The Inter-War Crisis:Revised 2nd Edition

Description

Features

• Document sections illustrate key points and encourage students to read original sources
• A chronology provides an at-a-glance guide to key dates
• Who’s Who section provides short bibliographies of major figures
• A guide to further reading ensures quality of students research

New to this Edition

This edition has been revised and reformatted, and includes colour plates and primary source material.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the series
Acknowledgements
Chronology

PART ONE: THE BACKGROUND

1.         What Kind of Crisis?

 PART TWO: ANALYSIS

2.         Revolution and Counter-Revolution
                        The Russian Revolution
                        Exporting the Revolution
                        The failure of revolution

3.         A Crisis of Modernisation
                        The challenge of modernity
                        The conservative revolt

4.         The ‘End of Civilisation’
                    Decline of the West
                    Science and civilisation
                    Women, sex and moral decline
                     Psycho-Analysis and the Modern Malaise
                    War and civilisation

5.         The ‘Great Crash’: Capitalism in Crisis
                     The causes of the Crash
                     The effects of the recession
                     The search for recovery
                     The end of capitalism?

6.        Democracy and Dictatorship
                     The decline of democracy
                     The appeal of dictatorship
                     The ‘New Order’ in Politics

7.         The International Crisis
                     The unsettled peace
                     The world crisis
                     The slide to war

PART THREE: ASSESSMENT

8.         The Challenge of Progress

PART FOUR: DOCUMENTS

Glossary
Who’s Who
Bibliography

Index

Back Cover

When the world around you is crumbling and the end of civilization seems near, where do you turn? At the end of the First World War this was the crisis facing millions in the Western world.

In this revised second edition, Richard Overy presents the history of a civilization scrambling to save itself from looming disaster. By 1918 an entire generation across Europe felt themselves poised at a crossroads: a choice between chaos and decline on the one hand or a new world political and economic order on the other. In this atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, entire populations strove to choose order over chaos by turning to the political extremes of fascism and communism. When explanation was required, blame was laid at the doors of enfeebled democracy, communist subversion or Jewish plots.

Despite the yearning for peace, war appeared unavoidable. Not simply a reaction to Hitler's rise to power, some also saw it as a welcome way out of a bankrupt and crisis-ridden age, a violent ending that would clear the stale air of the inter-war world.

This wide-ranging and absorbing book covers:

• The intellectual, scientific and cultural responses to an age of anxiety and fear
• The Russian Revolution and the Great Crash of 1929
• How dictatorship came to replace democracy
• The irresistible slide toward a second world war

This revised edition now includes a colour plate section containing illuminating contemporary posters, photographs and illustrations.

R. J. Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He has written numerous books on the Third Reich, the Second World War and air warfare including: The Air War 1939-1945 (2nd ed., 2006), Why the Allies Won (2nd ed., 2006) and The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (2004) which won both the Wolfson and the Hessell Tiltman Prizes for History in 2005.