Tom Stammers: 5 books

Daniel Goldhagen's study of the Holocaust offers conclusions that run directly counter to those reached by Christopher Browning, whose book Ordinary Men is also the subject of a Macat analysis. As such, the two analyses make possible some interesting critical thinking exercises focused on evaluation...

Of all the controversies facing historians today, few are more divisive or more important than the question of how the Holocaust was possible. What led thousands of Germans – many of them middle-aged reservists with, apparently, little Nazi zeal – to willingly commit acts of genocide? Was it ideology?...

The Age of Revolution is the first of four works by Eric Hobsbawm that collectively synthesize the ideas he developed over a lifetime spent studying the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hobsbawm's vision is important – he was a lifelong Marxist whose view of history was shaped by a fascination...

Richard Evans wrote In Defence of History at a time when the historian's profession was coming under heavy attack as a result of the ‘cultural turn’ taken by the discipline during the late 1980s and the 1990s. Historians were being forced to face up to postmodern thinking, which argued that, because...

Georges Lefebvre was one of the most highly-regarded historians of the 20th century – and a key reason for the high reputation he enjoys can be found in The Coming of the French Revolution. Lefebvre's key contribution to the debate over what remains arguably one of history's most contentious...