Ernest Gellner — a Jew who escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1939 after Hitler invaded — knew first-hand the catastrophic effects of excessive nationalism, and he was determined to understand the phenomenon that had shaped so much of 20th century history.
Eric Foner’s 1988 account of the decade following the American Civil War shows that black people were integral in ending slavery and were often key drivers of what successes there were in the `Reconstruction’ period.
Postmodernist thinkers consider history to be not very far removed from a work of fiction, something dependent on historians’... Læs mere
Dikötter’s 2010 masterpiece catalogues the tragedy and the cover-up of the hideous famine caused by the Great Leap Forward—Mao Zedong’s disastrous attempt to jumpstart industrialization in China in the late 1950s.
The bizarre story of Martin Guerre–a peasant who disappears from a small village in sixteenth-century France and whose place is taken by an imposter–has captivated historians for centuries
Slavery had been accepted in Western culture for centuries. So why did a movement suddenly rise up in the... Læs mere
Crosby’s landmark 1972 work argues that environmental factors shape our history just as much as—and sometimes more than—human factors.
Before the publication of Nature’s Metropolis in 1991, historians generally treated urban and rural areas as distinct from one another, each following separate lines of development and maturity.
A critical analysis of Centuries of Childhood, an important example of the critical thinking skill of interpretation in which the French historian Philippe Aries offers a fundamentally fresh interpretation of what childhood is and what the institution means for society at large.
In the century before the Black Death swept across the world, economic relations flourished between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, interacting on essentially equal terms.
Sen’s 1997 work argues that the success or failure of international development cannot be measured by income alone.
The Selfish Gene is that rarest of things: an outstanding work of scholarship that has seeped into popular culture.