A groundbreaking history of what drove the Germans to fight -- and keep fighting -- for a lost cause in World War II In The German War , acclaimed historian Nicholas Stargardt draws on an extraordinary range of firsthand testimony -- personal diaries, court records, and military correspondence -- to explore how the German people experienced the Second World War. When war broke out in September 1939, it was deeply unpopular in Germany. Yet without the active participation and commitment of the German people, it could not have continued for almost six years. What, then, was the war the Germans thought they were fighting? How did the changing course of the conflict -- the victories of the Blitzkrieg , the first defeats in the east, the bombing of German cities -- alter their views and expectations? And when did Germans first realize they were fighting a genocidal war? Told from the perspective of those who lived through it -- soldiers, schoolteachers, and housewives; Nazis, Christians, and Jews -- this masterful historical narrative sheds fresh and disturbing light on the beliefs and fears of a people who embarked on and fought to the end a brutal war of conquest and genocide.

An Amazon Best History Book of 2019 "A splendid and beautifully written illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives of ordinary people." —Ryan Cooper, Washington Monthly Over the last generation, the United States has undergone seismic changes. Stable institutions have given way to frictionless transactions, which are celebrated no matter what collateral damage they generate. The concentration of great wealth has coincided with the fraying of social ties and the rise of inequality. How did all this come about? In Transaction Man , Nicholas Lemann explains the United States’—and the world’s—great transformation by examining three remarkable individuals who epitomized and helped create their eras. Adolf Berle, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s chief theorist of the economy, imagined a society dominated by large corporations, which a newly powerful federal government had forced to become benign and stable institutions, contributing to the public good by offering stable employment and generous pensions. By the 1970s, the corporations’ large stockholders grew restive under this regime, and their chief theoretician, Harvard Business School’s Michael Jensen, insisted that firms should maximize shareholder value, whatever the consequences. Today, Silicon Valley titans such as the LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman hope “networks” can reknit our social fabric. Lemann interweaves these fresh and vivid profiles with a history of the Morgan Stanley investment bank from the 1930s through the financial crisis of 2008, while also tracking the rise and fall of a working-class Chicago neighborhood and the family-run car dealerships at its heart. Incisive and sweeping, Transaction Man is the definitive account of the reengineering of America and the enormous impact it has had on us all.

“Once you’ve become a part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren’s writing that “you should not read it if you cannot take a punch.” The prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make , filled with language that swings and jabs and stuns, lives up to those words. In this sixtieth anniversary edition, Algren presents 120 years of Chicago history through the lens of its “nobodies nobody knows”: the tramps, hustlers, aging bar fighters, freed death-row inmates, and anonymous working stiffs who prowl its streets. Upon its original publication in 1951, Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make was scorned by the Chicago Chamber of Commerce and local journalists for its gritty portrayal of the city and its people, one that boldly defied City Hall’s business and tourism initiatives. Yet the book captures the essential dilemma of Chicago: the dynamic tension between the city’s breathtaking beauty and its utter brutality, its boundless human energy and its stifling greed and violence. The sixtieth anniversary edition features historic Chicago photos and annotations on everything from defunct slang to Chicagoans, famous and obscure, to what the Black Sox scandal was and why it mattered. More accessible than ever, this is, as Studs Terkel says, “the best book about Chicago.”

"The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela" offers a fascinating glimpse into the 12th-century world through the eyes of a medieval traveler. Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish merchant, meticulously documented his extensive travels across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. This invaluable historical text provides a unique perspective on Jewish communities and their social life during the Middle Ages. Part travelogue, part historical record, the itinerary details customs, populations, and significant landmarks encountered along his journey. Readers interested in Jewish history, medieval Europe, or historical travel accounts will find this work to be an enduring source of information and insight into a world long past. Explore the routes and records of Benjamin of Tudela, a key figure in understanding 12th-century geography and culture. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

In the last sixty years, Israel has faced seven different wars. During that time, the country has been under immense scrutiny and been the recipient of false accusations. This leaves the public with many questions: Does Israel want peace with the Arab nations? How do Islamic views affect Israel? Using a number of sources, Mitchell G. Bard uncovers Israel's true history. His book includes the following: � A discussion of various wars involving Israel (including the war of 1948) � Multiple maps that help the reader visualize the wars � An analysis of terrorism directed at Israel � An alphabetical index � A discussion of the media's role in how it portrays Israel � A review of successful and unsuccessful peace efforts � An overview of US-Israel relations Bard also offers a synopsis of Israel's roots, beginning with the great myth: that the Jews have no claim to their own land. Bard focuses on Israel's relationships with neighboring countries, but he also includes suggested readings for those interested in further research. You'll learn about the Jewish Virtual Library, an online source that's constantly updated and offers reliable options for study. Dive into this versatile read as Bard investigates common myths about Israel and reveals the truth.

Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction Award The benefits of living in a digital, globalised society are enormous; so too are the dangers. The world has become a law enforcer's nightmare and every criminal's dream. We bank online, shop online, date, learn, work and live online. But have the institutions that keep us safe on the streets learned to protect us in the burgeoning digital world?Ê Have we become complacent about our personal security Ñ sharing our thoughts, beliefs and the details of our daily lives with anyone who cares to relieve us of them? In this fascinating and compelling book, Misha Glenny, author of the international bestseller McMafia, explores the three fundamental threats facing us in the twenty-first century: cyber crime, cyber warfare and cyber industrial espionage. Governments and the private sector are losing billions of dollars each year, fighting an ever-morphing, often invisible, and highly intelligent new breed of criminal: the hacker. Glenny has travelled and trawled the world. And by exploring the rise and fall of the criminal website, DarkMarket, he has uncovered the most vivid, alarming and illuminating stories.ÊWhether JiLsi or Matrix, Iceman, Master Splynter or Lord Cyric; whether Detective Sergeant Chris Dawson in Bolton or Agent Keith Mularski in Pittsburgh, Glenny has tracked down and interviewed all the players Ñ the criminals, the geeks, the police, the security experts and the victims Ñ and he places everyone and everything in a rich brew of politics, economics and history. The result is simply unputdownable. DarkMarketis authoritative and completely engrossing. It's a must-read for everyone who uses a computer: the essential crime book for our times.

"As this century comes to a close, debates over immigration policy, racial preferences, and multiculturalism challenge the consensus that formerly grounded our national culture. The question of our national identity is as urgent as it has ever been in our history. Is our society disintegrating into a collection of separate ethnic enclaves, or is there a way that we can forge a coherent, unified identity as we enter the 21st century?" "In this book Michael Lind provides a comprehensive revisionist view of the American past and offers a concrete proposal for nation-building reforms to strengthen the American future. He shows that the forces of nationalism and the ideal of a trans-racial melting pot need not be in conflict with each other, and he provides a practical agenda for a liberal nationalist revolution that would combine a new color-blind liberalism in civil rights with practical measures for reducing class based barriers to racial integration."--BOOK JACKET.

Presents a narrative history of the Yankees from the team's beginnings in 1903 through 2011 that profiles its owners, players, and twenty-seven championships.

About the Book Books about Civilization are concerned with the development of structured societies that grow to require urban planning, develop social and cultural elites, and forms of writing for record keeping, complex organization and transfer of ideas. Almost invariably, the process of civilization results in the growth of empires, and subjugation of less civilized peoples. Titles include: Ancient Man: The Beginning of Civilizations, Syllabus: Introduction to the History of European Civilization, Evolution and Culture, The Pivot of Civilization, The Western Hemisphere Idea: Its Rise and Decline, The decay of capitalist civilisation, and The fate of empires; being an inquiry into the stability of civilisation. About us Trieste Publishing's aim is to provide readers with the highest quality reproductions of fiction and non-fiction literature that has stood the test of time. Our titles are produced from scans of the original books and as a result may sometimes have imperfections. To ensure a high-quality product we have: thoroughly reviewed every page of all the books in the catalog repaired some of the text in some cases, and rejected titles that are not of the highest quality. You can look up "Trieste Publishing" in categories that interest you to find other titles in our large collection. Come home to the books that made a difference

For over sixty years, Jews have ranked as the most liberal white ethnic group in American politics, figuring prominently in social reform campaigns ranging from the New Deal to the civil rights movement. Today many continue to defy stereotypes that link voting patterns to wealth. What explains this political behavior? Historians have attributed it mainly to religious beliefs, but Marc Dollinger discovered that this explanation fails to account for the entire American Jewish political experience. In this, the first synthetic treatment of Jewish liberalism and U.S. public policy from the 1930s to the mid-1970s, Dollinger identifies the drive for a more tolerant, pluralistic, and egalitarian nation with Jewish desires for inclusion in the larger non-Jewish society. The politics of acculturation, the process by which Jews championed unpopular social causes to ease their adaptation to American life, established them as the guardians of liberal America. But, according to Dollinger, it also erected barriers to Jewish liberal success. Faced with a conflict between liberal politics and their own acculturation, Jews almost always chose the latter. Few Jewish leaders, for example, condemned the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, and most southern Jews refused to join their northern co-religionists in public civil rights protests. When liberals advocated race-based affirmative action programs and busing to desegregate public schools, most Jews dissented. In chronicling the successes, limits, and failures of Jewish liberalism, Dollinger offers a nuanced yet wide-ranging political history, one intended for liberal activists, conservatives curious about the creation of neo-conservatism, and anyone interested in Jewish communal life.

“Sexy, surprising, funny, insightful, and wildly entertaining” ( Huffington Post )—the definitive biography of Giacomo Casanova, the impoverished boy who became the famous writer, notorious libertine, and self-invented genius in decadent eighteenth-century Europe. Today, “Casanova” is a synonym for “great lover,” yet the real story of this remarkable figure is little known. A figure straight out of a Henry Fielding novel, Giacomo Casanova was erotic, brilliant, impulsive, and desperate for recognition; a self-destructive genius. Over the course of his lifetime, he claimed to have seduced more than one hundred women, among them married women, young women in convents, girls just barely in their teens, women of high and low birth alike. Abandoned by his mother, an actress and courtesan, Casanova was raised by his illiterate grandmother, coming of age in a Venice filled with spies and political intrigue. He was intellectually curious and read forbidden books, for which he was jailed. He staged a dramatic escape from Venice’s notorious prison, I Piombi, the only person known to have done so. He then fled to France, ingratiated himself at the royal court, and invented the national lottery that still exists to this day. He crisscrossed Europe, landing for a while in St. Petersburg, where he was admitted to the court of Catherine the Great. He corresponded with Voltaire and met Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte—assisting them as they composed the timeless opera Don Giovanni . And he wrote what many consider the greatest memoir of the era, the twelve-volume Story of My Life . Laurence Bergreen’s Casanova recounts this astonishing life in rich, intimate detail, and at the same time, paints a dazzling portrait of eighteenth-century Europe, filled with a cast characters from serving girls to kings and courtiers, “great fun for any history lover” ( Kirkus Reviews ).

In The American People: Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact , Larry Kramer completes his radical reimagining of his country’s history. Ranging from the brothels of 1950s Washington, D.C., to the activism of the 1980s and beyond, Kramer offers an elaborate phantasmagoria of bigoted conspiracists in the halls of power and ordinary individuals suffering their consequences. With wit and bite, Kramer explores (among other things) the sex lives of every recent president; the complicated behavior of America’s two greatest spies, J. Edgar Hoover and James Jesus Angleton; the rise of Sexopolis , the country’s favorite magazine; and the genocidal activities of every branch of our health-care and drug-delivery systems. The American People: Volume 2 is narrated by (among others) the writer Fred Lemish and his two friends—Dr. Daniel Jerusalem, who works for America’s preeminent health-care institution, and his twin brother, David Jerusalem, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp who was abused by many powerful men. Together they track a terrible plague that intensifies as the government ignores it and depict the bold and imaginative activists who set out to shock the nation’s conscience. In Kramer’s telling, the United States is dedicated to the proposition that very few men are created equal, and those who love other men may be destined for death. Here is a historical novel like no other—satiric and impassioned and driven by an uncompromising moral and literary vision.

'Nobody knows more about everyday life in Victorian Britain than Judith Flanders' - Douglas Robert-Fairhurst, author of Metamorphosis and The Turning Point In Rites of Passage , acclaimed historian Judith Flanders deconstructs the intricate, fascinating, and occasionally - to modern eyes - bizarre customs that grew up around death and mourning in Victorian Britain. Through stories from the sickbed to the deathbed, from the correct way to grieve and to give comfort to those grieving to funerals and burials and the reaction of those left behind, Flanders illuminates how living in nineteenth-century Britain was, in so many ways, dictated by dying. This is an engrossing, deeply researched and, at times, chilling social history of a period plagued by infant death, poverty, disease, and unprecedented change. In elegant, often witty prose, Flanders brings the Victorian way of death vividly to life.

"Joshua Jay, one of the world's most accomplished magicians, not only opens that door but brings us inside to reveal the artistry and obsessiveness, esoteric history, and long-whispered-about traditions of a subject shrouded in mystery. In 52 short, compulsively readable essays, Jay describes how he does it, whether it's through the making of illusions, the psychology behind them, or the way technology influences the world of magic. He considers the aesthetics of performance, discusses contemporary masters, including David Copperfield, Penn & Teller, and David Blaine, and details how magicians hone their craft. And answers questions like: Can a magic trick be too good? How do you saw a person in half? Is there real magic in the universe? The answers, like so much in magic and life, depend on you."--Amazon.com.

Using an interactive format that includes removable letters, documents, and personal effects, this visual history of the Jews in America follows the successive waves of Jewish immigration to the United States, from the eighteenth century to the present day. 30,000 first printing. Traditions Book Club Main.

This volume is the fruit of the colloquium ""Les Pays-Bas, carrefour de la tolerance aux Temps Modernes,"" held in Wassenaar, the Netherlands, in 1994. Toleration in the strict sense of the word was very much against the grain of sixteenth-century European history. This volume charts the emergence and vicissitudes of the concept of tolerance and its practical implications in the Dutch Republic, from the revolt against Spain in the sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century. The various contributions, all by distinguished scholars, address such issues as Erasmus' views on toleration, the relation between tolerance and irenism, and the contemporary intellectual debate about toleration in the Dutch Republic. This important volume will prove indispensable to historians of the Low Countries, students of humanism and all those interested in the intellectual history of the 16th-18th centuries.

This intensely interesting—and troubling—book is the product of a lifetime of reflection and study of democracy. In it, John Lukacs addresses the questions of how our democracy has changed and why we have become vulnerable to the shallowest possible demagoguery. Lukacs contrasts the political systems, movements, and ideologies that have bedeviled the twentieth century: democracy, Liberalism, nationalism, fascism, Bolshevism, National Socialism, populism. Reflecting on American democracy, Lukacs describes its evolution from the eighteenth century to its current form—a dangerous and possibly irreversible populism. This involves, among other things, the predominance of popular sentiment over what used to be public opinion. This devolution has happened through the gigantic machinery of publicity, substituting propaganda—and entertainment—for knowledge, and ideology for a sense of history. It is a kind of populism that relies on nationalism and militarism to hold society together. Lukacs's observations are original, biting, timely, sure to inspire lively debate about the precarious state of American democracy today.

Jeremi Suri--Nobel Fellow and leading light in the next generation of policy makers--looks to America's history to see both what it has to offer failed states around the world and what it should avoid. Far from being cold imperialists, Americans have earnestly attempted to export their invention of representative government. We have had successes (Reconstruction after the American Civil War, the Philippines, Western Europe) and failures (Vietnam), and we can learn a good deal from both. The framers of the Constitution initiated a policy of cautious nation-building, hoping not to conquer other countries, but to build a world of stable, self-governed societies that would support America's way of life--yet no other country has created more problems for itself and for others by intervening in distant lands and pursuing impractical changes. Suri has mined more than two hundred years of American policy in order to explain the five Ps of nation-building: Partners, Process, Problem-solving, Purpose, and People.--From publisher description.

As Times Square turns 100, New York Times Magazine contributing writer James Traub tells the story of how this mercurial district became one of the most famous and exciting places in the world. The Devil’s Playground is classic and colorful American history, from the first years of the twentieth century through the Runyonesque heyday of nightclubs and theaters in the 1920s and ’30s, to the district’s decline in the 1960s and its glittering corporate revival in the 1990s. First, Traub gives us the great impresarios, wits, tunesmiths, newspaper columnists, and nocturnal creatures who shaped Times Square over the century since the place first got its name: Oscar Hammerstein, Florenz Ziegfeld, George S. Kaufman, Damon Runyon, Walter Winchell, and “the Queen of the Nightclubs,” Texas Guinan; bards like A. J. Liebling, Joe Mitchell, and the Beats, who celebrated the drug dealers and pimps of 42nd Street. He describes Times Square’s notorious collapse into pathology and the fierce debates over how best to restore it to life. Traub then goes on to scrutinize today’s Times Square as no author has yet done. He writes about the new 42nd Street, the giant Toys “R” Us store with its flashing Ferris wheel, the new world of corporate theater, and the sex shops trying to leave their history behind. More than sixty years ago, Liebling called Times Square “the heart of the world”—not just the center of the world, though this crossroads in Midtown Manhattan was indeed that, but its heart. From the dawn of the twentieth century through the 1950s, Times Square was the whirling dynamo of American popular culture and, increasingly, an urban sanctuary for the eccentric and the untamed. The name itself became emblematic of the tremendous life force of cities everywhere. Today, Times Square is once again an awe-inspiring place, but the dark and strange corners have been filled with blazing light. The most famous street character on Broadway, “the Naked Cowboy,” has his own website, and Toys “R” Us calls its flagship store in Times Square “the toy center of the universe.” For the giant entertainment corporations that have moved to this safe, clean, and self-consciously gaudy spot, Times Square is still very much the center of the world. But is it still the heart?

"An acknowledged classic. Katz has transformed our conception of Jewish history from the 16th to the 18th century. Because of his work, we now understand that the ghetto was no longer sealed off at that time from outside opinions and that the movement towards modernity had begun long before the Jews were actually legally emancipated. Making this work available again in the revised edition is a service to scholarship and to public enlightenment." —Arthur Hertzberg "Since it first appeared in Hebrew in 1958, Tradition and Crisis has had a tremendous impact on generations of students and scholars. Katz's innovative use of sources has introduced scholars to new methodologies and opened new vistas for research. This new, unabridged translation is therefore highly welcome. It will ensure its continued use in the English-speaking world." —Jehuda Reinharz, Richard Koret Professor of Modern Jewish History, Brandeis University "Like a lovingly restored painting, Bernard Cooperman's new, annotated translation of Jacob Katz's classic portrait of early Jewish modernity can now be fully appreciated for the first time. An admirable achievement." —Ivan G. Marcus When it first appeared in Hebrew in 1958 and in English in 1961, Tradition and Crisis , Jacob Katz's groundbreaking study of Jewish society at the end of the Middle Ages, dramatically changed our perceptions of the Jewish community prior to the era of modernity. This new, unabridged translation by Bernard Dov Cooperman makes this classic available to new generations of students and scholars, together with Katz's original source notes, and an afterword and an updating bibliographic appendix by Professor Cooperman. Katz revolutionized the field by tapping into a rich and hitherto unexplored source for reconstructing the sociology of a previous era: the responsa literature of the Rabbinic establishment during the Middle Ages. The self-governing communities of Jews in Europe dealt with issues both civil and religious. The questions and answers addressed to the rabbinic authorities and courts provide an incomparable wealth of insights into life as it was lived in this period and into the social, historical, cultural, and economic issues of the day. How did European Jewry progress from a socially and culturally segregated society to become a component of European society at large? What were Jewish attitudes toward the Gentile world from which Jewry had been secluded for centuries? What were the bridges from the old to the new era? Tradition and Crisis traces the roots of modernity to internal developments within the communities themselves. Katz traces the modern movements of the Haskalah (Enlightenment) in the West and Hasidism in the East, to an internal breakdown in the structure of these communities and the emergence of an alternative leadership in the wake of the Sabbatian challenge. A dynamic work that has radically changed our view of this history, Tradition and Crisis remains the pivotal text for understanding the revolution in the entire conception of Jewish identity in the modern era.