Najnovšie - Knihy - História strana 10 z 24

'A fascinating history', Charles Moore, The Spectator A powerful history of the most significant military clashes between Islam and Christendom over the 1,300 years of the Muslim caliphate. From the taking of the holy city of Jerusalem in the 7th century AD by Caliph Umar, to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following the end of World War I, Christian popes, emperors and kings, and Muslim caliphs and sultans were locked in a 1300-year battle for political, military, ideological, economic and religious supremacy. In this powerful history of the era, acknowledged expert on the history of the Middle East and the Crusades Simon Mayall focuses on some of the most significant clashes of arms in human history: the taking and retaking of Jerusalem and the collapse of the Crusader states; the fall of Constantinople; the sieges of Rhodes and Malta; the assault on Vienna and the ‘high-water mark’ of Ottoman advance into Europe; culminating in the Allied capture of Jerusalem in World War I, the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the dissolution of the sultanate and the caliphate, and the formation of modern Europe and the modern Middle East. The House of War offers a wide, sweeping narrative, encompassing the broad historical and religious context of this period, while focussing on some of the key, pivotal sieges and battles, and on the protagonists, political and military, who determined their conclusions and their consequences.

‘Finally, a book that puts Herculaneum back on the map!’ – Dr Daisy Dunn‘What an extraordinary tour de force!' – Dr Sophie Hay‘This is an absolute must-read…’ – Dr Jessica VennerOn a beach near Naples in October 79 CE, more than 300 people stand on a beach, hoping for an evacuation that will never come. Vesuvius has erupted, and there is no time to escape. They will all be killed instantly in the suffocating, hellishly hot devastation that follows. This was the end of their town, but it is not the end of their story. Neighbouring the world-renowned Pompeii, the town of Herculaneum is the neglected victim of Vesuvius. It was uniquely preserved in the aftermath of the eruption, and in many ways gives us unparalleled glimpses into the past. Echoes of Ash tells the fascinating story of Herculaneum and the people who lived there for the first time. By looking through the eyes of such figures as the Weaver and the Slave Girl, the Soldier and the Boxer, and by investigating the relevant buildings and the archaeological discoveries of the past twenty years, acclaimed historian Adrian Murdoch builds a historical picture that is more colourful, complete and alive than has ever been possible before.

'A vigorous and engaging new study of the Irish famine . . . Richly underpinned by research in contemporary sources and firmly rooted in historical scholarship.' Fintan O'Toole'A vivid, polemical narrative that does justice to victims and explains the ideologies that worsened the disaster.' Irish Independent'Scanlan's history of the ''Great Hunger' and its repercussions is meticulous, measured and damning.' Financial Times'Mr. Scanlan's haunting and terrible book is undoubtedly a history title of the year.' Wall Street JournalIn the 1800s, as Britain became the world's most powerful industrial empire, Ireland starved. The Great Famine fractured long-held assumptions about political economy and 'civilisation', threatening disorder in Britain. Ireland was a laboratory for empire, shaping British ideas about colonisation, population, ecology and work. In Rot, Padraic Scanlan reinterprets the history of this time and the result is a revelatory account of Ireland's Great Famine. In the first half of the nineteenth century, nowhere in Europe - or the world - did the working poor depend as completely on potatoes as in Ireland. To many British observers, potatoes were evidence of a lack of modernity among the Irish. However, Ireland before the famine more closely resembled capitalism's future than its past. While poverty before and during the Great Famine was often blamed on Irish backwardness, it did in fact stem from the British Empire's embrace of modern capitalism. Uncovering the disaster's roots in Britain's deep imperial faith in markets and capitalism, Rot reshapes our understanding of the Famine and its tragic legacy.

“[An] extraordinary book.”—Brian Eno • “One of the best books about the U.S.S.R. in its late stage.”—Alexei Navalny, from Patriot: A Memoir • “Not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art.”—Slavoj Žižek • “Extraordinary and brilliant.”—Adam Curtis, director of HyperNormalisationA fascinating exploration of “hypernormalization” in a political system that seemed powerful and eternal—even when it was on the verge of collapseSoviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation. Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period. The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self, truth and lie—and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.

An engaging, wide-ranging exploration of the end of Roman Britain and the beginnings of England   In 410 CE, Roman rule of Britain collapsed, bringing a centuries-long occupation to an end. A century later, Britain was dividing into two areas with contrasting cultures, an expansive “Anglo-Saxon” south and east, and a shrinking Celtic west and north. How did this transition happen? And why did the customs of the Germanic incomers prevail in England, unlike elsewhere in Europe?   In this deeply researched account, Nicholas J. Higham addresses these difficult questions head on. Higham draws on archaeological evidence and contemporary literature, including the writings of Gildas, to reconsider the accepted narrative. We see anew the importance of culture, warfare, and language—as the arrival, spread, and dominance of incomers irrevocably changed the country. This period marked the beginnings of Englishness, and of such insular identities as Welsh and Cornish. Offering surprising new insights, Higham provides a penetrating account of how, as Roman Britain ended, Anglo-Saxon England emerged.

A new history that tells the story of how European imperial ambitions destroyed the Ottoman Empire during the Great War and created a divided and unstable Middle EastThe Ottoman Empire’s collapse at the end of the First World War is often treated as a foregone conclusion. It was only a matter of time, the story goes, before the so-called Sick Man of Europe succumbed to its ailments—incompetent management, nationalism, and ethnic and religious conflict. In The War That Made the Middle East, Mustafa Aksakal overturns this conventional narrative. He describes how European imperial ambitions and the Ottoman commitment to saving its empire at any cost—including the destruction of the Armenian community and the deaths of more than a million Ottoman troops and other civilians—led to the empire’s violent partition and created a politically unstable Middle East. The War That Made the Middle East shows that, until 1914, the Ottoman Empire was a viable multiethnic, multireligious state, and that relations between the Arabs, Jews, Muslims, and Christians of Palestine were relatively stable. When war broke out, the Ottoman government sought an alliance with the Entente but was rejected because of British and French designs on the Eastern Mediterranean. After the Ottomans entered the fight on the side of Germany and were defeated, Britain and France seized Ottoman lands, and new national elites in former Ottoman territories claimed their own states. The region was renamed “the Middle East,” erasing a robust and modernizing 600-year-old empire. A sweeping narrative of war, great power politics, and ordinary people caught up in the devastation, The War That Made the Middle East offers new insights about the Great War and its profound and lasting consequences.

David R. Francis held the post of the United States ambassador to Russia from April 1916 to November 1918, and represented his country before four Russian governments: the Imperial, Provisional, Soviet, and Northern. He was an eyewitness of the greatest events in the history of Russia: World War I, the February Revolution, the downfall of the empire, the October Revolution, and the Civil War. During the two and half years of his residence in Russia, Francis met prominent figures such as Nicholas II, the last Russian emperor, and Vladimir I. Lenin, the first Soviet leader. Francis s diplomatic experience was unique and had no parallel in the history of Russian-American relations which is why his memoirs are of special interest for historians and the general public alike.

How wheat growing, milling, and baking shaped the people and culture of North Texas. In the national imaginary, America’s amber fields of grain lie in the country’s center, but for more than a century, they also grew across one pocket of the South: North Texas. From the 1840s to the 1970s, the state's agriculture, dominated in lore by cotton in the east and livestock in the open range, was heavily invested in the cultivation, processing, sale, and consumption of wheat. Recalling a forgotten history, Rebecca Sharpless shows how the rhythms of the wheat harvest—and the evolution of the milling, distribution, and baking industries—governed daily life in what is now known as the Dallas–Forth Worth Metroplex. In the 1840s, Anglo settlers discovered that grain flourished in North Texas and quickly built an economy that included wheat in fields, mills, and kitchens. After the Civil War, hand labor gave way to mechanization, greatly increasing production. Commercial bakeries churned out novel confections, and big cities were built on the bounty of the countryside. In the second half of the twentieth century, as production moved northward, industrial milling and baking declined, but home baking boomed, flour advertising supported regional music, and wheat fortunes financed the region’s cultural life. Sharpless covers 150 years of wheat’s very human history and shows how the labor that cultivated it, the sustenance it provided, and the prosperity it generated left an indelible mark on the people and institutions of Texas.

The purpose of this volume is not simply to compile yet another wearying chronicle of the horrors that have been committed by our fellow human beings. Most students who register for a course on Genocide assume that it will focus, perhaps exclusively, on the Holocaust—the case with which they are most familiar. Many of them have read Elie Wiesel’s eloquent masterpiece Night in secondary school, and some may have read The Diary of Anne Frank. A few students might even know that a genocide occurred in Rwanda or Darfur. Like most people, however, they equate genocide simply with mass killing, and assume that genocide must by definition entail millions of deaths. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide”—meaning literally “to kill a people”— originally defined it “a colonial crime of destroying the national patterns of the oppressed and imposing the national patterns of the oppressors.” This was a process, Lemkin said, deliberately intending to destroy a people’s culture that could sometimes but not necessarily always result in mass murder. Students need to know that after World War II the great powers undermined and co-opted the process of writing the1948 Genocide Convention at the UN—because these nations did not want their own colonial crimes, oppression of minorities, and destructions of cultures to be included in the definition. Instead, they simply used the Holocaust as a template and succeeded in distorting what Lemkin originally meant by “genocide”—the murder of a people by destroying their social and cultural connections.

A sweeping, riveting history of the Venetian Ghetto, the world’s first Jewish ghetto. 'Brilliantly researched and deeply moving' - Roger Crowley, author of City of Fortune'Alexander Lee combines expertise in Venetian history, with sensibility to the Jewish past, and a gift for story-telling. Highly recommended' - Professor Miri Rubin, author of Cities of StrangersIn the early sixteenth century, amidst the ruins of war, and in an atmosphere of religious hatred, the world’s first Jewish ‘ghetto’ was established in Venice. Constrained in cramped, often insanitary conditions, the Jews who were forced to live there were extorted, abused and subjected to countless humiliating restrictions. Before long, Venice’s Ghetto became the prototype for ghettos throughout Europe, paving the way for a more vicious and enduring form of antisemitism. Yet the Ghetto’s story is also a testament of hope. Despite all they faced through the centuries, its residents thrived, creating a flourishing literary, musical and religious community. They sustained Venice’s economy – and, as more migrants arrived, the Ghetto became a microcosm of the Jewish world. Historian Alexander Lee traces this vivid story from the first Jewish arrivals in the early fourteenth century to the present day, reconstructing the Ghetto through the eyes of its inhabitants – from the domestic squabbles of a sixteenth-century rabbi to the agonising wait of a family bound for Auschwitz. Authoritative, detailed and incomparably intimate, The First Ghetto offers a fitting monument to the Ghetto’s past – and powerful lessons for the future.

A vivid and visceral portrayal of the most famous naval battle in history, focusing on the human cost of war, by a brilliant military historianAt or about 1.15 in the afternoon of 21 October 1805, Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson was struck by a 22-gramme, 15-millimetre French musket round fired down from the mizzen top of the Redoutable, a distance of some 70 feet to HMS Victory’s quarter deck. It nicked the edge of his epaulette, and passed diagonally down, through the material of his coat and into the left shoulder, fracturing the upper part of the scapula or shoulder blade, then the second and third rib. It pierced the left lung, dividing a branch of the pulmonary artery, and emerged to sever the spine, splintering the sixth and seventh vertebrae above and below as it crashed between. The soft lead ball – distorted by collisions with bone – ended its flight embedded in muscle two inches below the right scapula.In this fresh and visceral retelling of the battle of Trafalgar, Paul O’Keeffe traces the course of events both prior and subsequent to that fatal shot: from about 6.30 in the morning, as the British ships began their slow approach towards the combined French and Spanish fleet, until the cessation of firing that followed the apocalyptic destruction of the French 74-gun Achille at 5.45 in the afternoon.But we also learn about the battle’s dramatic aftermath: how a violent storm that raged for eight days destroyed the surviving French and Spanish ships and drowned more sailors than had been killed during battle; how news of victory travelled and was celebrated in London; how Nelson’s body was brought home and given a spectacular funeral.Paying meticulous attention to the peripheral – and little explored – details, O’Keeffe gives us a front-row view of events; and in his unflinching portrayal of the brutal reality of naval warfare, he tells the story of the human cost of war. Gripping and immersive, this is a unique account of Trafalgar for a new generation of readers.

'Superb and timely' KATE MOSSE'Impressive, important, deeply moving' SARAH WATERS'Brilliant' ANTHONY HOROWITZWhat role could music play in a death camp? What was the effect on those women who owed their survival to their participation in a Nazi propaganda project? And how did it feel to be forced to provide solace to the perpetrators of a genocide that claimed the lives of their family and friends? In 1943, German SS officers in charge of Auschwitz-Birkenau ordered that an orchestra should be formed among the female prisoners. Almost fifty women and girls from eleven nations were assembled to play marching music to other inmates - forced labourers who left each morning and returned, exhausted and often broken, at the end of the day - and give weekly concerts for Nazi officers. Individual members were sometimes summoned to give solo performances of an officer's favourite piece of music. It was the only entirely female orchestra in any of the Nazi prison camps and, for almost all of the musicians chosen to take part, being in the orchestra was to save their lives. In The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz, award-winning historian Anne Sebba tells their astonishing story with sensitivity and care.

Mosaics in Britannia provides an authoritative overview of Romano-British mosaics, including how they were made and maintained, how the craft was organised, the geometric designs and the subject matter, source and significance of the figured pavements. Also considered is the mosaics’ place within the buildings they adorned, and what they tell us about the social dynamics of the residence and baths. The book ends with the fate of mosaics in the late Roman period and thereafter, including their recording upon rediscovery and their display. Although Romano-British pictorial mosaics seldom attain the artistic brilliance of those around the Mediterranean, they often have sophisticated content. Several demonstrate a good knowledge of classical literature, arguably more so than most other provinces, which is perhaps surprising to those who have assumed that Roman Britain was a backwater at the extreme edge of the Roman Empire.

'A captivating mosaic of wartime Berlin' Katja Hoyer, Financial Times'Brilliant and beautifully written' Anne Applebaum 'Brings to life Berlin during World War II so vividly that you can imagine yourself blithely strolling the streets of the city or hunkering down in the bomb shelters' Barbara Demick'A rich and fascinating portrait of Berlin at war' Literary Review'Wonderfully nuanced' GuardianWhen war broke out in September 1939, what was most striking in the German capital at first was how little changed. Unless you were Jewish. Then life, already hard, soon got unfathomably worse. Drawing on diaries, letters and memoirs, Stay Alive chronicles daily life in wartime Berlin with extraordinary power and immediacy. Here are the movie stars and swing dancers, the resistance circles and SS patrols hunting deserters, the desperate calculations of survival and collaboration. As Allied bombs reduced the city to rubble and Soviet troops closed in, the common greeting of Berliners became not auf Wiedersehen or Heil Hitler but bleiben Sie übrig - 'Stay alive'. Revelatory, devastating and deeply humane, this book illuminates how ordinary people navigated the moral catastrophe of the Third Reich - what it meant to resist, to conform or simply to endure. Buruma shows how a society's accommodation to evil unfolds one compromise at a time, and why understanding this descent remains urgently relevant today.

‘Brilliant’ – The Times‘Hugely informative and entertaining’ – New Scientist‘Put this at the head of your reading lists immediately’ – Eric IdleFrom the winner of the 2022 Royal Society Science Book Prize, a thrilling and thought-provoking account of the rise and fall of humankind. For the first time in over ten millennia, the rate of human population growth is slowing down. The global population is forecast to begin declining in the second half of this century, and in 10,000 years’ time our species will likely be extinct. In The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire, Henry Gee shows how we arrived at this crucial moment in history, beginning his story deep in the palaeolithic past and charting our dramatic rise from one species of human among many to the most dominant animal ever to live on Earth. But rapid climate change, a stagnating global economy, falling birth rates and an unexplainable decline in average human sperm count are combining to make our chances for longevity increasingly slim. There could be a way forward, but the launch window is narrow . . . Drawing on a dazzling array of the latest scientific research, Gee tells the extraordinary story of humanity with characteristic warmth and wit, and suggests how our exceptional species might avoid its tragic fate. ‘Like Jared Diamond meets Arthur C. Clarke with a dash of Douglas Adams’ – Philip Ball, author of How Life Works

The Oxford History of the United States is by far the most respected multi-volume history of the USA. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, two New York Times bestsellers, and winners of the Bancroft and Parkman Prizes. Now, in the newest volume in the series, one of America''s most esteemed historians, Gordon S. Wood, offers a brilliant account of the early American Republic, ranging from 1789 and the beginning of the national government to the end of the War of 1812. As Wood reveals, the period was marked by tumultuous change in all aspects of American life--in politics, society, economy, and culture. The men who founded the new government had high hopes for the future, but few of their hopes and dreams worked out quite as they expected. They hated political parties but parties nonetheless emerged. Some wanted the United States to become a great fiscal-military state like those of Britain and France; others wanted the country to remain a rural agricultural state very different from the European states. Instead, by 1815 the United States became something neither group anticipated. Many leaders expected American culture to flourish and surpass that of Europe; instead it became popularized and vulgarized. The leaders also hope to see the end of slavery; instead, despite the release of many slaves and the end of slavery in the North, slavery was stronger in 1815 than it had been in 1789. Many wanted to avoid entanglements with Europe, but instead the country became involved in Europe''s wars and ended up waging another war with the former mother country. Still, with a new generation emerging by 1815, most Americans were confident and optimistic about the future of their country. Integrating all aspects of life, from politics and law to the economy and culture, Empire of Liberty offers a marvelous account of this pivotal era when America took its first unsteady steps as a new and rapidly expanding nation. A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for HistoryWinner of the New-York Historical Society American History Book PrizeA New York Times BestsellerSelected as one of the Top 25 Books of 2009 by The Atlantic"On every page of this book, Wood''s subtlety and erudition show. Grand in scope and a landmark achievement of scholarship, Empire of Liberty is a tour de force, the culmination of a lifetime of brilliant thinking and writing." --The New York Times Book Review"Empire of Liberty will rightly take its place among the authoritative volumes in this important and influential series."--The Washington Post

A history of three transnational political projects designed to overcome the inequities of imperialismAfter the dissolution of empires, was the nation-state the only way to unite people politically, culturally, and economically? In Post-Imperial Possibilities, historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper examine three large-scale, transcontinental projects aimed at bringing together peoples of different regions to mitigate imperial legacies of inequality. Eurasia, Eurafrica, and Afroasia—in theory if not in practice—offered alternative routes out of empire. The theory of Eurasianism was developed after the collapse of imperial Russia by exiled intellectuals alienated by both Western imperialism and communism. Eurafrica began as a design for collaborative European exploitation of Africa but was transformed in the 1940s and 1950s into a project to include France’s African territories in plans for European integration. The Afroasian movement wanted to replace the vertical relationship of colonizer and colonized with a horizontal relationship among former colonial territories that could challenge both the communist and capitalist worlds. Both Eurafrica and Afroasia floundered, victims of old and new vested interests. But Eurasia revived in the 1990s, when Russian intellectuals turned the theory’s attack on Western hegemony into a recipe for the restoration of Russian imperial power. While both the system of purportedly sovereign states and the concentrated might of large economic and political institutions continue to frustrate projects to overcome inequities in welfare and power, Burbank and Cooper’s study of political imagination explores wide-ranging concepts of social affiliation and obligation that emerged after empire and the reasons for their unlike destinies.

A distinctive collection of essays capturing Lawrence Freedman''s insightful analysis across war, strategy, and foreign policy and providing a unique view of the key thinkers that shaped history.One of the world''s foremost scholars of warfare, both historical and contemporary, Lawrence Freedman has also played an important role in policymaking, serving as an official historian of both the Falklands War and on the UK inquiry into the 2003 Iraq War. Since the publication of his best-selling Strategy in 2013, Freedman has continued to explore many of the themes he raised in the book while commenting on ongoing conflicts.On Strategists and Strategy combines the best of Freedman''s many essays from the past ten years on warfare and foreign policy, alongside more personal pieces on the scholars who influenced him and his own life trajectory. The range of his interests is demonstrated in this lively and engaging collection of essays. They cover a wide range of topics, including Vladimir Putin''s strategic fanaticism; arguments on why we don''t take tactics seriously enough and why "stalemate" is used incorrectly as a metaphor for deadlock in war; considerations of the dilemmas of nuclear deterrence; and what Covid tells us about crisis management. The material on his own life is richly contextual, attuned to the broader historical trends and social forces in 1960s and 1970s Britain that shaped his experiences.This volume not only provides a broad-ranging sampling of Freedman''s most representative work, but also offers a unique window into a half century of world history.

Located on the border of present-day Romania and Ukraine, the historical region of Bukovina was the site of widespread displacement and violence as it passed from Romanian to Soviet hands and back again during World War II. This study focuses on two groups of “Bukovinians”—ethnic Germans and German-speaking Jews—as they navigated dramatically changed political and social circumstances in and after 1945. Through comparisons of the narratives and self-conceptions of these groups, Resettlers and Survivors gives a nuanced account of how they dealt with the difficult legacies of World War II, while exploring Bukovina’s significance for them as both a geographical location and a “place of memory.”