The best books on the German Empire

Poland: The First Thousand Years is a lively and accessible introduction to Polish history, presented from its medieval beginnings up to the present.

My book is a sweeping account designed to amplify major figures, moments, milestones, and turning points in Polish history. These include important battles and illustrious individuals, alliances forged by marriages and choices of religious denomination, and meditations on the likes of the Polish battle slogan "for our freedom and yours" that resounded during the Polish fight for independence in the long 19th century and echoed in the Solidarity period of the late 20th century.

With a wide array of sources, including oodles of maps and images, this book shows how the idea of the German nation developed and changed over half a millennium. Modern nationalism was a major, if extremely destructive part of the story of the German nation. But it was not the whole story. In Germany, as in other countries, nationalism was always only one possible way of imagining the nation.

Contrary to contemporary and later historical opinion, the German army that entered World War One in 1914 was not a mega-machine-like juggernaut built to smash enemies under its wheels. In fact, older notions of combat stressing human strength and morale overcoming all technological and numerical odds had been so persistent in Germany since defeating France in 1870 that – despite the best efforts of modernizers in the decades before the World War – technological shortcomings factored mightily into Germany’s failure to win a quick and decisive victory on the western front in August and September 1914. The result: defeat in a longer war of attrition against a coalition of more powerful enemies.     

This book provides an engaging and accessible guide to current thinking on Imperial Germany. It offers a historiographical overview, spanning more than a century of works on the German Empire guides readers through the main approaches, from ‘personalist’ to ‘structuralist’ and ‘post-structuralist’; presents varying perspectives on gender, cultural history, international relations, colonialism, and war; explores the controversial reputations of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II; and reflects the wide range of opinions on Imperial Germany held by historians today.

As the book shows, history is never static. Since it appeared, some debates have moved on and exciting new works have appeared. This list highlights five recent books which I would certainly look to include in any new edition.

This book provides an engaging and accessible guide to current thinking on Imperial Germany. It offers a historiographical overview, spanning more than a century of works on the German Empire guides readers through the main approaches, from ‘personalist’ to ‘structuralist’ and ‘post-structuralist’; presents varying perspectives on gender, cultural history, international relations, colonialism, and war; explores the controversial reputations of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II; and reflects the wide range of opinions on Imperial Germany held by historians today.

As the book shows, history is never static. Since it appeared, some debates have moved on and exciting new works have appeared. This list highlights five recent books which I would certainly look to include in any new edition.

With a wide array of sources, including oodles of maps and images, this book shows how the idea of the German nation developed and changed over half a millennium. Modern nationalism was a major, if extremely destructive part of the story of the German nation. But it was not the whole story. In Germany, as in other countries, nationalism was always only one possible way of imagining the nation.

This book provides an engaging and accessible guide to current thinking on Imperial Germany. It offers a historiographical overview, spanning more than a century of works on the German Empire guides readers through the main approaches, from ‘personalist’ to ‘structuralist’ and ‘post-structuralist’; presents varying perspectives on gender, cultural history, international relations, colonialism, and war; explores the controversial reputations of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II; and reflects the wide range of opinions on Imperial Germany held by historians today.

As the book shows, history is never static. Since it appeared, some debates have moved on and exciting new works have appeared. This list highlights five recent books which I would certainly look to include in any new edition.

This book provides an engaging and accessible guide to current thinking on Imperial Germany. It offers a historiographical overview, spanning more than a century of works on the German Empire guides readers through the main approaches, from ‘personalist’ to ‘structuralist’ and ‘post-structuralist’; presents varying perspectives on gender, cultural history, international relations, colonialism, and war; explores the controversial reputations of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II; and reflects the wide range of opinions on Imperial Germany held by historians today.

As the book shows, history is never static. Since it appeared, some debates have moved on and exciting new works have appeared. This list highlights five recent books which I would certainly look to include in any new edition.

History-writing is often related to the formation of collective identities. Historians write the history of nations which answers questions about how those who think of themselves as belonging to a nation, developed over time. History has been, for many centuries, meaningful in the construction of collective identities.

This volume reflects on the ways in which professional historians have, since the 1980s become more self-reflective about their role in providing identities and identifications, and it analyzes the different ways in which they have attempted to stay clear of essentialisms. How did they manage to introduce more self-reflectivity and critical potential into their handling of identitarian questions in historical writing? The volume looks at a range of different histories, political, social, economic, cultural, the history of concepts, visual histories, material culture histories, historical anthropology, environmental history, big history, and global history to demonstrate, how across a range of different sub-disciplines we can speak of a self-reflective turn of historical studies in relation to collective identities.

This book provides an engaging and accessible guide to current thinking on Imperial Germany. It offers a historiographical overview, spanning more than a century of works on the German Empire guides readers through the main approaches, from ‘personalist’ to ‘structuralist’ and ‘post-structuralist’; presents varying perspectives on gender, cultural history, international relations, colonialism, and war; explores the controversial reputations of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II; and reflects the wide range of opinions on Imperial Germany held by historians today.

As the book shows, history is never static. Since it appeared, some debates have moved on and exciting new works have appeared. This list highlights five recent books which I would certainly look to include in any new edition.