The conquest of the air-and beyond
This interesting book, which includes photographs and diagrams, describes the early years of man's attempts to gain mastery of the air. It chronicles the first, rudimentary attempts at flight in balloons to their ultimate development including their use during the Great War. Next came the age of the dirigible including, of course, the mighty Zeppelin. Allied dirigibles of the First World War are also considered. Most significant, however, was the development of powered, heavier than air, winged, machines and in this account they are described from their genesis with the Wright brothers to their use in the first great conflict which led to the creation of the air forces of the world. German and Allied aircraft are discussed, together with their various uses, applications and the deeds of the intrepid young men who flew them. There are not many accounts of the early days of aviation in peace and war so any addition to their number is welcome. This book was written before the potential of the aircraft had been fully realised and is an interesting perspective on how the first pilots, aircraft designers, manufacturers and visionaries saw them and their future in the opening decades of the twentieth century. An essential addition to any library of early aviation, this book is recommended.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

Margarete Susman was among the great Jewish women philosophers of the twentieth century, and largely unknown to many today. This book presents, for the first time in English, six of her important essays along with an introduction about her life and work. Carefully selected and edited by Elisa Klapheck, these essays give the English-speaking reader a taste of Susman's religious-political mode of thought, her originality, and her importance as Jewish thinker. Susman's writing on exile, return, and the revolutionary impact of Judaism on humanity, illuminate enhance our understanding of other Jewish philosophers of her time: Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Ernst Bloch (all of them her friends). Her work is in particularly fitting company when read alongside Jewish religious-political and political thinkers such as Bertha Pappenheim, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Gertrud Stein. Initially a poet, Susman became a follower of the Jewish Renaissance movement, secular Messianism, and the German Revolution of 1918. This collection of essays shows how Susman's work speaks not only to her own time between the two World Wars but to the present day.

Gandhi's ideas are as meaningful today as they were during his long and inspiring life. His enlightening thoughts and beliefs, especially on violence and the atomic bomb, reveal his eloquent foresight about our contemporary world. The words of one of the greatest men of the twentieth century, chosen by the award-winning director Richard Attenborough from Gandhi's letters, speeches, and published writings, explore the prophet's timeless thoughts on daily life, cooperation, nonviolence, faith, and peace.

This bestselling volume includes an introduction by Attenborough and an afterword by Time magazine Senior Foreign Correspondent Johanna McGeary that places Gandhi's life and work in the historical context of the twentieth century. This book and the film Gandhi were the result of producer/director Richard Attenborough's long commitment to keeping alive the flame of Gandhi's spiritual achievement and the wisdom of his actions and his words. They are the wisdom and words of peace. Also included are twenty striking historical photographs, specially selected from the archives at the National Gandhi Museum in New Delhi, that capture the important personal, political, and spiritual aspects of Gandhi's career.

The Women of the Great War
It has been a salient feature of twentieth century warfare that the industrial nature of conflict, combined with the huge number of men required and the numerous machines and armaments involved, has meant that industry has-of necessity-had to increase its capacity to keep the fighting forces constantly and consistently supplied. Yet each conflict has inevitably drained the places of industry of the very workforce it required to function effectively. The solution in both World Wars has been for women to step forward to fill the roles formally undertaken by men who were by then enlisted into the armed services. Of course, women invariably proved themselves to be equal to the tasks assigned to them and indeed without them wartime industrial production would inevitably have been compromised to the point of peril for the military outcome. The work was invariably hard and often dangerous, but women on the home front have long been regarded as the essential, if largely unsung, heroines of the war effort. The principal benefit of this book is that it not only describes the activities of women in the workplace, but that it includes many photographs of women at work, demonstrating the multitude of weapons, armaments, equipment and vehicles they manufactured during the First World War. This concise Leonaur edition includes two books-that were originally so short as to not have seen re-publication in modern times-for good value.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

"I lived the same life as everyone else, the life of ordinary people, the masses." Sitting in a prison cell in the autumn of 1944, Hans Fallada sums up his life under the National Socialist dictatorship, the time of "inward emigration." Under conditions of close confinement, in constant fear of discovery, he writes himself free from the nightmare of the Nazi years. His frank and sometimes provocative memoirs were thought for many years to have been lost. They are published here for the first time.

The confessional mode did not come naturally to Fallada the writer of fiction, but in the mental and emotional distress of 1944, self-reflection became a survival strategy. In the "house of the dead" he exacts his political revenge on paper. "I know that I am crazy. I'm risking not only my own life, I'm also risking the lives of many of the people I am writing about," he notes, driven by the compulsion to write. And write he does: about spying and denunciation, about the threat to his livelihood and his literary work, about the fate of many friends and contemporaries such as Ernst Rowohlt and Emil Jannings. To conceal his intentions and to save paper, he uses abbreviations. His notes, constantly exposed to the gaze of the prison warders, become a kind of secret code. He finally succeeds in smuggling the manuscript out of the prison, although it remained unpublished for half a century.

These revealing memoirs by one of the best-known German writers of the 20th century will be of great interest to all readers of modern literature.

A captivating look at a bygone era through the lens of a single, surprisingly momentous American year one century ago. 1908 was the year Henry Ford launched the Model T, the Wright Brothers proved to the world that they had mastered the art of flight, Teddy Roosevelt decided to send American naval warships around the globe, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series (a feat they have never yet repeated), and six automobiles set out on an incredible 20,000 mile race from New York City to Paris via the frozen Bering Strait.

A charming and knowledgeable guide, Rasenberger takes readers back to a time of almost limitless optimism, even in the face of enormous inequality, an era when the majority of Americans believed that the future was bound to be better than the past, that the world's worst problems would eventually be solved, and that nothing at all was impossible. As Thomas Edison succinctly said that year, "Anything, everything is possible."

The cultural legacy of the air war on Germany is explored in this comparative study of two bombed cities from different sides of the subsequently divided nation. Contrary to what is often assumed, Allied bombing left a lasting imprint on German society, spawning vibrant memory cultures that can be traced from the 1940s to the present. While the death of half a million civilians and the destruction of much of Germany's urban landscape provided 'usable' rallying points in the great political confrontations of the day, the cataclysms were above all remembered on a local level, in the very spaces that had been hit by the bombs and transformed beyond recognition. The author investigates how lived experience in the shadow of Nazism and war was translated into cultural memory by local communities in Kassel and Magdeburg struggling to find ways of coming to terms with catastrophic events unprecedented in living memory.

Drawing on recently declassified material from Stalin's personal archive in Moscow, this is the first attempt by scholars to systematically analyze the way Stalin interpreted and envisioned his world-both the Soviet system he was trying to build and its wider international context. Since Stalin rarely left his offices and perceived the world largely through the prism of verbal and written reports, meetings, articles, letters, and books, a comprehensive analysis of these materials provides a unique and valuable opportunity to study his way of thinking and his interaction with the outside world. Comparing the materials that Stalin read from week to week with the decisions that he subsequently shaped, Sarah Davies and James Harris show not only how Stalin perceived the world but also how he misperceived it. After considering the often far-reaching consequences of those misperceptions, they investigate Stalin's contribution to the production and regulation of official verbal discourse in a system in which huge political importance was attached to the correct use of words and phrases..

The shots that killed President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 were fired from the sixth floor of a nondescript warehouse at the edge of Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. That floor in the Texas School Book Depository became a museum exhibit in 1989 and was designated part of a National Historic Landmark District in 1993. This book recounts the slow and painful process by which a city and a nation came to terms with its collective memory of the assassination and its aftermath.
Stephen Fagin begins "Assassination and Commemoration "by retracing the events that culminated in Lee Harvey Oswald's shots at the presidential motorcade. He vividly describes the volatile political climate of midcentury Dallas as well as the shame that haunted the city for decades after the assassination. The book highlights the decades-long work of people determined to create a museum that commemorates a president and recalls the drama and heartbreak of November 22, 1963. Fagin narrates the painstaking day-to-day work of cultivating the support of influential citizens and convincing boards and committees of the importance of preservation and interpretation.
Today, The Sixth Floor Museum helps visitors to interpret the depository and Dealey Plaza as sacred ground and a monument to an unforgettable American tragedy. One of the most popular historic sites in Texas, it is a place of quiet reflection, of edification for older Americans who remember the Kennedy years, and of education for the large and growing number of younger visitors unfamiliar with the events the museum commemorates. Like the museum itself, Fagin's book both carefully studies a community's confrontation with tragedy and explores the ways we preserve the past.

This book tells the story of 1960-a tumultuous, transitional year that unleashed the forces that eventually reshaped the American nation and the entire planet, to the joy of millions and the sorrow of millions more. In 1960, attitudes were changing; barriers were falling. It was a transitional year, during which the world as we know it today was beginning to take shape. While other books have focused on the presidential contest between Kennedy and Nixon, A New World to Be Won: John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and the Tumultuous Year of 1960 illuminates the emerging forces that would transform the nation and the world during the 1960s, putting the election in the broader context of American history-and world history as well. While the author does devote a large portion of this book to the 1960 presidential campaign, he also highlights four pivotal trends that changed life for decades to come: unprecedented scientific breakthroughs, ranging from the Xerox copier to new spacecraft for manned flight; fragmentation of the international power structure, notably the schism between the Soviet Union and China; the pursuit of freedom, both through the civil rights movement at home and the drive for independence in Africa; and the elevation of pleasure and self-expression in American culture, largely as a result of federal approval of the birth-control pill and the increasing popularity of illegal drugs. Photographs of key newsmakers and important events throughout the year A bibliography with a detailed listing of more than 400 sources, including oral histories, government publications, memoirs, and journals A comprehensive index by name and subject Footnotes for the full manuscript

The extraordinary story of Captain Llewellyn Wynne Jones' 1918 service in East Africa told through his personal military campaign diary and photograph albums. Llewellyn's granddaughter, born some 36 years after his death, researches his military life and family history to uncover the fascinating, courageous and ultimately tragic story of his life. The book is beautifully illustrated with original photographs from Llewellyn's campaign albums and from a rich family photographic archive. It includes family artefacts, letters, newspaper reports and interviews which combine to bring this exceptional young man's few years to life once more 100 years on.

Controlling Sex in Captivity is the first book to examine the nature, extent and impact of the sexual activities of Axis prisoners of war in the United States during the Second World War. Historians have so far interpreted the interactions between captors and captives in America as the beginning of the post-war friendship between the United States, Germany and Italy. Matthias Reiss argues that this paradigm is too simplistic. Widespread fraternisation also led to sexual relationships which created significant negative publicity, and some Axis POWs got caught up in the U.S. Army's new campaign against homosexuals. By focusing on the fight against fraternisation and same-sex activities, this study treads new ground. It stresses that contact between captors and captives was often loaded with conflict and influenced by perceptions of gender and race. It highlights the transnational impact of fraternisation and argues that the prisoners' sojourn in the United States also influenced American society by fuelling a growing concern about social disintegration and sexual deviancy, which eventually triggered a conservative backlash after the war.

War in the East African bush
The First World War was inevitably a global conflict because the rush by the principal powers of Europe to establish trading bases and colonies, principally during the 19th century, guaranteed it would be so. In Africa, German and British settlers were close neighbours and at the outbreak of hostilities were ready for immediate confrontation. National and imperial forces were dispatched to augment local military operations. This book concerns the struggle for East Africa. It was written, drawing on memory and diary entries, by a British senior staff officer, a brigadier-general, who was central to the organisation of the British campaign and who has left posterity a concise, thorough and detailed historical overview of it from the British perspective. This book qualifies as a campaign history rather than a first hand account and is recommended to readers seeking that perspective on this interesting 'sideshow' theatre of the war.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.