Books by Frank Trentmann
“This is a story of redemption. It’s a story with a constant moral edge. There is nothing wrong with history taking a moral stance, but there are so many that you’ve got to take about this story. It’s a complicated story of two countries struggling out of the ruins of one, and their eventual reunification. It starts in Nazi Germany with the stories of individuals, illustrating the moral dilemmas of being part of a nation which is doing something utterly evil to some of its own people and to others too. Then there is the utter desolation, the devastation of 1945. Germany was a bit like an alcoholic, it had to reach utter baseness, utter defeat and destruction in order to recognize its problem. Then the next decades, as Trentmann lays them out, are interesting. They are a story of what happens when you, or most of you, have utterly rejected the ideology in which you’ve lived. You’ve painfully reconstructed something which the victors imposed, but which is very different in its embrace of democracy and its obstinate wish to tell truth.” Read more...
The Best History Books of 2024: The Wolfson History Prize
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Theologians & Historians of Religion
Interviews where books by Frank Trentmann were recommended
-
1
Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century
by Joya Chatterji -
2
Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire
by Nandini Das -
3
Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
by Nicholas Radburn -
4
Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best Loved Institution
by Andrew Seaton -
5
Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage
by Jonny Steinberg -
6
Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022
by Frank Trentmann
The Best History Books of 2024: The Wolfson History Prize, recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch
The Best History Books of 2024: The Wolfson History Prize, recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch
To win the Wolfson History Prize, a book must be both original and accessible to the general reader. British historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, one of the prize’s judges, talks us through the six books that made the 2024 shortlist, from the voyage of an English diplomat to Mughal India to the intimacy of a South African marriage, from the barbarity of the slave trade in the 18th century to the history of an institution that provides free health care to all.
