Perseus Academic: The Red Prince by Timothy Snyder

In this exhilarating narrative history, prize-winning historian Timothy D. Snyder offers and indelible portrait of Wilhelm von Habsburg, an aristocrat whose life personifies the wrenching upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century, as the rule of empire gave way to the new politics of nationalism.

Coming of age during the First World War, Wilhelm repudiated his family to fight alongside Ukrainian peasants in hope that he would become their king. When this dream collapsed he became, by turns, an ally of German imperialists, a notorious French lover, and angry Austrian monarchist, a calm opponent of Hitler, and British spy against Stalin. The Red Prince captures an extraordinary moment in the history of Europe, in which the old order of the past was giving way to an undefined future—and in which everything, including identity itself, seemed up for grabs.

TIMOTHY D. SNYDER is Professor of History at Yale University. He won the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association in 2003 for his book The Reconstruction of Nations, and his most recent book, Sketches From a Secret War, was awarded the Pro Historia Polonorum by the First Congress of Foreign Researches of Poland for the best book on Polish history by a foreign author published in the preceding five years. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Timothy D. Snyder is Professor of History at Yale University. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997, and has held fellowships in Paris, Vienna, Warsaw, and at Harvard. He won the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association in 2003 for his book The Reconstruction of Nations, and his most recent book, Sketches From a Secret War, was awarded the Pro Historia Polonorum by the First Congress of Foreign Researchers of Poland for the best book on Polish history by a foreign author published in the preceding five years. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.