Download or read book In Defence of History written by Richard J. Evans and published by Granta Publications. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A lucid, muscular, and often sly reflection” on the worth and purpose of historical scholarship by the award-winning author of The Third Reich Trilogy (Kirkus). In this volume, the renowned historian Richard J. Evans offers a fervent and deeply insightful defense of his craft and its importance to civilization. At a time when fact and historical truth are under unprecedented assault, Evans shows us why history is necessary. Taking us into the historians’ workshop, he offers a firsthand look at how good history gets written. In staunch opposition to the wilder claims of postmodern historians, Evans thoroughly dismantles the notion that a realistic grasp of history is impossible to attain. He then goes on to explain the deadly political dangers of losing a historical perspective on the way we live our lives. In the tradition of E.H. Carr’s What Is History? and G.R. Elton’s The Practice of History, Evans’ In Defense of History delivers “a model of lucid and intelligent historiographical analysis” (The Guardian, UK).
Download or read book An Analysis of Richard J Evans s In Defence of History written by Nicholas Piercey and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: La 4ème de couv. indique : "Postmodernist thinkers consider history to be not very far removed from a work of fiction, something dependent on historians' own interpretations of the past. Evans, however, argues that we can trust history and it is possible to be objective about what happened and what caused it to happen because historians are contrained and enabled by the surviving evidence. Evans shows how an understanding of social issues and rigorous scientific research give history shape, and why history is not simply what we make of it. He argues that this postmodernist view is contradictory and can lead to dangerous problems if we accept all historical interpretations as equally valid."
Download or read book An Analysis of Richard J Evans s In Defence of History written by Nicholas Piercey and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Evans wrote In Defence of History at a time when the historian's profession was coming under heavy attack as a result of the ‘cultural turn’ taken by the discipline during the late 1980s and the 1990s. Historians were being forced to face up to postmodern thinking, which argued that, because all texts were the product of biased writers who had incomplete information, none could be privileged above others. In this reading, there could be no objective history, merely the study of the texts themselves. While In Defence of History addresses all aspects of historical method, its key focus is on an extensive evaluation of this postmodern thinking. Evans judges the acceptability of the reasoning advanced by the postmodernists – and finds it badly wanting. He is strongly critical both of the relevance and of the adequacy of their arguments, seeking to show that, ultimately, they are guilty of failing to accept the logic of their own position. All texts are equally valid, or invalid, they suggest – while insisting that the products of their own school are in fact more ‘true’ than those of their opponents. Evans concludes by pointing out that this same argument could be advanced to suggest that the works of Holocaust deniers are just as valid as are those of historians who accept that the Nazis set out to commit genocide. So why, he demands, is no postmodernist willing to say as much? A devastating example of the usefulness of relentless evaluation.
Download or read book The Third Reich in History and Memory written by Richard J. Evans and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventy years after its demise, historian Richard J. Evans charts the ways our understanding of the Third Reich has changed.
Download or read book Telling Lies about Hitler written by Richard J. Evans and published by Verso. This book was released on 2002 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard J. Evans worked on the historical evidence on behalf of the defence during the Irving libel trial. In Telling Lies about Hitler, the author discusses the importance of historical writing and the social role of historians in such trials.
Download or read book Lying About Hitler written by Richard J. Evans and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2008-08-04 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In ruling against the controversial historian David Irving in his libel suit against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt, last April 2000, the High Court in London labeled him a falsifier of history. No objective historian, declared the judge, would manipulate the documentary record in the way that Irving did. Richard J. Evans, a Cambridge historian and the chief advisor for the defense, uses this pivotal trial as a lens for exploring a range of difficult questions about the nature of the historian's enterprise. For instance, don't all historians in the end bring a subjective agenda to bear on their reading of the evidence? Is it possible that Irving lost his case not because of his biased history but because his agenda was unacceptable? The central issue in the trial -- as for Evans in this book -- was not the past itself, but the way in which historians study the past. In a series of short, sharp chapters, Richard Evans sets David Irving's methods alongside the historical record in order to illuminate the difference between responsible and irresponsible history. The result is a cogent and deeply informed study in the nature of historical interpretation.
Download or read book Eric Hobsbawm written by Richard J. Evans and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-29 with total page 801 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eric Hobsbawm's works have had a nearly incalculable effect across generations of readers and students, influencing more than the practice of history but also the perception of it. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, of second-generation British parents, Hobsbawm was orphaned at age fourteen in 1931. Living with an uncle in Berlin, he experienced the full force of world economic depression, and in the charged reaction to it in Germany was forced to choose between Nazism and Communism, which was no choice at all. Hobsbawm's lifelong allegiance to Communism inspired his pioneering work in social history, particularly the trilogy for which he is most famous--The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, and The Age of Empire--covering what he termed "the long nineteenth century" in Europe. Selling in the millions of copies, these held sway among generations of readers, some of whom went on to have prominent careers in politics and business. In this comprehensive biography of Hobsbawm, acclaimed historian Richard Evans (author of The Third Reich Trilogy, among other works) offers both a living portrait and vital insight into one of the most influential intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Using exclusive and unrestricted access to the unpublished material, Evans places Hobsbawm's writings within their historical and political context. Hobsbawm's Marxism made him a controversial figure but also, uniquely and universally, someone who commanded respect even among those who did not share-or who even outright rejected-his political beliefs. Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History gives us one of the 20th century's most colorful and intellectually compelling figures. It is an intellectual life of the century itself.
Download or read book Stormtroopers written by Daniel Siemens and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full history of the Nazi Stormtroopers whose muscle brought Hitler to power, with revelations concerning their longevity and their contributions to the Holocaust Germany’s Stormtroopers engaged in a vicious siege of violence that propelled the National Socialists to power in the 1930s. Known also as the SA or Brownshirts, these “ordinary” men waged a loosely structured campaign of intimidation and savagery across the nation from the 1920s to the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934, when Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm and many other SA leaders were assassinated on Hitler’s orders. In this deeply researched history, Daniel Siemens explores not only the roots of the SA and its swift decapitation but also its previously unrecognized transformation into a million-member Nazi organization, its activities in German-occupied territories during World War II, and its particular contributions to the Holocaust. The author provides portraits of individual members and their victims and examines their milieu, culture, and ideology. His book tells the long-overdue story of the SA and its devastating impact on German citizens and the fate of their country.
Download or read book Beyond the Great Story written by Robert F. Berkhofer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What legitimate form can history take when faced by the severe challenges issued in recent years by literary, rhetorical, multiculturalist, and feminist theories? That is the question considered in this pathbreaking book. Robert Berkhofer addresses the essential practical concern of contemporary historians.
Download or read book Death in Hamburg written by Richard J. Evans and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-10-25 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A tremendous book, the biography of a city which charts the multifarious pathways from bacilli to burgomaster." - Roy Porter, London Review of Books Why were nearly 10,000 people killed in six weeks in Hamburg, while most of Europe was left almost unscathed? As Richard J. Evans explains, it was largely because the town was a “free city” within Germany that was governed by the “English” ideals of laissez-faire. The absence of an effective public-health policy combined with ill-founded medical theories and the miserable living conditions of the poor to create a scene ripe for tragedy. The story of the “cholera years” is, in Richard Evans’s hands, tragically revealing of the age’s social inequalities and governmental pitilessness and incompetence; it also offers disquieting parallels with the world’s public-health landscape today, including the current coronavirus crisis.
Download or read book The Hitler Conspiracies written by Richard J. Evans and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Brilliant, a 5 out of 5 masterpiece' Evening Standard The renowned historian of the Third Reich takes on the conspiracy theories surrounding Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, in a vital history book for the 'post-truth' age The idea that nothing happens by chance in history, that nothing is quite what it seems to be at first sight, that everything that occurs is the result of the secret machinations of malign groups of people manipulating everything from behind the scenes is as old as history itself. But conspiracy theories are becoming more popular and more widespread in the twenty-first century. Nowhere have they become more obvious than in revisionist accounts of the history of the Third Reich. Long-discredited conspiracy theories have taken on a new lease of life, given credence by claims of freshly discovered evidence and novel angles of investigation. This book takes five widely discussed claims involving Hitler and the Nazis and subjects them to forensic scrutiny: that the Jews were conspiring to undermine civilization, as outlined in 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'; that the German army was 'stabbed in the back' by socialists and Jews in 1918; that the Nazis burned down the Reichstag in order to seize power; that Rudolf Hess' flight to the UK in 1941 was sanctioned by Hitler and conveyed peace terms suppressed by Churchill; and that Hitler escaped the bunker in 1945 and fled to South America. In doing so, it teases out some surprising features these, and other conspiracy theories, have in common. This is a history book, but it is a history book for the age of 'post-truth' and 'alternative facts': a book for our own troubled times.
Download or read book Telling the Truth about History written by Joyce Appleby and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-02-14 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A fascinating historiographical essay. . . . An unusually lucid and inclusive explication of what it ultimately at stake in the culture wars over the nature, goals, and efficacy of history as a discipline."—Booklist
Download or read book The Pursuit of Power written by Richard J. Evans and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 1071 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ECONOMIST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2016 'A scintillating, encyclopaedic history, rich in detail from the arcane to the familiar... a veritable tour de force' Richard Overy, New Statesman 'Transnational history at its finest ... .. social, political and cultural themes swirl together in one great canvas of immense detail and beauty' Gerard DeGroot, The Times 'Dazzlingly erudite and entertaining' Dominic Sandbrook, The Sunday Times A masterpiece which brings to life an extraordinarly turbulent and dramatic era of revolutionary change. The Pursuit of Power draws on a lifetime of thinking about nineteenth-century Europe to create an extraordinarily rich, surprising and entertaining panorama of a continent undergoing drastic transformation. The book aims to reignite the sense of wonder that permeated this remarkable era, as rulers and ruled navigated overwhelming cultural, political and technological changes. It was a time where what was seen as modern with amazing speed appeared old-fashioned, where huge cities sprang up in a generation, new European countries were created and where, for the first time, humans could communicate almost instantly over thousands of miles. In the period bounded by the Battle of Waterloo and the outbreak of World War I, Europe dominated the rest of the world as never before or since: this book breaks new ground by showing how the continent shaped, and was shaped by, its interactions with other parts of the globe. Richard Evans explores fully the revolutions, empire-building and wars that marked the nineteenth century, but the book is about so much more, whether it is illness, serfdom, religion or philosophy. The Pursuit of Power is a work by a historian at the height of his powers: essential for anyone trying to understand Europe, then or now.
Download or read book The Bombing War written by Richard Overy and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ultimate history of the Blitz and bombing in the Second World War, from Wolfson Prize-winning historian and author Richard Overy The use of massive fleets of bombers to kill and terrorize civilians was an aspect of the Second World War which continues to challenge the idea that Allies specifically fought a 'moral' war. For Britain, bombing became perhaps its principal contribution to the fighting as, night after night, exceptionally brave men flew over occupied Europe destroying its cities. The Bombing War radically overhauls our understanding of the War. It is the first book to examine seriously not just the most well-known parts of the campaign, but the significance of bombing on many other fronts - the German use of bombers on the Eastern Front for example (as well as much newly discovered material on the more familiar 'Blitz' on Britain), or the Allied campaigns against Italian cities. The result is the author's masterpiece - a rich, gripping, picture of the Second World War and the terrible military, technological and ethical issues that relentlessly drove all its participants into an abyss. Reviews: 'Magnificent ... must now be regarded as the standard work on the bombing war ... It is probably the most important book published on the history of he second world war this century' Richard J Evans, Guardian 'Monumental ... this is a major contribution to one of the most controversial aspects of the Second World War ... full of new detail and perspectives ... hugely impressive' James Holland, Literary Review 'This tremendous book does what the war it describes signally failed to do. With a well-thought-out strategy and precision, it delivers maximum force on its objectives ... The result is a masterpiece of the historian's art' The Times 'It is unlikely that a work of this scale, scope and merit will be surpassed' Times Higher Education 'What distinguishes Mr Overy's account of the bombing war from lesser efforts is the wealth of narrative detail and analytical rigour that he brings to bear' Economist 'Excellent ... Overy is never less than an erudite and clear-eyed guide whose research is impeccable and whose conclusions appear sensible and convincing even when they run against the established trends' Financial Times 'Hard to surpass. If you want to know how bombing worked, what it did and what it meant, this is the book to read' Times Literary Supplement About the author: Richard Overy is the author of a series of remarkable books on the Second World War and the wider disasters of the twentieth century. The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia won both the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hessell-Tiltman Prize. He is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. Penguin publishes 1939: Countdown to War, The Morbid Age, Russia's War, Interrogations, The Battle of Britain and The Dictators. He lives in London.
Download or read book On Tyranny written by Timothy Snyder and published by Crown. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “bracing” (Vox) guide for surviving and resisting America’s turn towards authoritarianism, from “a rising public intellectual unafraid to make bold connections between past and present” (The New York Times) “Timothy Snyder reasons with unparalleled clarity, throwing the past and future into sharp relief. He has written the rare kind of book that can be read in one sitting but will keep you coming back to help regain your bearings.”—Masha Gessen The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. On Tyranny is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.
Download or read book Plotting Hitler s Death written by Joachim C. Fest and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1997-09-15 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author documents more than a dozen plots to assassinate Hitler, surprisingly, from conservative and military circles within Germany.
Download or read book Eichmann Before Jerusalem written by Bettina Stangneth and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-09-02 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A total and groundbreaking reassessment of the life of Adolf Eichmann—a superb work of scholarship that reveals his activities and notoriety among a global network of National Socialists following the collapse of the Third Reich and that permanently challenges Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil.” Smuggled out of Europe after the collapse of Germany, Eichmann managed to live a peaceful and active exile in Argentina for years before his capture by the Mossad. Though once widely known by nicknames such as “Manager of the Holocaust,” in 1961 he was able to portray himself, from the defendant’s box in Jerusalem, as an overworked bureaucrat following orders—no more, he said, than “just a small cog in Adolf Hitler’s extermination machine.” How was this carefully crafted obfuscation possible? How did a central architect of the Final Solution manage to disappear? And what had he done with his time while in hiding? Bettina Stangneth, the first to comprehensively analyze more than 1,300 pages of Eichmann’s own recently discovered written notes— as well as seventy-three extensive audio reel recordings of a crowded Nazi salon held weekly during the 1950s in a popular district of Buenos Aires—draws a chilling portrait, not of a reclusive, taciturn war criminal on the run, but of a highly skilled social manipulator with an inexhaustible ability to reinvent himself, an unrepentant murderer eager for acolytes with whom to discuss past glories while vigorously planning future goals with other like-minded fugitives. A work that continues to garner immense international attention and acclaim, Eichmann Before Jerusalem maps out the astonishing links between innumerable past Nazis—from ace Luftwaffe pilots to SS henchmen—both in exile and in Germany, and reconstructs in detail the postwar life of one of the Holocaust’s principal organizers as no other book has done
