The Inter-War Crisis: Revised 2nd Edition (Seminar Studies) - Softcover

Overy, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1408223171 ISBN 13: 9781408223178

Publisher: Routledge, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the 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.

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1408223171
• ISBN 13: 9781408223178
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 192