with Teri J. Edelstein. En Guerre: French Illustrators and World War I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014, which accompanied an exhibition at the University of Chicago Library.

Cultural Capital: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Chicago Apartments: A Century of Lakefront Luxury. New York: Acanthus Press, 2004.

Building Lives. Constructing Rites and Passages. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: The Transportation Revolution in Children's Picture Books. University of Chicago Library, 1995, which accompanied an exhibition at the library.

Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum. University of Chicago Press, 1981.

The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790–1860. New York: George Braziller, 1966.

Imagining India. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

Marriage and Rank in Bengali Culture: A History of Caste and Clan in Middle-period Bengal. Berkeley and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

"Transcending Identities in Modern India's World." In Politics and the Ends of Identity, edited by Kathryn Dean, 64–102. London: Ashgate, 1997.

"Embodying God: From Imperial Progresses to National Progress in India." Economy and Society 24, no. 2 (May 1995), 245–78.

"Changes in the Vedic Priesthood." In Ritual, State, and History in South Asia: Essays in Honour of J. C. Heesterman, edited by A. W. van denHoek, D. H. A. Kolff, and  M. S. Oort, 556–77. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992.

"Tradition Against Itself." American Ethnologist 13, no.4 (Nov. 1986), 762–75.

"Orientalist Constructions of India." Modern Asian Studies 20, no. 3 (1986), 401–46.

“German Jews and the German-speaking Civic Culture of Nineteenth-century America.” In American Jewry: Transcending the European Experience? edited by Christian Wiese and Cornelia Wilhelm, 105–24. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Eva Hofmann Gundlach, Letters and Poems, 1849–1874: From Bavaria to Early San Francisco—A Story of Love and Opportunity, compiled by Lee Sims  and translated by Hannah Shield and Kathleen N. Conzen. El Granada, CA: Del Oro Publishing, 2016.

“Before the Chicago School: Vernacular Assimilation Theory in Later 19th Century Immigrant Chicago.” In Global Cities—Metropolitan Cultures: A Transatlantic Perspective, edited by Barbara Hahn and Meike Zwingenberger, 101–12. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011.

“Reshaping the Nation: Federal Employment, Civil Service Reform, and the Turners of Washington, D.C.” In Adolf Cluss und die Turnbewegung: Vom Heilbronner Turnfest 1846 ins amerikanische Exil, edited by Lothar Wieser and Peter Wanner, 79–84. Heilbronn: Stadtarchiv Heilbronn, 2007.

“Die Residenzler: German Americans in the Making of the Nation's Capital.” In Adolf Cluss, Architect: From Germany to America, edited by Alan Lessoff and Christof Mauch, 55–67. Washington, D.C.: Historical Society of Washington, D.C. and Heilbronn: Stadtarchiv Heilbronn, 2005.

"Immigrant Religion and the Public Sphere: The German Catholic Milieu in America." In German-American Immigration and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective, edited by Wolfgang Helbich and Walter D. Kamphoefner, 69-114. Madison: Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004.

Germans in Minnesota. Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2003.

"Ethnicity and Musical Culture among the German Catholics of the Sauk, 1854–1920." In Land without Nightingales: Music in the Making of German-America, edited by Philip V. Bohlman and Otto Holzapfel, 31–71. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.

"German-Catholic Communalism and the American Civil War: Exploring the Dilemmas of Transatlantic Political Integration." In Bridging the Atlantic: Europe and the United States in Modern Times, edited by Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt and Hermann Wellenreuther, 119–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

"Phantom Landscapes of Colonization: Germans in the Making of a Pluralist America." In The German-American Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation between Two Cultures, 1800–2000, edited by Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore, 7–21. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001.

"Pi-ing the Type: Jane Grey Swisshelm and the Contest of Midwestern Regionality." In The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History, edited by Andrew L. Cayton and Susan Gray, 91–110. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

"German Catholics in America." In The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History, edited by Michael Glazier and Thomas J. Shelley, 571–83. Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1997.

"The Winnebago Urban System: Indian Policy and Townsite Promotion on the Upper Mississippi." In Cities and Markets: Studies in the Organization of Human Space, edited by Rondo Cameron, 269–310. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997.

"Forum: The Place of Religion in Urban and Community Studies." Religion and American Culture 6 (1996): 108–14.

"The Stories Immigrants Tell." Swedish American Historical Quarterly 46 (1995): 49–57.

"A Saga of Families." In Oxford History of the American West, edited by Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Conner, and Martha A. Sandweiss, 315–57. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

"Ethnic Patterns in American Cities: Historiographical Trends." In Swedes in America: New Perspectives, edited by Ulf Beijbom, 24–32. Växjö, Sweden: Swedish Emigrant Institute, 1993.

"Mainstreams and Side Channels: The Localization of Immigrant Cultures." Journal of American Ethnic History 11 (1991): 5–20.

"Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century Agricultural History." In Agriculture and National Development: Views on the Nineteenth Century, edited by Louis Ferleger, 303–42. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990.

Co-authored with David A. Gerber, Ewa Morawska, George E. Pozzetta, and Rudolph J. Vecoli. "The Invention of Ethnicity." Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (1992): 3–41.

"Ethnicity as Festive Culture: German-America on Parade." In The Invention of Ethnicity, edited by Werner Sollors,  44–76. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Mischka's War: A European Odyssey of the 1940s. Melbourne University Press, 2017.

A Spy in the Archives: A Memoir of Cold War Russia. Melbourne University Press, 2013.

My Father's Daughter. Melbourne University Press, 2010 (Australian Historical Association's Magarey Medal for Biography)

Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia. Princeton University Press, 2005.

(ed.). Stalinism: New Directions. New York: Routledge, 2000.

(ed. with Yuri Slezkine). In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

(ed. with Robert Gellately). Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

The Cultural Front. Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia. Ithaca: NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.

The Russian Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1st ed., 1982/3; 2nd revised ed. 1994; 3rd (revised) ed. 2007.

Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1932. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

(ed.). Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.

The Commissariat of Enlightenment. Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, 1917–1921. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.

"The Soviet Union in the 21st Century." Journal of European Studies 37, no. 1 (2007).

"Social Parasites: How Tramps, Idle Youth, and Busy Entrepreneurs Impeded the Soviet March to Communism." Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 47, no. 1–2 (2006).

"Happiness and Toska: A Study of Emotions in 1930s Russia." Australian Journal of Politics and History 50, no. 3 (2004).

"Politics as Practice: Thoughts on a New Soviet Political History." Kritika 5, no. 1 (2004).

"Vengeance and Ressentiment in the Russian Revolution." French Historical Studies 24, no. 4 (2001).

Reviews Red at Heart in the NYRB

Reviews What You Did Not Tell for the Nation

Discusses her latest book, Mischka's War, with the Manchester Guardian

Participates in Neubauer Collegium research project on the Russian Revolution

Reviews 5 Books on Lenin for Harper's Magazine

The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict (Royal Historical Society, 1978) analysed the first decade of the Palestine mandate, drawing on the approaches to imperial history suggested by Robinson and Gallagher in their Africa and the Victorians.

Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945 (Oxford, 1979), again based mainly on recently released British records, examined the British record in relation to the Jewish genocide in Europe, focusing on British receptivity to Jewish immigration to the UK, to the empire, and to Palestine, on British policy regarding relief supplies sent through the economic blockade to Nazi Europe, and on official reaction to proposals for the bombing of Auschwitz and for aid to Jewish resistance in occupied Europe.

The Jews in Modern France (University Press of New England, 1985), edited with Frances Malino, brought together essays originally prepared for a conference organized at Brandeis University.

The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln (Yale, 1988) was an experiment in biography that drew partly on the models offered by A. J. A. Symons's The Quest for Corvo and Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Hermit of Peking. The Crime Writers’ Association awarded this book their Golden Dagger for Non-Fiction.

Herbert Samuel: A Political Life (Oxford, 1992) was a political biography of the first High Commissioner under the British mandate in Palestine and the successor to Lloyd George as leader of the British Liberal Party.

Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe since 1945 (Harvard, 1996) proposed a radical reassessment of post-Hitler European Jewry; the picture of demographic decline, social disintegration, and cultural dissolution provoked considerable debate.

Secret War in Shanghai (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), an account of the rivalries of the great powers in North China during World War II, was partly based, like the biography of Trebitsch Lincoln, on the archive of the British-controlled Shanghai Municipal Police Special Branch. This book elicited some critical reactions on account of its portrait of widespread collaborationism among the foreign communities (including the British and the Americans) in Shanghai.

Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City (Yale, 2001) returned to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The book surveyed the diplomatic history of the Jerusalem question over the past two hundred years, with a close focus on the period since 1967. The book emphasized the historic roots of the current divisions in the city and the exploitation of religious devotion to the city by politicians of all three monotheistic faiths.

Israelis and Palestinians: Why Do They Fight? Can They Stop? (Yale, 2003) re-engages with some of the themes of The British in Palestine and re-examines them in a larger frame and over a longer period. It analyses, in particular, demography, social relations, especially the labour market, and environmental pressures, showing how all of these have shaped and continue to shape Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Barbarism and Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time (Oxford, 2007) is a general history of the continent since 1914. The twentieth century witnessed some of the most brutish episodes in history. Yet it also saw incontestable improvements in the conditions of existence for most inhabitants of the continent. It was a century of cruelty and tenderness, of technological achievement and environmental spoliation, of imperial expansion and retraction, of authoritarian repression and of individualism resurgent. Barbarism and Civilization attempts to encapsulate and reinterpret the experience of Europeans in the course of the tumultuous twentieth century.

On the Eve: the Jews of Europe before the Second World War (Simon & Schuster, 2012) portrays European Jewry on the brink of its destruction. It examines the existential crisis that Jews faced throughout the continent and shows that the challenges to collective Jewish survival came as much from within as without. On the Eve discusses Jews' hopes and fears, anxieties and ambitions, family ties, internal and external relations, their cultural creativity, amusements, songs, fads and fancies, dress, diet, and, insofar as they can be grasped, the things that made existence meaningful for them. The fundamental objective is to restore forgotten men, women, and children to the historical record, to breathe renewed life momentarily into those who were soon to be dry bones. The book was awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize in 2013.

The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews (Harvard, 2014) challenges the ahistorical interpretation of the role of the Nazi-appointed Jewish councils in Nazi-occupied Europe that was offered by Hannah Arendt in her Eichmann in Jerusalem. The Ambiguity of Virtue tells the story of Gertrude van Tijn’s work on behalf of her fellow Jews as the avenues that might save them were closed off. Between 1933 and 1940 Van Tijn helped organize Jewish emigration from Germany. After the Germans occupied Holland, she worked for the Jewish Council in Amsterdam, enabling many Jews to escape to safety. Some later called her a heroine; others denounced her as a collaborator. Was she merely a pawn of the Nazis, or should she be commended for taking advantage of such opportunities as offered themselves to save Jews from the gas chambers? In such impossible circumstances, what is just action, and what is complicity?

A Small Town in Ukraine: The Place We Came From, The Place We Went Back To (Allen Lane, 2023) ‘A little place – you won’t have heard of it’ is what my father used to say when people asked him where exactly our people came from. Krakowiec is a small town situated on what is today the border between Ukraine and Poland. It also lies at the epicentre of the tumultuous national and ideological conflicts that have shaped the destiny of modern Europe. This book traces the history of the town over the past six centuries; it analyses the evolving patterns of social interaction among its three communities, Jews, Ukrainians (Greek Catholics), and Poles (Roman Catholics); and it retrieves the story of my family’s intimate, tortured relationship with a place that we once called home. 

Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in Eighteenth Century France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and What Is the Third Estate? Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.

Structure and Mobility: The Men and Women of Marseille, 1820–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

“Connecting Capitalism to the French Revolution: The Parisian Promenade and the Origins of Civic Equality in Eighteenth Century France." Critical Historical Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 5–46.

“Economic Crises and the Shape of Modern History,” Public Culture 24, no. 2 (2012): 303–27.

"A Strange Career: The Historical Study of Economic Life,” History and Theory 49, no. 4 (2010): 146–66.

“The Rise of Capitalism and the Empire of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century France,” Past and Present 206, no.1 (2010): 81–120.

“The Temporalities of Capitalism,” Socio-Economic Review 6, no. 3 (2008): 517–37.

“Space in Contentious Politics.” In Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics, edited by Ronald Aminzade, Doug McAdam, Elizabeth Perry, William H. Sewell, Jr., Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, 51–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

"The Concept(s) of Culture." In  Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, edited by Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, , 35–61. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

"Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille." Theory and Society 25 (1996): 841–81.

"Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology." In The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, edited by Terrence J. McDonald, 245–80. Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 1996.

"Toward a Post-Materialist Rhetoric for Labor History." In Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis, edited by Lenard R. Berlanstein, 15–38. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

“Collective Violence and Collective Loyalties in France: Why the French Revolution Made a Difference.” Politics and Society 18 (1990): 527–52.

Coedited with Helmut Lethen and Lutz Musner. Zeitalter der Gewalt: Zur Geopolitik und Psychopolitik des Ersten Weltkriegs. Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 2015.

Coedited with Sheila Fitzpatrick. Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Coedited with Lucian Hölsche. Die Gegenwart Gottes in der modernen Gesellschaft: Transzendenz und religiöse Vergemeinschaftung in Deutschland. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006.

Coedited with Hartmut Lehmann. Religion und Nation–Nation und Religion: Beiträge zu einer unbewältigten Geschichte. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004.

Editor. War and Terror in Contemporary and Historical Perspective. Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins University, American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 2003.

With Konrad Jarausch. A Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

"How the Germans Learned to Wage War: On the Question of Killing in the First and Second World Wars." In Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany, edited by Paul Betts, Alan Confino, and Dirk Schuman, 25–50. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008.

"The Subject(s) of Europe." In Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories, edited by Konrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger, 254–80. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007.

"Donde moran los alemanes: transnacionalismo en la teoria y la práctica." Istor: Rivista de Historia Internacional 8, no. 30 (2007): 99–113.

With Charles Bright. "Regimes of World Order: Global Integration and the Production of Difference in Twentieth Century World History." In Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History, edited by Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Anand A Yang, 202–38. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005.

"Virtue in Despair: A Family History from the Days of the Kindertransport." History & Memory 17 no. 1–2 (2005): 323–65.

"Deutschland und Japan im Zeitalter der Globalisierung: Überlegungen zu einer komparativen Geschichte jenseits des Modernisierungs-Paradigmas." In Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914, edited by Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel, 68–86. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004.

"Violence et expérience de la violence au XXe siècle—La Première Guerre mondiale." In 1914–1945: L'ère de guerre: violence, mobilisations, dueils, edited by Anne Duménil, Nicolas Beaupré, and Christian Ingrao, 37–71. Paris: Agnès Viénot Editions, 2004.

With Charles Bright. "Where in the World is America? The History of the United States in the Global Age." In Rethinking American History in a Global Age, edited by Thomas Bender, 63–99. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002.

"Insurrectionary Warfare: The German Debate about a Levée en Masse in October 1918." Journal of Modern History 73 (September 2001): 459–527.

"The Long Good-bye: German Culture Wars in the Nineties." In The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany, edited by Michael Geyer, 355–80. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

"America in Germany: Power and the Pursuit of Americanization." In The German-American Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation between Two Cultures, 1800–2000, edited by Frank Trommler and Elliot Shore, 121–44. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001.

"Cold War Angst: The Case of West-German Opposition to Rearmament and Nuclear Weapons." In Miracle Years, edited by Hanna Schissler, 376–408. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

"Germany, or, the Twentieth Century as History." South Atlantic Quarterly 96, no. 4 (1997): 663–702.

"Civitella in Val di Chiana, 29 giugno 1944. Ricostruzione di un 'intervento' tedesco.” In La memoria del nazismo nell'Europa di oggi, edited by Leonardo Paggi, 3–48. Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice Scandici, 1997.

With Charles Bright. "World History in a Global Age." American Historical Review 100 (Oct. 1995): 1034–60.

"German Strategy in the Age of Machine Warfare, 1914-1945." In Makers of Modern Strategy, 2nd ed, edited by Peter Paret, 527–97. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.