On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century

A historian of fascism offers a guide for surviving and resisting America’s turn towards authoritarianism. On November 9th, millions of Americans woke up to the impossible: the election of Donald Trump as president. 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. Timothy Snyder is one of the most celebrated historians of the Holocaust. 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. With *Twenty Lessons* , Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism and communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.” *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.