The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 by a Serbian nationalist has set off a crisis in Europe. Since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, peace had largely prevailed among the Great Powers, preserved through international conferences and a delicate balance of power. Now, however, interlocking alliances are threatening to plunge Europe into war, as Austria-Hungry is threatening war against Serbia. Germany is allied with Austria-Hungary, while Russia views itself as the p...

Set in Japan during the early years of World War II, this game helps students understand the political and strategic reasons behind Japan’s decision to enter the war. Taking on the roles of leading figures in Tokyo—army or navy officers, bureaucrats, and members of the Imperial Court—students are thrust into the middle of Japan’s strategic dilemma. Drawing on important works from Japan’s past, players must advise the emperor on how to proceed. Will they call for a “strike south” to seize t...

John T. Flynn, a prolific writer, columnist for the New Republic, Harper's Magazine, and Collier's Weekly, radio commentator, and political activist, was described by the New York Times in 1964 as “a man of wide-ranging contradictions.” In this new biography of Flynn, John E. Moser fleshes out his many contradictions and profound influence on U.S. history and political discourse.In the 1930s, Flynn advocated extensive regulation of the economy, the breakup of holding companies, and ...

The devastation of the Second World War is coming to an end. As victory for the Grand Alliance draws close, the leaders of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States gather at Yalta, a resort town on the Black Sea, for the most important summit meeting of the war. Can the great powers finalize their plans for a new world order, or will their often antagonistic ideologies prevent them from forging a lasting peace? Restoring the World immerses students in the Yalta Confe...

The Global Great Depression and the Coming of World War II demonstrates the ways in which the economic crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s helped to cause and shape the course of the Second World War. Historian John E. Moser points to the essential uniformity in the way in which the world s industrialized and industrializing nations responded to the challenge of the Depression. Among these nations, there was a move away from legislative deliberation and toward executive autho...

Shortly after arriving in the White House in early 1933, Franklin Roosevelt took the United States off the gold standard. His opponents thought his decision unwise at best, and ruinous at worst. But they could not have been more wrong.With The Money Makers, Eric Rauchway tells the absorbing story of how FDR and his advisors pulled the levers of monetary policy to save the domestic economy and propel the United States to unprecedented prosperity and superpower status. Drawi...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author's stunning trilogy of American history, spanning the birth of the Constitution to the final days of the Cold War.In these three volumes, Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winner James MacGregor Burns chronicles with depth and narrative panache the most significant cultural, economic, and political events of American history. In The Vineyard of Liberty, he combines the color and texture of early American life with met...

When turmoil strikes world monetary and financial markets, leaders invariably call for 'a new Bretton Woods' to prevent catastrophic economic disorder and defuse political conflict. The name of the remote New Hampshire town where representatives of forty-four nations gathered in July 1944, in the midst of the century's second great war, has become shorthand for enlightened globalization. The actual story surrounding the historic Bretton Woods accords, however, is full of startling drama, i...

"A brilliant full-length portrait of Franklin Roosevelt the politician"—the first in an award-winning two-volume biography ( The Christian Science Monitor).Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the longest serving president in United States history, reshaping the country during the crises of the Great Depression and World War II. But before his ascension to the presidency, FDR laid the groundwork for his unprecedented run with decades of canny political maneuvering...

The first international history of the emergence of economic sanctions during the interwar period and the legacy of this developmentEconomic sanctions dominate the landscape of world politics today. First developed in the early twentieth century as a way of exploiting the flows of globalization to defend liberal internationalism, their appeal is that they function as an alternative to war. This view, however, ignores the dark paradox at their core: designed to prev...

From the ashes of World War II to the conflict over Iraq, William Hitchcock examines the miraculous transformation of Europe from a deeply fractured land to a continent striving for stability, tolerance, democracy, and prosperity. Exploring the role of Cold War politics in Europe’s peace settlement and the half century that followed, Hitchcock reveals how leaders such as Charles de Gaulle, Willy Brandt, and Margaret Thatcher balanced their nations’ interests against the demands of the reig...