History · · C.B. Greenberg
Books in a Time of Ukraine
In a constitutional democracy, it is the responsibility that we all have as citizens to know authoritarians for their documented horrors, but also to recognize them early by their aspirations come anew.
The news is filled with horrid and bloody stories of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine based on smoldering territorial claims and imagined or real threats from NATO. The so-called claims and threats arise, at least in recent history, out of the aftermath of World War II and disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is a very complex story, best told in well informed and resourced books, but not easily in newspapers or magazines or the evening’s TV news. We live in an age of voluminous and outstanding scholarship about these not so distant events. That is what makes studying them in depth so easy, even for novice historians like me. Not all periods of history are that easily accessible. I have suggested some important books to you before about World War II and its aftermath. …