On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

"On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century" is a concise, influential non-fiction book written by Timothy Snyder, a Yale University historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, fascism, Nazism, and the Holocaust. Published in 2017 by Tim Duggan Books (an imprint of Crown Publishing), it spans just 128 pages and was a New York Times bestseller. The book emerged in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, offering practical advice drawn from 20th-century authoritarian regimes (e.g., Nazi Germany, Stalinist Soviet Union, and Mussolini's Italy) to help ordinary citizens resist the slide toward tyranny in modern democracies.