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.

Tyrant, psychopath, and implementer of a ruthless programme of racial extermination, Adolf Hitler was also the charismatic Fuhrer of millions of dedicated followers. In this major new biography, internationally acclaimed German historian Peter Longerich brings Hitler back to centre-stage in the history of Nazism, revealing a far more active and interventionist dictator than we are familiar with from recent accounts, with a flexibility of approach that often surprises. Whether it was foreign policy, war-making, terror, mass murder, cultural and religious affairs, or even mundane everyday matters, Longerich reveals how decisive a force Hitler was in the formulation of policy, sometimes right down to the smallest details, in a way which until now has not been fully appreciated. Consistently and ruthlessly destroying both the people and the power structures that stood in his way, Longerich shows how over time Hitler succeeded in forging his 'Fuhrer dictatorship' - with terrifying and almost limitless power over the German people.

The imagery of Hell, the Christian account of the permanent destinations of the human soul after death, has fascinated people over the centuries since the emergence of the Christian faith. These landmark volumes provide the first large-scale investigation of this imagery found across the Byzantine and post-Byzantine world. Particular emphasis is placed on images from churches across Venetian Crete, which are comprehensively collected and published for the first time. Crete was at the centre of artistic production in the late Byzantine world and beyond and its imagery was highly influential on traditions in other regions. The Cretan examples accompany rich comparative material from the wider Mediterranean - Cappadocia, Macedonia, the Peloponnese and Cyprus. The large amount of data presented in this publication highlight Hell's emergence in monumental painting not as a concrete array of images, but as a diversified mirroring of social perceptions of sin.

In the lead-up to the Bolshevik Revolution, one young revolutionary is condemned to exile in Siberia; a hundred years later, his ancestors discover his story and learn just how much history has repeated itself. In the midst of running a long-shot political campaign, Democratic political consultant John Simon discovers a 100-year-old manuscript written by his grandfather Joseph--a brilliant young revolutionary whose exile to Siberia by the last czar of Russia is just the beginning of an extraordinary tale of survival, romance, and revolution. Return From Siberia chronicles not only the Simon family's relationship to each other and the past, but also the remarkable story of a young man who sacrificed everything for his political ideals. As Joseph's manuscript is translated, chapter-by-chapter, the Simon family is pulled deep into their ancestor's story-- in particular, the bitter rivalry between two brothers, whose competing visions of the American Dream are played out on the campaign trail and in their lives. Return from Siberia is a timely appraisal of modern politics and society juxtaposed with an inside look into the machinations of a young political mind 100 years ago. The true story documents an extraordinary time of political upheaval in Russia and Europe just prior to World War I while also drawing parallels to current day American politics and the current philosophical and ideological debates about immigration, Democratic Socialism, and Capitalism. Beyond the deep social, political, and philosophical themes, there is romance, adventure, betrayal, suspense, and the struggles of families today and in yesteryear. Return from Siberia illustrates how one modern family's connection to the past helps them resolve their future.

Dark Eyes, Lady Blue tells the story of Sister Maria of Agreda's remarkable life. Maria was born in Agreda, Spain, in 1602, and vowed there as a nun at age seventeen. From birth to her death in 1665, she never left the small town. Yet her accomplishments had a lasting impact in Spain and as far away as the American Southwest, where she is celebrated to this day. Although cloistered in Agreda's Monastery of the Immaculate Conception, Maria grew to be a renowned mystic, a widely read author, and an advisor to the King of Spain. She experienced religious ecstasy that inspired her visionary writings and - quite remarkably - communications with the Jumano Indians of what would later become the states of Texas and New Mexico. When Spanish missionaries met the Jumano Indians, their chief expressed a desire to be baptized because of the supernatural visits from the mystical ""lady in blue."" This fresh telling of Maria's story is one that will appeal to readers young and old and provides an unforgettable perspective on early American exploration of Texas and New Mexico.

The revival of the Olympic games in 1896 and the subsequent rise of modern athletics prompted a new, energetic movement away from more sedentary habits. In Russia, this ethos soon became a key facet of the Bolsheviks' shared vision for the future. In the aftermath of the revolution, glorification of exercise persevered, pointing the way toward a stronger, healthier populace and a vibrant Socialist society. With interdisciplinary analysis of literature, painting, and film, Faster, Higher, Stronger, Comrades! traces how physical fitness had an even broader impact on culture and ideology in the Soviet Union than previously realized. From prerevolutionary writers and painters glorifying popular circus wrestlers to Soviet photographers capturing unprecedented athleticism as a means of satisfying their aesthetic ideals, the nation's artists embraced sports in profound, inventive ways. Though athletics were used for doctrinaire purposes, Tim Harte demonstrates that at their core, they remained playful, joyous physical activities capable of stirring imaginations and transforming everyday realities.

Forgotten is an extraordinary blend of military and social history - a story that pays tribute to the valour of an all-black battalion whose crucial contributions at D-Day have gone unrecognised to this day. In the early hours of June 6, 1944, the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, a unit of African-American soldiers, landed on the beaches of France. Their orders were to man a curtain of armed balloons meant to deter enemy aircraft. One member of the 320th would be nominated for the Medal of Honor, an award he would never receive. The nation's highest decoration was not given to black soldiers in the Second World War. Drawing on newly uncovered military records and dozens of original interviews with surviving members of the 320th and their families, Linda Hervieux tells the story of these heroic men. In England and Europe, they discovered freedom they had not known in a homeland that treated them as second-class citizens - experiences they carried back to America, fuelling the budding civil rights movement. In telling the story of the Battalion, Hervieux offers a vivid account of the tension between racial politics and national service in wartime America, and a moving narrative of human bravery and perseverance in the face of injustice.

D-Day Decoded

This Pitkin Guide explores the reality, and unpacks the myths, of `Tommy', the British soldier on the Western Front in the First World War. It looks at every aspect of his personal experience - uniform, kit, trench cuisine, health and hygiene, pay, training and weaponry. It conveys the horrors of the early days of industrial warfare, from machine guns and artillery barrages to close-quarters combat within the enemy trenches and bunkers, and much much more. As well as the most visible aspects of the Tommy's experience, it also delves into more hidden worlds, and answers key questions. What did the Tommy do on his rest periods behind the frontlines? What caused him to suffer from shell shock, and how was he treated? How was he punished for disciplinary offences? These questions and many more are answered through a factual narrative.

Days after the assassination of his prime minister in the middle of Rome in November 1848, Pope Pius IX found himself a virtual prisoner in his own palace. The wave of revolution that had swept through Europe now seemed poised to put an end to the popes' thousand-year reign over the Papal States, if not indeed to the papacy itself. Disguising himself as a simple parish priest, Pius escaped through a back door. Climbing inside the Bavarian ambassador's carriage, he embarked on a journey into a fateful exile. Only two years earlier Pius's election had triggered a wave of optimism across Italy. After the repressive reign of the dour Pope Gregory XVI, Italians saw the youthful, benevolent new pope as the man who would at last bring the Papal States into modern times and help create a new, unified Italian nation. But Pius found himself caught between a desire to please his subjects and a fear-stoked by the cardinals-that heeding the people's pleas would destroy the church. The resulting drama-with a colorful cast of characters, from Louis Napoleon and his rabble-rousing cousin Charles Bonaparte to Garibaldi, Tocqueville, and Metternich-was rife with treachery, tragedy, and international power politics. David Kertzer is one of the world's foremost experts on the history of Italy and the Vatican, and has a rare ability to bring history vividly to life. With a combination of gripping, cinematic storytelling, and keen historical analysis rooted in an unprecedented richness of archival sources, The Pope Who Would Be King sheds fascinating new light on the end of rule by divine right in the west and the emergence of modern Europe.

The arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of the Yukos oil company, in October 2003, was a key turning point in modern Russian history. From being one of the world's richest and most powerful men, Khodorkovsky became Putin's prisoner. After two controversial trials, attracting widespread international condemnation (revealing accounts of which feature in the book) Khodorkovsky was sentenced to fourteen years in jail. In this book, Richard Sakwa examines the rise and fall of Yukos and considers the relationship between Putin's state and big business during Russia's traumatic shift from the Soviet planned economy to capitalism, as well as Russia's emergence as an energy superpower. The attack on Khodorkovsky had - and continues to have - far-reaching political and economic consequences but it also raises fundamental questions about the quality of freedom in Putin's Russia as well as in the world at large. In addition the author delves into the writings of Mr. Khodorkovsky in prison which show him to be a thoughtful critic of Russian reality.

Corporal Eric Gunton of the Royal Engineers, landed on Gold Beach on 8 June 1944, carrying his camera into the aftermath of battle. His photographs, though lost until 2005, are an evocation of life in Normandy in the months after D-Day, seen through the eyes of an Englishman who married a Frenchwoman and lived the rest of his years in France.

A poignant description of one of Europe's most well known war cemeteries. Based on interviews and personal experiences, this work includes images, including photographs by Corporal Eric Gunton of Number 32 Graves Registration Unit, who photographed the cemetery as it took shape. Look out for more Pitkin Guides on the very best of British and French history, heritage and travel.

The Second World War almost destroyed Stalin's Soviet Union. But victory over Nazi Germany provided the dictator with his great opportunity: to expand Soviet power way beyond the borders of the Soviet state. Well before the shooting stopped in 1945, the Soviet leader methodically set about the unprecedented task of creating a Red Empire that would soon stretch into the heart of Europe and Asia, displaying a supreme realism and ruthlessness that Machiavelli would surely have envied. By the time of his death in 1953, his new imperium was firmly in place, defining the contours of a Cold War world that was seemingly permanent and indestructible - and would last until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But what were Stalin's motives in this spectacular power grab? Was he no more than a latter-day Russian tsar, for whom Communist ideology was little more than a smoke-screen? Or was he simply a psychopathic killer? In Stalin's Curse, best-selling historian Robert Gellately firmly rejects both these simplifications of the man and his motives. Using a wealth of previously unavailable documentation, Gellately shows instead how Stalin's crimes are more accurately understood as the deeds of a ruthless and life-long Leninist revolutionary. Far from being a latter day 'Red Tsar' intent simply upon imperial expansion for its own sake, Stalin was in fact deeply inspired by the rhetoric of the Russian revolution and what Lenin had accomplished during the Great War. As Gellately convincingly shows, Stalin remained throughout these years steadfastly committed to a 'boundless faith' in Communism - and saw the Second World War as his chance to take up once again the old revolutionary mission to carry the Red Flag to the world.

In 1517, a certain Dr Beale, rector of St Mary Spitall in London, had roused the capital's mob by laying the blame for an increase in poverty squarely upon the shoulders of grasping foreigners. 'God has given England to Englishmen,' he fumed, and 'as birds would defend their nest, so ought Englishmen to cherish and defend themselves and to hurt and grieve aliens for the common weal.' But migration was not the only factor influencing Tudor attitudes to Europe. War, religion, commerce and dynastic security were all critical in linking England to developments abroad, and in ways that remain strikingly relevant today. What were the forces that shaped the shifting perspectives of Tudor men and women and their rulers towards a continent at the crossroads? And what, in turn, were the responses of sixteenth-century Europeans to their counterparts across the Channel? At a time when the very survival of England hung critically in the balance, were there, asks The Tudors and Europe, lessons for the present?

'Louis Napoleon's story is certainly remarkable. Alan Strauss-Schom tells it with brio in The Shadow Emperor... This is a boldly revisionist biography... For all the corruption and repression that marked his reign, Louis Napoleon may have done more for France than his famous uncle.' (Alan Massie, Wall Street Journal) This is the definitive biography, and the first in twenty years, of Louis-Napoleon III, whose controversial achievements have notoriously divided historians. Here, pre-eminent Napoleon Bonaparte expert and Pulitzer Prize-nominated historian Alan Strauss-Schom focuses on his successor Louis-Napoleon, overshadowed for too long by his more romanticized forebear. Strauss-Schom employs years of primary source research to explore the massive cultural, social, economical, financial, international, and military impact of France's most polarizing emperor. Louis-Napoleon completely revolutionized the state and the economy, but amid gross financial scandals. His expansion of the French Empire was praised by the French military and resisted by the socialists. He expanded the railways to rival England's; created new transoceanic steamship lines and a modern navy; introduced a new banking sector supported by seemingly unlimited venture capital; and even oversaw the creation of the first large department stores. Napoleon III wanted to surpass the legacy of his famous uncle, Napoleon I. In The Shadow Emperor, Alan StraussSchom sets out his true legacy.

1st July 1916 saw a campaign that devastated the lives of thousands of young men serving under the British Empire. It was a day chosen to begin what had been called `The Big Push', a desperate attempt to overwhelm the German Front Line and bring an end to a two year long stalemate on the Western Front. The Battle of the Somme has become tightly woven into the memory of the British nation and stands as a testimony to the conflict which took so many lives. This authoritative guide gives a factual account of the events leading up to the Somme battle, the battle itself, the politics of the day as well as the experiences of the young men who answered the call to join Kitchener's Army. With dramatic photographs, maps and diagrams this guide is an informative and sensitive account of the conflict.

From bestselling and prize-winning author Paddy Ashdown, a revelatory new history of German opposition to Hitler. `Ashdown has a great gift for narrative history. He unearths little known stories and places them in context with great dexterity. His new book throws fresh and important light on a crucial topic.' JONATHAN DIMBLEBY In his last days, Adolf Hitler raged in his bunker that he had been betrayed by his own people, defeated from the inside. In part, he was right. By 1945, his armies were being crushed on all fronts, his regime collapsing with many fleeing retribution for their crimes. Yet, even before the war started, there were Germans very high in Hitler's command committed to bringing about his death and defeat. Paddy Ashdown tells, for the first time, the story of those at the very top of Hitler's Germany who tried first to prevent the Second World War and then to deny Hitler victory. Based on newly released files, the repeated attempts of the plotters to warn the Allies about Hitler's plans are revealed. What is revealed is that the anti-Hitler bomb plots, which have received so much attention are, in fact only a small part of a much wider story; one in which those at the highest levels of the German state used every means possible - conspiracy, assassination, espionage - to ensure that, for the sake of the long-term reputation of their country and the survival of liberal and democratic values, Hitler could not be allowed to win the war. It is a matter of record that the European Union we have today and the nature and central position of Germany within it, is, in very large measure, the future envisaged by the plotters and for which they gave their lives.

"I have decided to prepare for, and if necessary to carry out, an invasion against England."--Adolph Hitler, July 16, 1940
Operation Sealion was the codename for the Nazi invasion of Britain that Hitler ordered his generals to plan after France fell in June 1940. Although the plan ultimately never came to fruition, a few sets of the Germans' detailed strategy documents are housed in the rare book rooms of libraries across Europe. But now the Bodleian Library has made documents from their set available for all to peruse in this unprecedented collection of the invasion planning materials.
The planned operation would have involved landing 160,000 German soldiers along a forty-mile stretch of coast in southeast England. Packets of reconnaissance materials were put together for the invading forces, and the most intriguing parts are now reproduced here. Each soldier was to be given maps and geographical descriptions of the British Isles that broke down the country by regions, aerial photographs pinpointing strategic targets, an extensive listing of British roads and rivers, strategic plans for launching attacks on each region, an English dictionary and phrase book, and even a brief description of Britain's social composition.
Augmenting the fascinating documents is an informative introduction that sets the materials in their historical and political context. A must-have for every military history buff, "German Invasion Plans for the British Isles, 1940" is a remarkable revelation of the inner workings of Hitler's most famous unrealized military campaign.

From the author of Wittgenstein's Poker and Would You Kill the Fat Man?, the story of an extraordinary group of philosophers during a dark chapter in Europe's history On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelboeck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelboeck himself argued in court that his onetime teacher had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle-an influential group of brilliant thinkers led by Schlick-and of a philosophical movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city darkened by fascism, anti-Semitism, and unreason. The Vienna Circle's members included Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and the eccentric logician Kurt Goedel. On its fringes were two other philosophical titans of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. The Circle championed the philosophy of logical empiricism, which held that only two types of propositions have cognitive meaning, those that can be verified through experience and those that are analytically true. For a time, it was the most fashionable movement in philosophy. Yet by the outbreak of World War II, Schlick's group had disbanded and almost all its members had fled. Edmonds reveals why the Austro-fascists and the Nazis saw their philosophy as such a threat. The Murder of Professor Schlick paints an unforgettable portrait of the Vienna Circle and its members while weaving an enthralling narrative set against the backdrop of economic catastrophe and rising extremism in Hitler's Europe.

* Written by experienced examiners and teachers and tailored to the new Edexcel specification. * An active, engaging approach that brings History alive in the classroom! * Exam tips, activities and sources in every chapter give students the confidence to tackle typical exam questions. * Carefully written material ensures the right level of support at AS or A2. * Our unique Exam Zone sections provide students with a motivating way to prepare for their exams. View the sample chapter below (N.B is 4MB so may take a moment to download).

In 1944 the British War Office distributed a handbook to British soldiers informing them what to expect and how to behave in a newly-liberated France. Containing candid descriptions of this war-ravaged society (widespread malnourishment, rampant tuberculosis) as well as useful phrases and a pronunciation guide (Bonjewer, commont-allay-voo), it was an indispensable guide to everyday life. This small, unassuming publication had a deeper purpose: to bring together two allies who did not enjoy ideal relations in 1944. The book attempts to reconcile differences by stressing a shared history and the common aim - defeating Hitler. It also tried to dispel misapprehensions: 'There is a fairly widespread belief among people in Britain that the French are a particularly gay, frivolous people with no morals and few convictions.' Often unintentionally hilarious in its expression of these false impressions, the book is also a guide for avoiding social embarrassment: 'If you should happen to imagine that the first pretty French girl who smiles at you intends to dance the can-can or take you to bed, you will risk stirring up a lot of trouble for yourself - and for our relations with the French.' Many of its observations still ring true today. For example, 'The French are more polite than most of us. Remember to call them "Monsieur, Madame, Mademoiselle," not just "Oy!"' Others remind us of how we recently we have adopted French customs: 'Don't drink yourself silly. If you get the chance to drink wine, learn to "'take it".' Anyone with an interest in Britain, France or World War II will find this an irresistible insight into British attitudes towards the French and an interesting, timeless commentary on Anglo-French relations.