20th Century

The history of modern China has long been portrayed as a tale of Communists fighting in the hills for freedom, gradually gaining popular support by taking land from the rich and giving it to the poor. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Red Dawn Over China reveals how unlikely the Party's victory actually was, had it not been for financial and military support from the Soviet Union.

A LitHub and Parade Most Anticipated Book of the Year For fans of Ben Macintyre and Erik Larson, the gripping story of the assassination of Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky and the deadly game of cat and mouse that preceded it On August 20, 1940, Leon Trotsky invited a man he knew only as...

Case Red tells the often overlooked story of the fall of Metropolitan France from the evacuation of the BEF at Dunkirk through to the eventual collapse and armistice in June 1940. Even after the legendary evacuation from Dunkirk in June 1940 there were still large British formations fighting the Germans alongside their French allies. After mounting a vigorous counterattack at Abbeville and then conducting a tough defence along the Somme, the British were forced to conduct a second evacuation from the ports of Le Havre, Cherbourg, Brest and St Nazaire.

In the fall of 1943, during some of the Pacific theater's bloodiest battles, the United States and Japan pulled off a diplomatic coup—the exchange of civilians caught on the wrong side of the battlefield after Pearl Harbor. Nearly fifteen hundred Allied civilians trapped in Asia, mostly...

By the close of World War II, six million Jews had been erased from the face of the earth. Those who eluded death had lost their homes, families, and entire way of life. Their response was quintessentially Jewish. From a people with a long-history of self-narration, survivors gathered in groups and wrote books, yizkor books, remembering all that had been destroyed. Jane Ziegelman’s Once There Was a Town takes listeners on a journey through this largely uncharted body of writing and the vanished world it depicts.

Vladka Meed, born Feigele Peltel, was just a teenager when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. Increasingly devastated by the deportation and murder of 300,000 Jews—including her mother, brother, and sister—who were sent from Warsaw to the death camp of Treblinka, she heeded the call for armed resistance, joining the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), established in Warsaw in July 1942.

Drawing together a remarkably wide-range of original sources, including interviews with relatives of the 1920s gangsters, Peaky Blinders: The Real Story adds a new dimension to the true history of Birmingham's underworld and fact behind its fiction.

In the high-stakes world of early 20th-century finance, two ambitious men thought they could outsmart the market—and almost brought down the entire U.S. economy in the process. Two Idiots, One Crash is the gripping, darkly funny, and surprisingly timely true story of Augustus Heinze and Charles Morse—two overconfident schemers who leveraged banks, backdoor deals, and bravado in a financial system built more on personality than policy. In 1907, their reckless gambles triggered a full-scale panic that toppled banks, destroyed fortunes, and sent Wall Street into chaos. With the U.S.

Germany one felt the world’s wrath for crimes committed during the Nazi regime. More recently, it received extravagant praise for facing up to the atrocities. The country now boasts of new Jewish museums, Holocaust memorials, restored synagogues, and classroom lessons designed to honor its Jewish heritage and teach tolerance. This effort was led not by politicians or historians, but by local citizen activists, few of them Jewish, almost all of them born after World War II. They could have shrugged off responsibility for evils done before they were born.

Sie sind literarische Legenden. Adrienne Monnier und Sylvia Beach haben mit ihren benachbarten Buchhandlungen über Jahrzehnte das literarische Paris geprägt. Doch 1940, mit der deutschen Besatzung, ändert sich auch für sie alles. Aus der literarischen Oase im Herzen der Stadt wird ein Zufluchtsort für deutsch-jüdische Exilanten und ein Ort des Widerstands. Uwe Neumahr erzählt in seinem bewegenden Buch die Geschichte dieses großen Paares und ihrer Freunde.