Karl Marx is a magisterial and defining biography that vividly explores not only the man himself but also the revolutionary times in which he lived.Between his birth in 1818 and his death sixty-five years later, Karl Marx became one of Western civilization’s most influential political philosophers. Two centuries on, he is still revered as a prophet of the modern world, yet he is also blamed for the darkest atrocities of modern times. But no matter in what light he is cast, the shor...

A panoramic view of global history from the end of World War Two to the dawn of the new millennium, and a portrait of an age of unprecedented transformation. In this ambitious, groundbreaking, and sweeping work, Jonathan Sperber guides readers through six decades of global history, from the end of World War Two to the onset of the new millennium. As Sperber's immersive and propulsive book reveals, the defining quality of these decades involved the rising and unstoppable fl...

Jonathan Sperber’s Revolutionary Europe 1780–1850 is a history of Europe in the age of the French Revolution, from the end of the old regime to the outcome of the revolutions of 1848. Fully revised and updated, this second edition provides a continent-wide history of the key political events and social transformation that took place within this turbulent period, extending as far as their effects within the European colonial society of the Caribbean.Key features include...

This major interpretation of the Revolution of 1848-1849 in Germany stresses its character as a mass political phenomenon. Building skillfully on the theme of the interaction of self-conscious radicalism and spontaneous popular movements, Jonathan Sperber analyzes the social and religious antagonisms of pre-1848 German society and shows how they were politicized by the democratic political opposition.

Now in its second edition, Bourgeois Europe, 1850–1914 is a general history of Europe from the middle of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War, a successor to Revolutionary Europe: 1780–1850, also available from Routledge.The book offers wide geographic coverage of the European continent, from the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to the Urals. Topical coverage is equally broad, including major trends and events in in...

**A New York Times bestseller • A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, 2025 Kirkus Prize, 2025 Cundill History Prize, and 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction • Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker,The New Republic, and Mother Jones“Greg Grandin's argument is compelling and written with zest. His history is punchy, the array of sources is vast, and the narrative pace is superb.” —

21st Century Monetary Policy takes readers inside the Federal Reserve, explaining what it does and why.In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve deployed an extraordinary range of policy tools that helped prevent the collapse of the financial system and the U.S. economy. Chair Jerome Powell and his colleagues lent directly to U.S. businesses, purchased trillions of dollars of government securities, pumped dollars into the international fina...

**Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in HistoryWinner of the Hillman Prize for Book JournalismFinalist for the Kirkus Prize for NonfictionNamed a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and the Chicago Public Library • One of NPR's "Books We Love" for 2022A paradigm-shifting investigation of Jim Crow–era violence, the legal apparatus that sustained it, and its enduring...

This "disturbing yet fascinating" exploration of mass mania through the ages explains the biological and psychological roots of irrationality ( Kirkus Reviews).From time immemorial, contagious narratives have spread through susceptible groups—with enormous, often disastrous, consequences. Inspired by Charles Mackay's nineteenth-century classic Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, neurologist and author William Bern...

The New York Times bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor uses the same skills to teach how to access accurate information in a rapidly changing 24/7 news cycle and become better readers, thinkers, and consumers of media.We live in an information age, but it is increasingly difficult to know which information to trust. Fake news is rampant in mass media, stoked by foreign powers wishing to disrupt a democratic society. We ne...

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice SelectionOne of President Bill Clinton’s “Best Things I’ve Read This Year”From the acclaimed historian and New Yorker writer comes this urgent manifesto on the dilemma of nationalism and the erosion of liberalism in the twenty-first century.At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America

**"Plutarch regularly shows that great leaders transcend their own purely material interests and petty, personal vanities. Noble ideals actually do matter, in government as in life." —Michael Dirda, Washington PostA brilliant new translation of five of history’s greatest lives from Plutarch, the inventor of biography.**Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, Brutus, Antony: the names resonate across thousands of years. Major figures in the civil wars that brutally ended the Roman ...