The newest immensely original undertaking from the historian who gave us the defining two-volume portrait of Hitler, Fateful Choices puts Ian Kershaw's analytical and storytelling gifts on dazzling display. From May 1940 to December 1941, the leaders of the world's six major powers made a series of related decisions that determined the final outcome of World War II and shaped the course of human destiny. As the author examines the connected stories...

Tensions during the Yalta Conference in February 1945 threatened to tear apart the wartime alliance among Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin just as victory was close at hand. Katz uncovers the dramatic story of the three young women who were chosen by their fathers to travel with them to Yalta. Anna Roosevelt, Sarah Churchill, and Kathleen Harriman were each bound by fierce family loyalty, political savvy, and intertwined romances...

An authoritative chronicle, drawing on new research on World War I, traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute narrative that examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914.

Distinguished historian John Lukacs presents an hour-by-hour account of the five days from 24th to 28th May 1940, as the British War Cabinet debated whether to negotiate with Hitler or to continue the war.

Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, led to one of the most brutal campaigns of World War II: of the estimated 70 million people who died in the war, over 30 million died on the Eastern Front. Although it has previously been argued that the campaign was a pre-emptive strike, in fact, Hitler had been planning a war of intervention against the USSR ever since he came to power in 1933. Using previously unseen sources,...

A remarkably revealing view of how this greatest of Cold War strategists came to doubt his strategy and always doubted himself.

"When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, his papers were sealed in the Vatican Secret Archives, leaving unanswered questions about what he knew and did during World War II. Those questions have only grown and festered, making Pius XII one of the most controversial popes in Church history, especially now as the Vatican prepares to canonize him. In 2020, Pius XII's archives were finally opened, and David I. Kertzer--widely recognized as one of the world's...

The behind-the-scenes story of how the United States forged its wartime alliance with Britain, told from the perspective of three key American players in London: Edward R. Murrow, Averell Harriman, and John Gilbert Winant.