Offering a twenty-first century perspective on twentieth-century Europe, pre-eminent scholar Bonnie Smith's engaging new synthesis is the first text to provide both a thorough integration of social and cultural material with political history and substantive treatment of Europe's broader global context. Each of the twelve chapters combines compelling narrative with a wonderfully rich set of primary texts and picture essays, reinforcing for students the importance of primary sources to the study of history. Neither overtly triumphalist nor disparaging, this even-handed and thoughtful account takes the full measure of Europe's negative and positive legacies at home and its impact on and interactions with the world at large.

BONNIE G. SMITH is the Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of Confessions of a Concierge: Madame Lucie's History of Twentieth-Century France (1985); Changing Lives: Women in European History Since 1700 (1989); The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (1998); Imperialism (2000); and The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures. She is the editor of Global Feminisms since 1945 (2000) and coeditor of Objects of Modernity: Selected Writings of Lucy Maynard Salmon, Gendering Disability (2004) and the forthcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History. Smith has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Currently she is studying the globalization of European culture since the seventeenth century.