The Inter-war Crisis 1919-1939 (Seminar Studies In History) (Paperback)

The inter-war years were, at the time, perceived to be years of crisis across the world. The First World War, ‘the war to end all wars’, had solved nothing and its legacy was a world full of unresolved disputes and manifest ambiguities.

Overy examines the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent economic crisis which struck at the very foundations of the capitalist world, and seeks to explain why dictatorships came to supplant democracy in Italy, Spain, Germany, the Baltic States and the Balkans, and why the world slid into war once more in 1939.

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 second edition of his Seminar Studies volume, Richard Overy presents the history of a civilization scrambling to save itself from looming disaster which seemed as brutal and tragic as it was unavoidable.

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 whole 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, or communist subversion or Jewish plots.

Despite the yearning for peace, war appeared inescapable - not simply a reaction to Hitler's rise to power, war was also seen by some 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.

Areas covered include:

• A new chapter exploring the intellectual, scientific and cultural response 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

Richard Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He has authored 17 books on the Third Reich, the Second World War and air warfare these include:The Air War 1939-1945 (2nd ed, 2006), Why the Allies Won (2nd ed, 2006) andThe Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (2004) which won both the Wolfson and the  Hessell Tiltman Prizes for History in 2005.

• Books > History > Academic History
• Books > History > World History > Inter-war Period 1919-1938
• Books > Study Books > Undergraduate & Postgraduate > Arts & Humanities > History > By Series > Seminar Studies in History

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