history / modern / 20th century

"Author Jerry Borrowman recounts seven lesser-known stories of World War II spies, resisters, and others who fought for freedom against the Nazi threat"--Provided by publisher.

"...a narrative exploring two harrowing attempts to rescue East Germans by tunneling beneath the Berlin Wall, the U.S. television networks who financed and filmed them, and the Kennedy administration's unprecedented attempt to suppress both films."--Provided by publisher.

"... a dual biography of Winston Churchill and George Orwell, with a focus on the pivotal years from the mid-1930s through the 1940s, when their farsighted vision and inspired action in the face of the threat of fascism and communism helped preserve democracy for the world."--Provided by publisher.

The Berlin Wall went up in 1961. A year later a group of young West Germans risked prison, Stasi torture, and even death to liberate friends, lovers, and even strangers in East Berlin by digging tunnels under the Wall. When American channels NBC and CBS heard about it, they funded two separate tunnels in return for the right to film the escapes, planning spectacular prime-time documentary specials. President John F. Kennedy was not in favor of the plan because he was worried that the Soviets might take offense. As he said, "a wall is better than a war." In an era of escalating nuclear tensions, he approved unprecedented maneuvers to halt both documentaries, testing the limits of a free press.

"What does it mean to live for your ideals...and to risk dying for them? This book tells the story of young American radicals who sensed a moment of unprecedented promise for American life--politically, socially, culturally--and struggled to bring it about, only to see a cataclysmic war sweep it away. Based on six years of extensive archival research, Jeremy McCarter's ... narrative brings to life the adventures of Randolph Bourne, a cerebral hunchbacked writer, Max Eastman, an activist editor, Walter Lippmann, a slippery political operative, Alice Paul, a trailblazing suffragette, and John Reed, a Communist journalist. It evokes the America they fought to create in the early 20th century, one that young radicals are still fighting to create in the 21st, through movements such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter"--.

"A pathbreaking account of the continuing ethnic and state violence after the end of WWI--conflicts that more than anything else set the stage for WWII"--Provided by publisher.

"In An Extraordinary Time, acclaimed economic historian Marc Levinson recounts the global collapse of the postwar economy in the 1970s. While economists struggle to return us to the high economic growth rates of the past, Levinson counterintuitively argues that the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s were an anomaly; slow economic growth is the norm-no matter what economists and politicians may say. Yet these atypical years left the public with unreasonable expectations of what government can achieve. When the economy failed to revive, suspicion of government and liberal institutions rose sharply, laying the groundwork for the political and economic polarization that we're still grappling with today. A sweeping reappraisal of the last sixty years of world history, An Extraordinary Time describes how the postwar economic boom dissipated, undermining faith in government, destabilizing the global financial system, and forcing us to come to terms with how tumultuous our economy really is"--.

"Unlike World War I, when the horrors of battle were largely confined to the front, World War II reached into the lives of ordinary people in an unprecedented way. Entire countries were occupied, millions were mobilized for the war effort, and in the end, the vast majority of the war's dead were non-combatant men, women, and children. Inhabitants of German-occupied Europe--the war's deadliest killing ground--experienced forced labor, deportation, mass executions, and genocide. As direct targets of and witnesses to violence, rather than far-off bystanders, civilians were forced to face the war head on. Drawing on a wealth of diaries, letters, fiction, and other first-person accounts, award-winning historian Peter Fritzsche redefines our understanding of the civilian experience of war across the vast territory occupied and threatened by Nazi Germany. Amid accumulating horrors, ordinary people across Europe grappled with questions of faith and meaning, often reaching troubling conclusions. World War II exceeded the human capacity for understanding, and those men and women who lived through it suspected that language could not adequately register the horrors they saw and experienced. But it nevertheless prompted an outpouring of writing, as people labored to comprehend and piece thoughts into philosophy. Their broken words are all we have to reconstruct how contemporaries saw the war around them, how they failed to see its terrible violence in full, and how they attempted to translate the destruction into narratives. Carefully reading these testimonies as no historian has done before, Fritzsche's groundbreaking work sheds new light on the most violent conflict in human history, when war made words inadequate, and the inadequacy of words heightened the devastation of war"--.

The extraordinary true story of the downfall of one of England's wealthiest families. The Fitzwilliam family founded a coal-mining dynasty and lived in the breathtaking Wentworth estate, the largest private home in England. When the sixth Earl Fitzwilliam died in 1902, he left behind the second largest estate in twentieth-century England, valued at billions of pounds. It was a lifeline to the tens of thousands of people who worked either in the family's coal mines or on their expansive estate. The earl also left behind four sons, and the family line seemed assured. But was it? As Bailey retraces the Fitzwilliam family history, she uncovers a legacy riddled with bitter feuds, scandals, (including Peter Fitzwilliam's ill-fated affair with American Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy, one of President John F. Kennedy's sisters), and civil unrest as the conflict between the coal industry and its miners came to a head.

"... historian Mary Elise Sarotte shows that the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, was not, as is commonly believed, the East German government's deliberate concession to outside influence ... Drawing on evidence from archives in multiple countries and languages, along with dozens of interviews with key actors, 'The Collapse' is [an] ... account of the event that brought down the East German Politburo and came to represent the final collapse of the Cold War order"--Provided by publisher.