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A People's History of the Second World War unearths the fascinating history of the war as fought 'from below'. Until now, the vast majority of historical accounts have focussed on the conflict between the Allied and Axis powers for imperialist mastery. Donny Gluckstein shows that in fact between 1939 and 1945 two distinct wars were fought – one ‘from above’ and one ‘from below’.

Using examples from countries under the Nazi heel, in the colonies and within the Axis and Allied camps, Gluckstein brings to life the very different struggle of the people's and resistance movements which proliferated during the war. He shows how they fought not just fascism, but colonialism and empire, and were betrayed by the Allies at the war’s end.

This book will fundamentally challenge our understanding of the Second World War – both about the people who fought it and the reasons for which it was fought.

An essential, accessible guide to the greatest conflict in human history.

A World in Flames by Martha Byrd offers a clear, compelling, and comprehensive chronicle of World War II, guiding readers through the defining battles, strategies, and turning points that reshaped the modern world. Emphasizing the military history of the conflict, Byrd structures the narrative as a battle‑by‑battle survey, covering major campaigns including Stalingrad, Omaha Beach, and the Battle of the Atlantic, each presented with clarity and precision. 

Beginning with the prelude to war and the rising tensions across Europe and Asia, the book traces Germany’s swift subjugation of Holland, Belgium, and France before shifting to Britain’s determined resistance. As the conflict expands, Byrd explores Japan’s entry into the war, the rapid advances across the Pacific, and the United States’ pivotal role in reversing Axis momentum. 

Byrd’s accessible style makes complex military operations understandable without sacrificing depth, offering readers both a broad overview and meaningful detail. Maps, campaign analyses, and vivid summaries of naval, air, and ground operations provide context for the global scale of the conflict. From the brutal Eastern Front to the island‑hopping campaigns of the Pacific, the book highlights the strategic decisions and human costs that defined the war’s progression. 

Concluding with the collapse of Axis power and the war’s final climactic battles in Europe and the Pacific, A World in Flames stands as an excellent introduction for readers seeking a concise but thorough account of World War II—one praised for its balance of readability, accuracy, and narrative drive. 

A moving personal account of a man’s flight for freedom—above the clouds and beyond prejudice—by one of the first Tuskegee airmen.

A-Train is the story of one of the black Americans who, during World War II, graduated from Tuskegee (AL) Flying School and served as a pilot in the Army Air Corps’ 99th Pursuit Squadron. Charles W. Dryden presents a fast-paced, balanced, and personal account of what it was like to prepare for a career traditionally closed to African Americans, how he coped with the frustrations and dangers of combat, and how he, along with many fellow black pilots, navigators, bombardiers, and crewmen, emerged with a magnificent war record.

Under the command of Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr., the Tuskegee airmen fought over North Africa, Sicily, and Europe, escorting American bomber crews who respected their "no-losses" record. Some were shot down, many of them were killed or captured by the enemy, and several won medals of valor and honor. But the airmen still faced great barriers of racial prejudice in the armed forces and at home. As a member of that elite group of young pilots who fought for their country overseas while being denied civil liberties at home, Dryden presents an eloquent story that will touch every reader.

A powerful work by the heralded writer, this collection is a touchstone event in German literature of the post-war era.

On April 8, 1945, several American bomber squadrons were informed that their German targets were temporarily unavailable due to cloud cover. As it was too late to turn back, the assembled ordnance of more than two hundred bombers was diverted to nearby Halberstadt. A mid-sized cathedral town of no particular industrial or strategic importance, Halberstadt was almost totally destroyed, and a then-thirteen-year-old Alexander Kluge watched his town burn to the ground. 

In this work, Sean Dettman traces an observable correlation over the course of late summer 1940 between the bombings of London and other UK cities and the changing attitude of the American people towards adopting a moderate pro-aid position, and argues that these processes were aided by pro-aid US journalists who deployed a positive Blitz narrative centered on themes of resilience, courage, and fortitude. This shift in US public opinion allowed the Roosevelt Administration and pro-aid pressure groups to advance conversations in Washington towards aiding Britain, even at the risk of war.

Dettman also argues that this shift in opinion was caused by fear that a Nazi victory would threaten US national security and the American way of life, rather than an interest in expanding pro-democratic structures and institutions in Britain. 

Whereas the vast body of literature examining US public opinion during the ‘Great Debate’ reduces the Blitz narrative to a minor cause, America and the Blitz demonstrates how the Blitz narrative influenced domestic conversations regarding US national security and the American way of life. The author reveals that when the events and themes of the Blitz come into dialogue with conversations about US aid to Britain and national security, the traditional narrative changes.

America and the Blitz offers a new framework for understanding the ‘Great Debate,’ revealing the relationship between US journalists’ Blitz narrative and its effect on US public opinion towards aiding Britain and the ascendancy of American global power.

Cultural diplomacy—“winning hearts and minds” through positive portrayals of the American way of life—is a key element in U.S. foreign policy, although it often takes a backseat to displays of military might. Americans All provides an in-depth, fine-grained study of a particularly successful instance of cultural diplomacy—the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), a government agency established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 and headed by Nelson A. Rockefeller that worked to promote hemispheric solidarity and combat Axis infiltration and domination by bolstering inter-American cultural ties.

Darlene J. Sadlier explores how the CIAA used film, radio, the press, and various educational and high-art activities to convince people in the United States of the importance of good neighbor relations with Latin America, while also persuading Latin Americans that the United States recognized and appreciated the importance of our southern neighbors. She examines the CIAA’s working relationship with Hollywood’s Motion Picture Society of the Americas; its network and radio productions in North and South America; its sponsoring of Walt Disney, Orson Welles, John Ford, Gregg Toland, and many others who traveled between the United States and Latin America; and its close ties to the newly created Museum of Modern Art, which organized traveling art and photographic exhibits and produced hundreds of 16mm educational films for inter-American audiences; and its influence on the work of scores of artists, libraries, book publishers, and newspapers, as well as public schools, universities, and private organizations.

Compared to the writings of other American observers of the Third Reich, Plotkin's diary is unique in style, scope, themes, and time span. Most accounts of Hitler's rise to power emphasize political institutions by focusing on the Nazi party's clashes with other political forces. In contrast, Plotkin is especially attentive to socioeconomic factors, providing an alternative view from the left that stems from his access to key German labor and socialist leaders. Chronologically, the diary reports on the moment when Hitler's seizure of power was not yet inevitable and when leaders on the left still believed in a different outcome of the crisis, but it also includes Plotkin's account of the complete destruction of German labor in May 1933.

Published to great acclaim in French and now available for the first time in English, this groundbreaking book explores how the Nazi regime used sexuality to promote political loyalty, conformity, and cohesion among “ordinary” Germans. Beginning before the collapse of the Weimar Republic and continuing through the postwar American occupation of Germany, Elissa Mailänder’s study highlights the complex and conflicted ways that sexual “liberation,” repression, and violence were used and experienced in the everyday lives of citizens of the Reich. Her analysis draws on a vast array of sources, from legal dossiers to private photographs and letters, as well as public archives, magazines, and movies. Mailänder’s findings are often uncomfortable; she demonstrates, for example, that a significant number of women who were not persecuted by the regime saw shifts in gender and sexual norms as positive developments—ones that some felt were lost under the American occupation, with its own routines of military sexual exploitation. What emerges is a portrait of a regime that was less interested in repressing sexuality than in reinventing it according to a racist, elitist, and homophobic agenda.

An alternate selection of the History Book Club and Military Book Club

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Halina Nelken was a precocious fifteen-year-old, living a middle-class life in Krakow. Like other girls her age, she recorded her personal observations and feelings in a diary. As conditions in Krakow deteriorated and her family was forced into the Jewish ghetto, she continued to write, eventually smuggling her diary out with a Catholic friend. This remarkable book tells the story of Nelken's experiences in the ghetto and later in eight Nazi concentration camps, including Plaszow, Auschwitz, and Ravensbrück. Her diary entries, written between 1938 and 1943, form the core of the volume and are supplemented by recollections written shortly after the war, and by later commentaries and explanatory notes which she added in the mid-1980s. Although there exist numerous published and unpublished memoirs by Holocaust survivors, Nelken's book presents one of the few extant diaries written at the time. Already released in Polish and German editions, it has been hailed as one of the finest works of its kind. Now it is available in English for the first time.

A commanding firsthand account of the most successful antisubmarine campaign in U.S. Naval History.

The USS England was a 1200-ton, 306-foot, long-hull destroyer escort. Commissioned into service in late 1943 and dispatched to the Pacific the following February, the England and its crew, in one 12-day period in 1944, sank more submarines than any other ship in U.S. naval history: of the six targets attacked, all six were destroyed. For this distinction, legendary in the annals of antisubmarine warfare, the ship and her crew were honored with the Presidential Unit Citation.

After convoying in the Atlantic, John A. Williamson was assigned to the England—first as its executive officer, then as its commanding officer—from the time of her commissioning until she was dry-docked for battle damage repairs in the Philadelphia Naval Yard fifteen months later. Besides being a key participant in the remarkable antisubmarine actions, Williamson commanded the England in the battle of Okinawa, where she was attacked by kamikaze planes.

Williamson narrates his memoir with authority and authenticity, describes naval tactics and weaponry precisely, and provides information gleaned from translations of the orders from the Japanese high command to Submarine Squadron 7. The author details the challenges of communal life aboard ship and explains the intense loyalty that bonds crew members for life. Ultimately, Williamson offers a compelling portrait of himself, an inexperienced naval officer who, having come of age in Alabama during the Depression, rose to become the most successful World War II antisubmarine warfare officer in the Pacific.
 

Sixty years ago, at the height of World War II, an extraordinary series of gatherings took place at Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts. During the summers of 1942–1944, leading European figures in the arts and sciences met at the college with their American counterparts for urgent conversations about the future of human civilization in a precarious world. 

Two Sorbonne professors, the distinguished medievalist Gustave Cohen and the existentialist philosopher Jean Wahl, organized these “Pontigny” sessions, named after an abbey in Burgundy where similar symposia had been held in the decades before the war. Among the participants—many of whom were Jewish or had Jewish backgrounds—were the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Rachel Bespaloff, the poets Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the linguist Roman Jakobson, and the painters Marc Chagall and Robert Motherwell. 

In this collection of original essays, Stanley Cavell and Jacques Derrida lead an international group of scholars—including Jed Perl, Mary Ann Caws, Jeffrey Mehlman, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl—in assessing the lasting impact and contemporary significance of Pontigny-en- Amérique. Rachel Bespaloff, a tragic figure who wrote a major work on the Iliad, is restored to her rightful place beside Arendt and Simone Weil. Anyone interested in the “intellectual resistance” of Francophone intellectuals and artists, and the inspiring support from such American figures as Stevens and Moore, will want to read this pioneering work of scholarship and historical re-creation.

In the early 20th century, the diesel-electric submarine made possible a new type of unrestricted naval warfare. Such brutal practices as targeting passenger, cargo, and hospital ships not only violated previous international agreements; they were targeted explicitly at civilians. A deviant form of warfare quickly became the norm.

In Atrocity, Deviance, and Submarine Warfare, Nachman Ben-Yehuda recounts the evolution of submarine warfare, explains the nature of its deviance, documents its atrocities, and places these developments in the context of changing national identities and definitions of the ethical, at both social and individual levels. Introducing the concept of cultural cores, he traces the changes in cultural myths, collective memory, and the understanding of unconventionality and deviance prior to the outbreak of World War I. Significant changes in cultural cores, Ben-Yehuda concludes, permitted the rise of wartime atrocities at sea.