on tyranny 20 lessons from the 20th century

A New York Times bestseller and a book of the year according to The Atlantic, The Independent, The Financial Times, the Telegraph, and the New Statesman, it has won twelve awards including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Leipzig Award for European Understanding, and the Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thought. He is author also of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), a history of Nazi and Soviet mass killing on the lands between Berlin and Moscow. His most recent book is Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, published in September 2015 by Crown Books. He has held fellowships in Paris, Vienna, and Warsaw, and an Academy Scholarship at Harvard. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997, where he was a British Marshall Scholar. Timothy Snyder is Housum Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences. Twenty Lessons is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.” As he writes, “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism and communism.

With Twenty Lessons, Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. In his books Bloodlands and Black Earth, he has carefully dissected the events and values that enabled the rise of Hitler and Stalin and the execution of their catastrophic policies. Timothy Snyder is one of the most celebrated historians of the Holocaust. Against all predictions, one of the most-disliked presidential candidates in history had swept the electoral college, elevating a man with open contempt for democratic norms and institutions to the height of power.

On November 9th, millions of Americans woke up to the impossible: the election of Donald Trump as president. A historian of fascism offers a guide for surviving and resisting America’s turn towards authoritarianism.

On tyranny 20 lessons from the 20th century