222 results for "History"

One Hundred Days Napoleon's Road to Waterloo

Alan Schom
'The best account of this episode in English.' TLS Napoleon was the hero of his age, a man who helped France become, briefly, a hugely impressive European power. In 1814, he was imprisoned on Elba, planning an escape and plotting his course of action once he had done so. From the time he landed back in France to his loss at Waterloo, one hundred days elapsed. Scholar Alan Schom, an expert in the history of the Napoleonic era, outlines the key personalities and events of those hundred days in 1815. Napoleon is a far cry from the heroic leader of the time before he was imprisoned in Elba, attempting to gather forces and convince his old friends to help him once again. Despite the difficulties he faced from his irresponsible brothers, and acting in opposition to the statesman Talleyrand, Napoleon was only a whisker away from a famous triumph, and only eventually defeated by the mobilised force of the Allies. It was the Duke of Wellington and Blücher who defeated Napoleon, who was prepared to take on England, Austria, Prussia and Russia. The book includes a brilliant account of the manoeuvres at Waterloo, and is a fantastic tale of daring that is a useful book exactly 200 years on from the 100 days. 'Undoubtedly the best account of this episode in English' - Richard Holmes, The Times Literary Supplement 'Alan Schom has written a racy account, backed by copious detail and an abundance of quotations...a good read' - Michael Carver, Sunday Telegraph 'A brisk, pacey account of the Hundred Days, written in a fluent and engaging manner...There are excellent sketches of Fouché, Talleyrand and Carnot and a most able analysis of the background...as well as fascinating material on espionage and intelligence' - Frank McLynn in the Literary Review 'A riveting narrative of events...a sparkling portrait gallery of the personalities who shaped those events' - Russell F. Weigely, author of The Age of Battles Alan Schom was a professor of French and European history before retiring to write full-time. He is the author of Emile Zola: A Biography and Trafalgar . One Hundred Days was nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize and for the 1992 US National Book Award.
Amazon Digital Services LLC - Kdp 2021-02-18 340 pages

Blue-Eyed Boy A Memoir

Robert Timberg
Acclaimed journalist Robert Timberg's extraordinary, long-awaited memoir of his struggle to reclaim his life and find his calling after being severely burned as a young Marine lieutenant in Vietnam In January 1967, Robert Timberg was a short-timer, counting down the days until his combat tour ended. He had thirteen days to go before he got to go back home to his wife in Southern California. That homecoming would eventually happen, but not in thirteen days, and not as the person he once was. The moment his vehicle struck a Vietcong land mine divided his life into before and after. He survived, barely, with third-degree burns over his face and much of his body. It would have been easy to give up. Instead, Robert Timberg began an arduous and uncertain struggle back--not just to physical recovery, but to a life of meaning. Remarkable as his return to health was--he endured thirty-five operations, one without anesthesia--just as remarkable was his decision to reinvent himself as a journalist and enter one of the most public of professions. Blue-Eyed Boy is a gripping, occasionally comic account of what it took for an ambitious man, aware of his frightful appearance but hungry for meaning and accomplishment, to master a new craft amid the pitying stares and shocked reactions of many he encountered on a daily basis. By the 1980s, Timberg had moved into the upper ranks of his profession, having secured a prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard and a job as White House correspondent for The Baltimore Sun . Suddenly his work brought his life full circle: the Iran-Contra scandal broke. At its heart were three fellow Naval Academy graduates and Vietnam-era veterans, Oliver North, Bud McFarlane, and John Poindexter. Timberg's coverage of that story resulted in his first book, The Nightingale's Song , a powerful work of narrative nonfiction that follows these three academy graduates and two others--John McCain and Jim Webb--from Annapolis through Vietnam and into the Reagan years. In Blue-Eyed Boy , Timberg relates how he came to know and develop a deep understanding of these five men, and how their stories helped him understand the ways the Vietnam War and the furor that swirled around it continued to haunt him, and the nation as a whole, as they still do even now, nearly four decades after its dismal conclusion. Like others of his generation, Robert Timberg had to travel an unexpectedly hard and at times bitter road. In facing his own life with the same tools of wisdom, human empathy, and storytelling grit he has always brought to his journalism, he has produced one of the most moving and important memoirs of our time.
Penguin 2015-07-14 320 pages

U. S. Infantry and Rifle Tactics (1861) The Manual of Arms for the Rifle and Rifle Musket

James R. Gunn
THE MANUAL OF ARMS was the first step in the training of each individual soldier who enlisted either in the Union or Confederate army during the American Civil War, & gives detailed instructions for the new recruit in the use of his rifle or rifle musket. Each major position such as Shoulder Arms is closely described as well as the means of loading the piece in nine times & firing on command. Most importantly, the transitions between each position is also detailed, enabling soldiers standing elbow to elbow to use their weapons efficiently in a fire fight. This new illustrated reprint presents an exhaustive, painstakingly researched combination of the original step-by-step text & detailed drawings. Every illustration is meticulously cross referenced with the manuscript to provide both historical accuracy & ease of use. This is an excellent resource for the military historian or Civil War buff.
Stone Eagle Press 1993-11 67 pages

One Soldier's War

Arkady Babchenko
An outstanding dispatch from the frontline of war - unsparing, unsentimental, blackly comic and brutally beautiful - by and ordinary soldier who tells it like it is. Arkady Babchenko was still a naove 18-year-old when he and his fellow teenage conscripts arrived in a camp just north of Chechnya. Fresh off the truck, the new recruit rapidly learned the meaning of savagery and fear, before he'd even been near the front line. By the time he started his active duty, he had developed a tough skin against the harsh treatments meted out by his seniors and grew hardened and cynical. With unblinking honesty, Arkady Babchenko traces his journey from innocence to experience, taking the raw and mundane reality of war and twists it into compelling, chilling - and eerily elegant - prose.
Portobello 2007 405 pages

Friendly Fire How Israel Became Its Own Worst Enemy

Ami Ayalon,Anthony David
A highly decorated Israeli military officer, leader, and former director of the internal security service, Shin Bet, sees the light on what his country must do to achieve a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians. In this deeply personal journey of discovery, Ami Ayalon seeks input and perspective from Palestinians and Israelis whose experiences differ from his own. As head of the Shin Bet security agency, he gained empathy for 'the enemy' and learned that when Israel carries out anti-terrorist operations in a political context of hopelessness, the Palestinian public will support violence, because they have nothing to lose. Researching and writing Friendly Fire , he came to understand that his patriotic life had blinded him to the self-defeating nature of policies that have undermined Israel's civil society while heaping humiliation upon its Palestinian neighbours. 'If Israel becomes an Orwellian dystopia,' Ayalon writes, 'it won't be thanks to a handful of theologians dragging us into the dark past. The secular majority will lead us there motivated by fear and propelled by silence.' Ayalon is a realist, not an idealist, and many who consider themselves Zionists will regard as radical his conclusions about what Israel must do to achieve relative peace and security and to sustain itself as a Jewish homeland and a liberal democracy. 'How can a staunch Zionist who was raised on one of Israel's earliest settlements and trained as a kill-or-be-killed elite commando spearhead a campaign for peace with his enemies? The answer, in Ami Ayalon's captivating narrative, is an eye-opener for Palestinians and Israelis alike.' -Sari Nusseibeh, author of Once Upon a Country- a Palestinian life , former president of the Al-Quds University, and former Palestinian National Authority representative in Jerusalem ' Ayalon's aims and accomplishments are ... undeniably impressive ... Hope finds a prominent presence in what so many think is a hopeless, endless conflict.' - Kirkus Reviews 'Ami Ayalon discusses how he came to see a two-state solution with the Palestinians as the best way to ensure Israel's security, not just through analysing numbers and statistics, but through a humanistic approach. He discusses ... how his humanist paradigm not only allowed him to see how the Palestinians' grievances and aspirations are intertwined with Israel's security, but also how he still acknowledges and sympathises with the narratives of those in Israel whom he may disagree with.' -Jonah Naghi, The Times of Israel
Scribe Publications 2020-12 320 pages

German Psychological Warfare (WW2 Classic, Reprint Edition)

Ladislas Farago
German Psychological Warfare is a critical survey and bibliography of German methods of military psychology and propaganda both in warfare and in molding a citizenry ripe for manipulation. The seeds for the rise of the Nazi Party and German aggression during World War II were sown at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Immediately recognizing the importance of national morale for what was to come, plans were drawn for the psychological guidance of the German people toward a life dedicated to the philosophy of Total War, where civilians and military alike support the Leader in creating a dominant Germany. This book, published in America during World War II, extensively surveyed German publications to determine the psychological underpinnings of Germany's aggression and tactics. It quickly becomes clear that the Nazi Party and German military officials, though not always in lockstep with each other, both relied heavily on psychological profiling, extensive testing, and a philosophical justification for their actions. This reprint should provide plenty of food for thought for readers of military history, world politics, and psychological warfare. For additional military and psychological warfare history titles, visit CoachwhipBooks.com.
Coachwhip Publications 2018-12-10 330 pages

Company C

John Sack
Call it the Television War. For six weeks in 1991, images of the war in Iraq danced on America's TV sets, and we were led to believe that the GIs fought it by sitting at computer monitors and firing missiles at the Iraqis far, far away. It was a new kind of war, mudless and bloodless - a videogame war. Do not believe it. The real war in Iraq was as hellish as anything in The Red Badge of Courage or The Naked and the Dead - the GIs were wet and cold, uncertain and scared, and yet, through it all, courageous and compassionate, but TV wasn't there to report it. John Sack was with the GIs throughout the war. In America, he lived with the soldiers of Company C as they trained for D-Day in Iraq. He was with them in their homes, their churches, their drinking, dancing, and stripper clubs, and he was still with them as they invaded Iraq in sixty-ton tanks. He was with them at the biggest tank battle in American history - the only reporter who was.
HarperCollins Publishers 1996-06 241 pages

A tale of two continents: a physicist's life in a turbulent world

Pais, Abraham
"People like myself, who truly feel at home in several countries, are not strictly at home anywhere," writes Abraham Pais, one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, near the beginning of this engrossing chronicle of his life on two continents. The author of an immensely popular biography of Einstein, Subtle Is the Lord, Pais writes engagingly for a general audience. His "tale" describes his period of hiding in Nazi-occupied Holland (he ended the war in a Gestapo prison) and his life in America, particularly at the newly organized Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, then directed by the brilliant and controversial physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Pais tells fascinating stories about Oppenheimer, Einstein, Bohr, Sakharov, Dirac, Heisenberg, and von Neumann, as well as about nonscientists like Chaim Weizmann, George Kennan, Erwin Panofsky, and Pablo Casals. His enthusiasm about science and life in general pervades a book that is partly a memoir, partly a travel commentary, and partly a history of science. Pais's charming recollections of his years as a university student become somber with the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. He was presented with an unusual deadline for his graduate work: a German decree that July 14, 1941, would be the final date on which Dutch Jews could be granted a doctoral degree. Pais received the degree, only to be forced into hiding from the Nazis in 1943, practically next door to Anne Frank. After the war, he went to the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen to work with Niels Bohr. 1946 began his years at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he worked first as a Fellow and then as a Professor until his move to Rockefeller University in 1963. Combining his understanding of disparate social and political worlds, Pais comments just as insightfully on Oppenheimer's ordeals during the McCarthy era as he does on his own and his European colleagues' struggles during World War II. Originally published in 1997. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Oxford University Press 1997 511 pages

Abuse of Power

Draper, Theodore
"Mr. Draper believes that recent years have seen the suppression of political by military instrumentalities in the conduct of American foreign policy. After an opening chapter which briefly traces this process in two smaller instances - Cuba and the Dominican Republic - he devotes the rest of this book to a painstaking inquiry which seeks to dissolve the confusion that still envelops the story of our presence in Vietnam."
Penguin Books 1967-07-14 244 pages

The Russian Revolution

Rosa Luxemburg
2021 Reprint of the 1940 Edition. Translated by Bertram D. Wolfe. Facsimile of the original edition and not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. In this short work the author criticizes the Bolsheviks and presents a prescient warning of their dictatorship. Nonetheless, she continued to call for a "dictatorship of the proletariat", albeit not of the one-party Bolshevik model. In that context, she wrote the words "Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" ("Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently") and continues in the same chapter: "The public life of countries with limited freedom is so poverty-stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so unfruitful, precisely because, through the exclusion of democracy, it cuts off the living sources of all spiritual riches and progress". Bolshevik theorists such as Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky responded to this criticism by arguing that Luxemburg's notions were classical Marxist ones, but they could not be applied to Russia of 1917. They stated that the lessons of actual experience such as the confrontation with the bourgeois parties had forced them to revise the Marxian strategy.
Martino Fine Books 2021-09-27 74 pages

Calculated Risk

Mark W. Clark
Mark W. Clark was a major figure in World War II. He was prominent as one of the top American commanders. Together with Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar N. Bradley, and George S. Patton, Jr., Clark was widely regarded as being responsible for victory on the European side of the conflict. One of the great World War II memoirs by a legendary American general in charge of operations in North Africa and Italy. General Mark W. Clark recounts his wartime exploits and tells the story of the battles in Tunisia and Italy with verve and attention to key detail. An unparalleled account by a great military leader.
Enigma Books 2007 399 pages

Survivors of the Holocaust Israel after the War

Hanna Yablonka
This book deals with the integration of thousands of survivors of the Holocaust into Israeli society in the early years of the new State's existence. Among the issues discussed are: the ways in which the survivors were recruited into the defence forces and the role they played in the War of Independence, the settlement of the immigrants in towns and villages abandoned by Arabs during the war and the immigrant youth.
Palgrave Macmillan UK 1999-01-01 337 pages

Remembering in vain: the Klaus Barbie trial and crimes against humanity

Finkielkraut, Alain
In 1988, in what was probably one of the last trials of a Nazi war criminal and the first of such trials to take place in France, Klaus Barbie, the notorious "Butcher of Lyon", was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison. Yet despite the memories stirred, despite the verdict, to Alain Finkielkraut the trial was a moral failure. In Remembering in Vain, Finkielkraut maintains that the Barbie trial attests to the failure of international society to take responsibility for criminals of state. Trying Barbie not only for actions against Jews but also for actions against the Resistance―actions heretofore considered war crimes, on which the statute of limitations had run out―blurred the definition of crimes against humanity. Finkielkraut finds most disturbing how seriously taken were the arguments of the defence. By manipulating the guilty conscience of the West, Barbie's Vietnamese-French, Congolese, and Algerian lawyers became accusers, disputing the special significance of the Holocaust and portraying nearly everyone as a Nazi―except the former Nazi himself. Finkielkraut points to the ultimate irony of this Third World defense of a Nazi.
Columbia University Press 1992-04-15 102 pages

Stars and Stripes in Peril

Harry Harrison
"HARRY HARRISON IS ONE OF SCIENCE FICTION’S MOST PROLIFIC AND ACCOMPLISHED CRAFTSMEN." —The New York Times Book Review In the midst of Civil War, a stunned North and South join forces to combat a sudden attack of British troops. Though the Americans are victorious, three years later a new threat emerges. Her Majesty’s Army is massing for a possible attack through Texas. Into the gauntlet Lincoln sends his chosen angel of death, General Ulysses S. Grant—while his top soldiers, including Robert E. Lee and William Tecumseh Sherman, plan the most daring naval invasion ever launched: an assault on British soil itself. Stars and Stripes in Peril is the new masterwork from one of the world’s most provocative authors. Venturing beyond a fascinating question of what if? Harry Harrison brilliantly examines the people and passions that make up nations both great and small—and shows how technology and politics had the power to shape history’s first great World War . . . half a century before it began . . . "Lovers of novels of alternate history hold Harry Harrison in high regard and his latest book can only enhance that esteem." —Abilene Reporter News
National Geographic Books 2001-10-02 352 pages

The Military History of the Soviet Union

F. Kagan,R. Higham
The Military History of the Soviet Union and The Military History of Tsarist Russia treat Russian military history from the rise of the Muscovite state to the present, even peeking briefly into the future. The two volumes will cover Russia's land forces extensively, but will also cover the development of the Russian Navy, and the creation and development of the Russian Air Force, parts of the Russian military machine which are frequently neglected in general writings. The historical analysis will address the development and function of the Russian military whether in peace or in war, as well as the impact of war and changes in the military upon Russian society and politics.
Palgrave Macmillan US 2003-11-04 328 pages

Blood from a Stone The Quest for the Life Diamonds

Richard Hammer,Yaron Svoray
The search for the Life Diamonds--the subject of the compelling documentary produced by the History Channel. They were known as Life Diamonds--rough uncut diamonds of high quality bought by Jews in Eastern Europe to use as passports to safety. After 1939 and the Nazi blitzkrieg, after the extermination camps began belching black smoke into the skies and the railroad station at Auschwitz II-Birkenau became the busiest train station in the world, they became Death Diamonds. Blood from a Stone is the amazing story of forty of those diamonds, of their journey across continents and oceans, from the mines of South Africa to the diamond centers in Antwerp and Amsterdam, to the Jews of Eastern Europe, to the Death Camps . . . and to the two American soldiers who liberated them from the SS, finally, and buried them in a forest in Alsace on the border between France and Germany. It is the story of the curse believed to lie over the fabulous wealth of these stones, bringing death and disaster to all who touched them. It is the story of Yaron Svoray, who spent more than a decade in search of one small foxhole somewhere in a thousand square miles of forest . . . and of his unbelievable success. Blood from a Stone is a unique story, a story unlike any to come out of World War II. Blood from a Stone will more than over a dozen exclusive photos from the two-hour History Channel documentary.
Tom Doherty Associates 2004-05-01 304 pages