For our latest “Eminent Biography” installment, Joshua Rubenstein reflects on his writing of the tumultuous political career of Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary’s Life, the latest in Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series. Often remembered as persecutor turned persecuted, Leon Trotsky was a central figure in the global political drama between
The recent passing of retired senior military official and former Yale professor William Odom has given many the chance to reflect on his life of service and scholarship. In his work with the Carter and Reagan administrations, Odom maintained a hard-line stance on the Soviet Union, a nation that had
Writing for the Middle East Journal, Mark N. Katz favorably reviewed Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War by Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez. Professor Katz, an expert on Moscow’s foreign policy toward the Middle East, was blown away by the book’s compelling argument and unique
Yale University Press is pleased to announce that it has received a $1.3 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a digital documentary edition of Stalin’s Personal Archive. The digitization of Stalin’s Personal Archive is a new initiative of Yale University Press’s acclaimed Annals of Communism series,
June 5, 1967 marks the 40th anniversary of the Six Year War, the start of an armed conflict between Israel and the Arab states, Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Fearing an imminent invasion, Israel launched a preemptive air attack on Egypt in June 1967 and it achieved such staggering devastation that
As the headline states, the landmark series Annals of Communism is once again making news as a key resource for scholars of the Soviet Union. Jonathan Brent, editorial director for Yale University Press, discusses a exciting new project in an article featured in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. “The
On Sunday The Boston Globe ran a profile of Jonathan Brent, the associate director and editorial director of Yale University Press and the executive editor of the Annals of Communism Series. The series is a 20-book project that “provides new and vivid details from documents that have been mined by
How did the rulers of the Soviet Union pass the time during long Politburo meetings in the Kremlin? They doodled. Sketching on notebook pages, official letterheads, and the margins of draft documents, prominent Soviet leaders in the 1920s and 1930s amused themselves and their colleagues with drawings of one another.
Saturday, October 14, marks the centennial of the birth of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), the German-born political philosopher whose analysis of the nature of power, totalitarianism, and the “banality of evil” still resonates powerfully in our own time. “So it is no accident,” says Edward Rothstein in the New York Times,
“Does anybody really need to read another book about Hitler or Stalin?” asks Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times.”If you think not, spend a few engrossingly profitable hours with John Lukacs’ new book, June 1941, and you’ll be reminded that the one thing history does not admit is a