by Jonathan D. Spence (1990)
Jonathan Spence’s masterwork charts four centuries of Chinese history from the rise of the Manchu Qing dynasty to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, documenting China’s turbulent transformation into a modern superpower.
Martin Meredith
Martin Meredith’s classic panoramic history of post-independence Africa, examining how the optimism of 1960s liberation confronted the realities of civil wars, corruption, foreign intervention, and resilient reform.
John Lewis Gaddis
Pulitzer Prize-winner John Lewis Gaddis delivers the definitive one-volume narrative of the forty-five-year ideological struggle that divided the world and brought humanity to the brink of nuclear extinction.
Ramachandra Guha
The definitive, monumental history of post-1947 independent India. Ramachandra Guha tells the epic story of how the world’s largest and most diverse democracy survived riots, wars, insurgencies, and poverty.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s legendary exposé of the vast Soviet network of forced labor camps and secret police terror that shook the world and helped dismantle Soviet legitimacy.