Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century

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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Mar 14, 2000 - History - 512 pages
An unflinching and intelligent alternative history of the twentieth century that provides a provocative vision of Europe's past, present, and future.

"[A] splendid book." The New York Times Book Review

Dark Continent provides an alternative history of the twentieth century, one in which the triumph of democracy was anything but a forgone conclusion and fascism and communism provided rival political solutions that battled and sometimes triumphed in an effort to determine the course the continent would take.

Mark Mazower strips away myths that have comforted us since World War II, revealing Europe as an entity constantly engaged in a bloody project of self-invention.  Here is a history not of inevitable victories and forward marches, but of narrow squeaks and unexpected twists, where townships boast a bronze of Mussolini on horseback one moment, only to melt it down and recast it as a pair of noble partisans the next.
 

Contents

Democracys Rise and Fall
3
Empires Nations Minorities
41
Healthy Bodies Sick Bodies
76
The Crisis of Capitalism
104
Hitlers New Order 193845
138
Blueprints for the Golden Age
182
A Brutal Peace 19439
212
Building Peoples Democracy
250
The Social Contract in Crisis
327
The Collapse of Communism
361
Making Europe
395
Maps and Tables
404
Notes
417
Guide to Further Reading
451
Index
471
Copyright

Western Europe 195075
286

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About the author (2000)

MARK MAZOWER is Reader in History at the University of Sussex. He is the author of the prizewinning Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44. He writes and broadcasts regularly on current developments in the Balkans.

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