In this fully revised and updated third edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Maura Elizabeth Cunningham provide cogent answers to the most urgent questions regarding the newest superpower, and offer a framework for understanding China's meteoric rise from developing country to superpower. Focusing their answers through the historical legacies--Confucian thought, Western and Japanese imperialism, the Mao era, and the massacre near Tiananmen...

In the 19th century Europe changed more rapidly and radically than during any prior period. This volume offers an approach to understanding one of the most complex periods of modern history, addressing all the major issues.

Half a century after their deaths, the dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler still cast a long and terrible shadow over the modern world. They were the most destructive and lethal regimes in history, murdering millions. They fought the largest and costliest war in all history.

With great flair and authority, the author describes Prussia's great battles, dynastic marriages and astonishing reversals of fortune, its brilliant and charismatic leaders from the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg to Bismarck and Frederick the Great, the military machine and the progressive, enlightened values on which it was built.

The horrific series of conflicts known as the Thirty Years War (1618-48) tore the heart out of Europe, killing perhaps a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to whole areas of Central Europe to such a degree that many towns and regions never recovered. This title explains a compelling series of events.

King of Prussia, German Emperor, war leader and defeated exile, Kaiser Wilhelm II was one of the most important figures in the history of twentieth-century Europe. This book presents a fresh interpretation of this contentious figure, focusing on how his thirty-year reign from 1888 to 1918 affected Germany, and the rest of Europe.

This retelling and explanation of over eighty myths is interspersed with bold and vibrant pictures, with the wide range of contributors offering a distinctly global range of expertise. Includes the stories of Pandora's Box, King Midas, and Pyramus and Thisbe.

'The fascinating story of ancient words ? new revelations await' The Guardian 'A truly extraordinary detective story' Matt Ridley, author of The Evolution of Everything ________________________________