Austria & Hungary

From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War "The Good War."But before it even...

An essential new history of Central Europe, the contested lands so often at the heart of world history  Central Europe has long been infamous as a region beset by war, a place where empires clashed and world wars began. In The Middle Kingdoms, Martyn Rady offers the definitive history of the...

The definitive history of a powerful family dynasty who dominated Europe for centuries -- from their rise to power to their eventual downfall. Habsburgs ruled much of Europe for centuries. From modest origins as minor German nobles, the family used fabricated documents, invented genealogies...

From a bestselling historian, a daringly revisionist history of World War I The Pity of War makes a simple and provocative argument: the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England's fault. According to Niall Ferguson, England entered into war based on naive assumptions of German...

From the end of the Middle Ages to the First World War, Europe was dominated by one family: the Habsburgs. Their unprecedented rule is the focus of Simon Winder's vivid third book, Danubia. Thrillingly informative, Danubia is a treat that listeners will be eager to dip into....

The vibrant, sprawling saga of Empress Maria Theresa—one of the most renowned women rulers in history—and three of her extraordinary daughters, including Marie Antoinette, the doomed queen of France. Out of the thrilling and tempestuous eighteenth century comes the sweeping family saga of...

As he rose to power, Hitler's hatred toward the Habsburgs and their diverse empire fixated on Franz Ferdinand's sons, who became outspoken critics of the Nazi party and its racist ideology. When Germany seized Austria in 1938, they were the first two Austrians arrested by the Gestapo....

In a panoramic and pioneering reappraisal, Pieter M. Judson shows why the Habsburg Empire mattered so much, for so long, to millions of Central Europeans....

Richard Cockett gives us the entirety of an extraordinary story of how one city made the modern world—and how we all remain inescapably Viennese....

German military history is typically viewed as an inexorable march to the rise of Prussia and the two world wars, the road paved by militarism and the result a specifically German way of war. Peter Wilson challenges this narrative....

A spirited, poignant history of the seven daughters of the great Empress Maria Theresia—among them, Queen Marie Antoinette of France—tracing their lives as they balanced dynastic duty with personal ambition in a time of revolutionary cataclysm “Others make war; you, happy Austria, marry...

The Bridge at Andau is James A. Michener at his most gripping. His classic nonfiction account of a doomed uprising is as searing and unforgettable as any of his bestselling novels. For five brief, glorious days in the autumn of 1956, the Hungarian revolution gave its people a glimpse at a...

December 1944. Soviet and German troops fight from house to house in the shattered, corpse-strewn suburbs of Budapest. Crazed Hungarian fascists join with die-hard Nazis to slaughter Jews day and night, turning the Danube blood-red. In less than six months, thirty-eight-year-old SS Colonel Adolf...

In 1683, an Ottoman army that stretched from horizon to horizon set out to seize the "Golden Apple," as Turks referred to Vienna. The ensuing siege pitted battle-hardened Janissaries wielding seventeenth-century grenades against Habsburg armies, widely feared for their savagery. The walls of...

A distinguished professor debunks the assertion that America's Founders were deists who desired the strict separation of church and state and instead shows that their political ideas were profoundly influenced by their Christian convictions. In 2010, David Mark Hall gave a lecture at the...

The extraordinary story of a life suspended between the collapse of the imperial order and the violent emergence of modern Europe....

Drawing on unpublished letters and rare primary sources, King and Woolmans tell the true story behind the tragic romance and brutal assassination that sparked World War I....

The Austro-Hungarian army that marched east and south to confront the Russians and Serbs in the opening campaigns of World War I had a glorious past but a pitiful present....

The Crossroads of Civilization is a rich and illuminating history of the world capital that has transformed art, culture, and politics....

The Habsburg family ruled central Europe since the early medieval times to World War I, but they still exist as one of the most prestigious Austrian families. To keep themselves in such high positions, the Habsburgs had to develop unique strategies to fight their political enemies....

This is the concluding volume of the history of the IV SS-Panzerkorps, a relatively unknown organization that was born in battle during the last year of the war and fought exclusively on the Eastern Front....

Wolfram Siemann paints a fundamentally new image of the man who shaped Europe for over four decades. He reveals Metternich as more modern and his career much more forward-looking than we have ever recognized....

From an award-winning historian, the gripping, singular story of the destruction of Jewish Vienna as seen through the letters and diaries of an extraordinary woman who witnessed it all. In 1922, Hugo Bettauer published the novel The City Without Jews, a satirical critique of Austrian...

In 1930s and 1940s Vienna, psychiatrist Hans Asperger sought to define autism as a diagnostic category, aiming to treat those children he deemed capable of participating fully in society. Depicted as a compassionate researcher, Asperger was in fact deeply influenced by Nazi psychiatry....

Winner of the 2017 Prix Goncourt, this eye-opening account of the muddled forces at work behind the Anschluss brilliantly dismantles the myth of a glorious and inevitable Nazi victory....