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One of the most difficult, and under-rated, jobs undertaken by the historian is that of the synthesis. Text books covering long periods of historical time demand the exclusion of vast quantities of material.
The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 / Terry Martin
Weighing in at over five hundred pages, this formidable work of scholarship investigates the fifteen-year evolution of the Soviet Union's strategy towards its multi-ethnic jurisdiction from the 'Lenin Constitution' of 1923 through to the consolidation of the 'Stalin Constitution' of 1936.
In The Fall of the GDR, David Childs discusses the collapse of the GDR up to unification. He begins by discussing the leadership structure of the GDR, and notes in particular the relative longevity and the geriatric age structure of the Politbureau in the 1980s.
In spring 2004, Chris Ward argued in Rethinking History that writing on late Stalinism ‘focuses almost exclusively on “high politics”’.(1) Despite the publication of a handful of works that explore the social and cultural history of post-war era – in particular monographs by Amir Weiner, Donald Filtzer and Elena Zubkova – this has remained
Scandals are titillating phenomena, intriguing and enjoyable for almost everyone except their victims. They often carry two highly attractive features: first sex, and second the opportunity of watching high and mighty people being revealed to have feet of clay and thus brought low.
Histories of the Cold War have often, for obvious reasons, concentrated on the grand struggle between 'East and West', 'Communism and Capitalism', the 'USSR and the United States'.
In his review of David Howell’s MacDonald’s Party Matthew Worley praised Howell for his exposition of Labour’s ‘high’ politics and excused him for not including ‘an analysis of local Labour identities’; doing so would, Worley noted, ‘have added years to the book’s construction and probably h
Both these books have their origins in excellent PhD research theses, which have then been adapted into book form. Both books are highly original, well-written and well-organised.
The First World War is a seminal historical event; an historical caesura whose aftershocks still resonate.
In 1990 Robert Gellately completed a major study which investigated the role of the secret police in Nazi Germany. His book, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (Oxford University Press; Oxford, 1995) demonstrated conclusively that the much feared and allegedly omnipresent Gestapo in fact relied on widespread public support to function effectively.