Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in our Time

Bernard Wasserstein

feb 2009 · OUP Oxford

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The twentieth century in Europe witnessed some of the most brutish episodes in history. Yet it also saw incontestable improvements in the conditions of existence for most inhabitants of the continent - from rising living standards and dramatically increased life expectancy, to the virtual elimination of illiteracy, and the advance of women, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals to greater equality of respect and opportunity. It was a century of barbarism and civilization, of cruelty and tenderness, of technological achievement and environmental spoliation, of imperial expansion and withdrawal, of authoritarian repression - and of individualism resurgent. Covering everything from war and politics to social, cultural, and economic change, Barbarism and Civilization is by turns grim, humorous, surprising, and enlightening: a window on the century we have left behind and the earliest years of its troubled successor.

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Bernard Wasserstein was born in London in 1948 and educated at Balliol and Nuffield Colleges, Oxford. He has taught at Sheffield, Oxford, Glasgow, and Brandeis Universities and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since 2003 he has been Harriet and Ulrich Meyer Professor of History at the University of Chicago. His many previous books include Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945 and The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (which won the Golden Dagger Award for Non-Fiction from the Crime Writers' Association).