1871-1918

In 1900 Germany was the most progressive and dynamic nation in Europe, the only country whose rapid technological, social growth, and change challenged that of the United States. Its political culture was less authoritarian than Russia's and less anti-Semitic than France's. How did Germany fall into the hands of a violent, racist, extremist political movement that would lead it, and all of Europe, into utter moral, physical, and cultural, ruin? Evans' history restores drama and contingency to the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis, even as he shows how ready Germany was by the early 1930s for such a takeover to occur.

Discusses Britain and Germany and the era preceding World War II.

Discusses the principal causes and events of World War I and considers what the outcome might have been for the participants and subsequent history had different decisions been made at crucial times before, during, and after the war.

On an ocean liner headed to Europe in 1906, Samantha and Nellie set out to find an archaeologist's legendary sapphire that has gone missing, investigating every first-class passenger. Includes an informational section on ocean liner travel in this period and a glossary of French words used in the story.

Annika, a twelve-year-old foundling in late nineteenth-century Vienna, inherits a trunk of costume jewelry, and soon afterwards a woman claiming to be her aristocratic mother arrives and takes her to live in a strangely decrepit mansion in Germany.