A New History

Evan Mawdsley

This is a magisterial new global history of World War II. Beginning in 1937 with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, Evan Mawdsley shows how the origins of World War II lay in a conflict between the old international order and the new and then traces the globalisation of the conflict as it swept through Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

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Waging World War II in North Africa, 1941–1943

Martin Kitchen

At the height of his power in January 1941 Hitler made the fateful decision to send troops to North Africa to save the beleaguered Italian army from defeat. Martin Kitchen's masterful new history of the Axis campaign provides a fundamental reassessment of the key battles of 1941–1943, Rommel's generalship, and the campaign's place within the broader strategic context of the war. He shows that the British were initially helpless against the operational brilliance of Rommel's Panzer divisions.

Hans Safrian

More than sixty years after the advent of the National Socialist genocides, the question still remains: how could a state-sponsored terror that took the lives of millions of men, women, and children, persecuted as Jews or Gypsies, happen? Now available in English, Hans Safrian's path-breaking work on Adolf Eichmann and his Nazi helpers chronicles the escalation of Nazi anti-Semitic policies beginning in 1933 and during World War II to the "final solution."

Edited by Frank Tallett, D. J. B. Trim

The period 1350-1750 saw major developments in European warfare, which not only had a huge impact on the way wars were fought, but also are critical to long-standing controversies about state development, the global ascendancy of the West, and the nature of ‘military revolutions’ past and present.

Edited by Melvyn P. Leffler, Odd Arne Westad

This volume examines the origins, causes and early years of the Cold War. Leading scholars show how the conflict evolved from the geopolitical, ideological, economic, and socio-political environment of the two world wars and the interwar period as well as examining how markets, ideas, and cultural interactions affected political discourse, diplomatic events, and strategic thinking.

Edited by Melvyn P. Leffler, Odd Arne Westad

Volume Two of The Cambridge History of the Cold War examines the developments that made the Cold War into a long-lasting international system during the 1960s and 1970s. Leading scholars explain how the Cold War seemed to stabilize after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and how this sense of increased stability developed into the detente era of the early 1970s.

Edited by Melvyn P. Leffler, Odd Arne Westad

This volume examines the evolution of the Cold War from the Helsinki Conference of 1975 until the Soviet collapse in 1991. Leading scholars analyze the economic, social, cultural, religious, technological, and geopolitical factors that shaped the policies that ended the Cold War, looking at the personalities and policies of Carter and Reagan, Brezhnev and Gorbachev, Thatcher, Kohl, and Deng Xiaoping.

Europe and America at the Crossroads

Fraser J. Harbutt

This revisionist study of Allied diplomacy from 1941 to 1946 challenges Americocentric views of the period and highlights Europe’s neglected role. Fraser J. Harbutt, drawing on international sources, shows that in planning for the future Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and others self-consciously operated into 1945, not on "East/West" lines but within a "Europe/America" political framework characterized by the plausible prospect of Anglo-Russian collaboration and persisting American detachment.

Edited by Richard F. Hamilton, Holger H. Herwig

The major European powers drafted war plans before 1914 and executed them in August 1914; none brought the expected victory by Christmas. Why? This tightly focused collection of essays by international experts in military history reassesses the war plans of 1914 in a broad diplomatic, military, and political setting for the first time in three decades.

Jonathan E. Gumz

This book examines the Habsburg Army’s occupation of Serbia from 1914 through 1918. This occupation ran along a distinctly European-centered trajectory radically different from other great power colonial projects or occupations during the 20th century.

A History of Violence on the Eastern Front

Anna Krylova

Soviet Women in Combat explores the unprecedented historical phenomenon of Soviet young women’s en masse volunteering for World War II combat in 1941 and writes it into the twentieth-century history of women, war, and violence.

David Stahel

Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began the largest and most costly campaign in military history. Its failure was a key turning point of the Second World War. The operation was planned as a Blitzkrieg to win Germany its Lebensraum in the east, and the summer of 1941 is well-known for the German army's unprecedented victories and advances.

Soldiers of the Western Front and the German Revolution of 1918

Scott Stephenson

In many ways the German soldiers who marched back from the Western Front at the end of World War I held the key to the future of the newly-created republic that replaced the Kaiser’s collapsed monarchy. To the radical Left, the orderly columns of front line troops appeared to be the forces of the counterrevolution while to the conservative elements of society they seemed to be the Fatherland’s salvation.

J. P. Harris

From December 1915 until the armistice of November 1918, Sir Douglas Haig was commander-in-chief of the largest army his country had ever put into the field. He has been portrayed as both an incompetent 'butcher and bungler' and a clear-sighted, imperturbable 'architect of victory'.

The Allies and Belgian Society, 1944–1945

Peter Schrijvers

In the autumn of 1944, Belgium was liberated at lightning speed. Yet Allied troops continued to dominate much of Belgian society until late 1945. Peter Schrijvers’ revisionist account reveals that during that time, strong currents of discontent began to build beneath the waves of gratitude and admiration.

The Nation-in-Arms in French Republican Memory

Alan Forrest

A major contribution to the study of collective identity and memory in France, this book examines a French republican myth: the belief that the nation can be adequately defended only by its own citizens, in the manner of the French revolutionaries of 1793.