Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country by John R. Lampe (University of Maryland, College Park)
Yugoslavia as History, first published in 2000, examines the bloody demise of the former Yugoslavia in the full light of its history. It provides a balanced understanding of the common hopes and fears which held its ethnic mosaic together, and the ethnic conflicts which broke it apart. This book examines the origins of these competing forces, and how they fared as the Yugoslavian states formed after the two World Wars searched for a multi-ethnic political culture and economic viability. This edition of John Lampe's accessible and authoritative history devotes a full new chapter to the tragic ethnic wars that have followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia, first in Croatia and Bosnia, and most recently in Kosovo. The author concentrates on the connection, real and imagined, between these conflicts and the experience of the successor states, the two Yugoslavias and their predecessors.