy of each country, including a chronology and map. an extensive statistical survey of economic and demographic indicators, including area and population, health and welfare, agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, industry, finance, trade, transport, tourism, communications media and education. a comprehensive directory of names and contact details covering the most significant political and commercial institutions. Regional Information a directory of research institutes specializing in the region bibliographies of books and periodicals covering the region.

Defining Deutschtum: Political Ideology, German Identity, and Music-Critical Discourse in Liberal Vienna offers a nuanced look at the intersection of music, cultural identity, and political ideology in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. Drawing on an extensive selection of writings in the city's political press, correspondence, archival documents, and a large body of recent scholarship in late Habsburg cultural and political history, author David Brodbeck argues that Vienna's music critics were important agents in the public sphere whose writings gave voice to distinct, sometimes competing ideological positions. These conflicting positions are exemplified especially well in their critical writings about the music of three notable composers of the day who were Austrian citizens but not ethnic Germans: Carl Goldmark, a Jew from German West Hungary, and the Czechs Bed?ich Smetana and Antonin Dvo?ak.
Often at stake in the critical discourse was the question of who and what could be deemed "German" in the multinational Austrian state. For critics such as Eduard Hanslick and Ludwig Speidel, traditional German liberals who came of age in the years around 1848, "Germanness" was an attribute that could be earned by any ambitious bourgeois-including Jews and those of non-German nationality-by embracing German cultural values. The more nationally inflected liberalism evident in the writings of Theodor Helm, with its particularist rhetoric of German national property in a time of Czech gains at German expense, was typical of those in the next generation, educated during the 1860s. The radical student politics of the 1880s, with its embrace of racialist antisemitism and irredentist German nationalism, just as surely shaped the discourse of certain young Wagnerian critics who emerged at the end of the century. This body of music-critical writing reveals a continuum of exclusivity, from a conception of Germanness rooted in social class and cultural elitism to one based in blood.
Brodbeck neatly counters decades of musicological scholarship and offers a unique insight into the diverse ways in which educated German Austrians conceived of Germanness in music and understood their relationship to their non-German fellow citizens. Defining Deutschtum is sure to be an essential text for scholars of music history, cultural studies, and late 19th century Central European culture and society."

What do people do all day? What did women and men do to make a living in early modern Europe, and what did their work mean? As this book shows, the meanings depended both on the worker and on the context. With an innovative analytic method that is yoked to a specially-built database of source materials, this book revises many received opinions about the history of gender and work in Europe. The applied verb-oriented method finds the 'work verbs' that appear incidentally in a wide variety of early modern sources and then analyzes the context in which they appear. By tying information technologies and computer-assisted analysis to the analytic powers - both quantitative and qualitative - of professional historians, the method gets much closer to a participatory observation of the micro-patterns of early modern life than was once believed possible. It directly addresses a number of broad problems often debated by historians of gender and early modern Europe. First, it discusses the problem of assessing more accurately the incidence, character and division of work. Second, it analyzes the configurations of work and human difference. Third, it deals with the extent to which work practices created notions of difference - gender difference but also other forms of difference - and, conversely, to what extent work practices contributed to notions of sameness and gender convergence. Finally, it studies the impact of processes of change. Drawing on sources from Sweden, the authors show the importance of multiple employment, the openness of early modern households, the significance of marriage and marital status, the gendered nature of specific tasks, and the ways in which state formation and commercialization were entangled in people's everyday lives.

Ephemeral, fragile, often left unbound, sixteenth-century songbooks led fleeting lives in the pockets of singers and on the music desks of instrumentalists. Constantly in action, they were forever being used up, replaced, or abandoned as ways of reading changed. As such they document the acts of early musicians and the practices of everyday life at the unseen margins of elite society. Materialities is a cultural history of song on the page. It addresses a series of central questions concerning the audiences for written music by concentrating on the first genre to be commercialized by music printers: the French chanson. Scholars have long stressed that chansons represent the most broadly disseminated polyphony of the sixteenth century, but Materialities is the first book to account for the cultural reach of the chanson across a considerable cross-section of European society. Musicologist Kate van Orden brings extensive primary research and new analytical models to bear in this remarkable history of songbooks, music literacy, and social transformation during the first century of music printing. By tracking chansons into private libraries and schoolrooms and putting chansonniers into dialogue with catechisms, civility manuals, and chapbooks, Materialities charts the social distribution of songbooks, the gradual moralization of song, and the ways children learned their letters and notes. Its fresh conclusions revise several common assumptions about the value early moderns attributed to printed music, the levels of literacy required to perform polyphony, and the way musicians did or did not "read" their songbooks. With musical perspectives that can invigorate studies of print culture and the history of reading, Materialities is an essential guide for musicologists working with original sources and historians of the book interested in the vocal performances that operated alongside print.

Visual representations are an essential but highly contested means of understanding and remembering the Holocaust. Photographs taken in the camps in early 1945 provided proof of and visceral access to the atrocities. Later visual representations such as films, paintings, and art installations attempted to represent this extreme trauma. While photographs from the camps and later aesthetic reconstructions differ in origin, they share goals and have raised similar concerns: the former are questioned not as to veracity but due to their potential inadequacy in portraying the magnitude of events; the latter are criticized on the grounds that the mediation they entail is unacceptable. Some have even questioned any attempt to represent the Holocaust as inappropriate and dangerous to historical understanding. This book explores the taboos that structure the production and reception of Holocaust images and the possibilities that result from the transgression of those taboos. Essays consider the uses of various visual media, aesthetic styles, and genres in representations of the Holocaust; the uses of perpetrator photography; the role of trauma in memory; aesthetic problems of mimesis and memory in the work of Lanzmann, Celan, and others; and questions about mass-cultural representations of the Holocaust. David Bathrick is Emeritus Professor of German at Cornell University, Brad Prager is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri, and Michael D. Richardson is Associate Professor of German at Ithaca College.

The Second World War affected the lives and shaped the experience of millions of individuals in Germany--soldiers at the front, women, children and the elderly sheltering in cellars, slave laborers toiling in factories, and concentration-camp prisoners and POWs clearing rubble in the Reich's devastated cities.
Taking a "history from below" approach, the volume examines how the minds and behaviour of individuals were moulded by the Party as the Reich took the road to Total War. The ever-increasing numbers of German workers conscripted into the Wehrmacht were replaced with forced foreign workers and slave labourers and concentration camp prisoners. The interaction in everyday life between German civilian society and these coerced groups is explored, as is that society's relationship to the Holocaust.
From early 1943, the war on the home front was increasingly dominated by attack from the air. The role of the Party, administration, police, and courts in providing for the vast numbers of those rendered homeless, in bolstering civilian morale with "miracle revenge weapons" propaganda, and in maintaining order in a society in disintegration is reviewed in detail.
For society in uniform, the war in the east was one of ideology and annihilation, with intensified indoctrination of the troops after Stalingrad. The social profile of this army is analysed through study of a typical infantry division. The volume concludes with an account of the various forms of resistance to Hitler's regime, in society and the military, culminating in the failed attempt on his life in July 1944.

For most of the postwar period, the destruction of European Jewry was not a salient part of American Jewish life, and was generally seen as irrelevant to non-Jewish Americans. Survivors and their families tended to keep to themselves, forming their own organizations, or they did their best to block out the past. Today, in contrast, the Holocaust is the subject of documentaries and Hollywood films, and is widely recognized as a universal moral touchstone. Reluctant Witnesses mixes memoir, history, and social analysis to tell the story of the rise of Holocaust consciousness in the United States from the perspective of survivors and their descendants. The public reckoning with the Holocaust, the book argues, was due to more than the passage of time. It took the coming of age of the "second generation" - who reached adulthood during the rise of feminism, the ethnic revival, and therapeutic culture - for survivors' families to reclaim their hidden histories. Inspired by the changed status of the victim in American society, the second generation coaxed their parents to share their losses with them, transforming private pains into public stories. Reluctant Witnesses documents how a group of people who had previously been unrecognized and misunderstood managed to find its voice. It tells this story in relation to the changing status of trauma and victimhood in American culture more generally. At a time when a sense of Holocaust fatigue seems to be setting in, and when the remaining survivors are at the end of their lives, it offers a reminder that the ability to speak openly about traumatic experiences had to be struggled for. By confronting traumatic memories and catastrophic histories, the book argues, we can make our world mean something beyond ourselves.

The End of an Elite is the first scholarly study in English of the bishops of the French church at the outbreak of the French Revolution. The 130 members of the episcopate formed an elite within an elite, the First Estate of France. Nigel Aston explores the role of the episcopate in national and provincial politics in the last years of the ancien regime. He traces the policies and patronage of episcopal ministers such as Lomienie de Brienne and J.-M. Champion de Cice, who were as much politicians as pastors, and examines their relationships with their fellow bishops. Dr Aston emphasizes the leading role of the bishops in the Assemblies of Notables and offers a fresh interpretation of clerical elections to the Estates-General of 1789. This is an intensively researched and immensely readable account, which will be invaluable to all historians of late eighteenth-century France.