20th Century

April 7, 1944 - This date marks the successful escape of two Slovak prisoners from one of the most heavily-guarded and notorious concentration camps of Nazi Germany. The escapees fled over 100 miles to be the first to give graphic and detailed descriptions of the atrocities of Auschwitz....

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....

A brilliant exploration of freedom—what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival—by the acclaimed Yale historian and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller On Tyranny.

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

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....

A thrilling tick-tock recounting one of the most harrowing hostage situations and daring rescue attempts of our time—from true-life espionage master and New York Times bestselling author of Operation Mincemeat and The Spy and the Traitor Ben Macintyre.

Antony Beevor has reconstructed the experiences of those millions caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich's final collapse. The Fall of Berlin is a terrible story of pride, stupidity....

Beevor's grand and provocative account is destined to become the definitive work on this complex, tragic, and endlessly fascinating period in world history....

When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, they sent virtually the entire Jewish population to Auschwitz....

Powered flight. Votes for women. Human sexuality. Mass migration. The psychology of dreams. The magic of the movies. Spies and detectives. Welcome to Stephen Fry’s Edwardian Secrets....

It was to be the war to end all wars, and it began at 11:15 on the morning of June 28, 1914, in an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire called Sarajevo. It would officially end nearly five years later. Unofficially, however, it has never ended...

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

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....

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

In 1945, after his capture at the end of the Second World War, Hermann Göring arrived at an American-run detention center in war-torn Luxembourg, accompanied by 16 suitcases and a red hatbox....

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....

On December 16, 1944, Hitler launched his "last gamble" in the snow-covered forests and gorges of the Ardennes in Belgium....

Eleven months after he was liberated from the Nazi concentration camps, Viktor E. Frankl held a series of public lectures in Vienna. The psychiatrist, who would soon become world famous, explained his central thoughts on meaning, resilience, and the importance of embracing life....

In this magisterial and acclaimed history, Anne Applebaum offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag....

All Against All is the story of the season our world changed from postwar to prewar again. It is about the power of bad ideas - exploring why, during a single winter, between November 1932 and April 1933, so much went so wrong....