The last year of the war saw Russian offensives that cleared the Germans out of their final strongholds in Finland and the Baltic states, before advancing into Finnmark in Norway and the east European states that bordered Germany: Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. By spring 1945 the Red Army had reached to Vienna and the Balkans, and had thrust deep into Germany where they met American, French and British troops advancing from the west. The final days of the Third Reich were at hand. Berlin was first surrounded, then attacked and taken. Hitler's suicide and his successors' unconditional surrender ended the war. For writers and historians who concentrate on the Western Allies and the battles in France and the Low Countries, the Eastern Front comes as a shock. The sheer size of both the territories and the forces involved; the savagery of both weather and the fighting; the appalling suffering of the civilian populations of all countries and the wreckage of towns and cities - it's no wonder that words like armageddon are used to describe the annihilation. Red Army into the Reich combines a narrative history, contemporary photographs and maps with images of memorials, battlefield survivors and then & now views. It may come as a surprise to the western reader to see how many memorials there are to Russia's Great Patriotic War and those to the losses suffered by the countries who spent so long under the murderous Nazi regime.

In later life the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work, the Norwegian explorer and scientist Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930) led the team that in 1888 made the first successful crossing of Greenland's interior. Finding themselves cut off from the rest of the world for the winter, Nansen and his men spent several months living among the Greenlandic Inuit. Although 'far too short a time in which to attain a thorough knowledge', it was nevertheless sufficient to form a strong acquaintance and affection. First published in 1893, this English translation of the 1891 Norwegian original offers a valuable insight into much that was, and remains, foreign and peculiar to European experience. The coverage ranges from culinary to linguistic observations, and Nansen is by turns repulsed, fascinated and full of compassion, asking what the future holds for a people 'already stung with the venom of our civilisation'.

Donald A. Ritchie, a congressional historian for forty years , takes readers on a fascinating, behind-the-scenes tour of Capitol Hill, pointing out the key players, explaining their behavior, and translating parliamentary language into plain English. He also explores the essential necessity of compromise to accomplish anything significant in the legislative arena. However, recent events show that political polarization has hardened and produced gridlock, as Ritchie explains in this new edition. The 2020 election also produced a more diverse membership in terms of gender, ethnicity, religion, and ideology, with primary elections resulting in the defeat of moderate candidates by opponents ranging from socialists on the left to conspiracy theorists on the right, making bipartisan compromise harder to achieve. Among the most significant events since the last edition, the Senate ignored President Obama's last nomination to the Supreme Court and then adopted a "nuclear option" to streamline future Supreme Court confirmations. The House also twice impeached President Trump, processes that starkly expose the differences between the majority-rule requirements of the House and the super-majority requirements of the Senate. This new edition explains how the parties have changed in light of the unprecedented politics of the past four years, culminating in the mob attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and how this development has affected both the House and the Senate.

Do you think that Jesus only surrounded himself with men? Think again. Inspired by their popular Channel 4 documentary Jesus' Female Disciples, historians Helen Bond and Joan Taylor explore the way in which Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Mary, Martha and a whole host of other women - named and unnamed - have been remembered by posterity, noting how many were silenced, tamed or slurred by innuendo - though occasionally they get to slay dragons. Women Remembered looks at the representation of these women in art, and the way they have been remembered in inscriptions and archaeology. And of course they dig into the biblical texts, exposing misogyny and offering alternative and unexpected ways of appreciating these women as disciples, apostles, teachers, messengers and church-founders. At a time when both the church and society more widely are still grappling with the full inclusion and equality of women, this is a must-read for anyone interested in the historical and cultural origins of Christianity.

In 1921 Tulsa's Greenwood District, known then as the nation's 'Black Wall Street,' was one of the most prosperous African American communities in the United States. But on May 31 of that year, a white mob, inflamed by rumors that a young Black man had attempted to rape a white teenage girl, invaded Greenwood. By the end of the following day, thousands of homes and businesses lay in ashes, and perhaps as many as three hundred people were dead. Tulsa, 1921 shines new light into the shadows that have long been cast over this extraordinary instance of racial violence. With the clarity and descriptive power of a veteran journalist, author Randy Krehbiel digs deep into the events and their aftermath and investigates decades-old questions about the local culture at the root of what one writer has called a white-led pogrom. Krehbiel analyzes local newspaper accounts in an unprecedented effort to gain insight into the minds of contemporary Tulsans. In the process he considers how the Tulsa World, the Tulsa Tribune, and other publications contributed to the circumstances that led to the disaster and helped solidify enduring white justifications for it. Some historians have dismissed local newspapers as too biased to be of value for an honest account, but by contextualizing their reports, Krehbiel renders Tulsa's papers an invaluable resource, highlighting the influence of news media on our actions in the present and our memories of the past. The Tulsa Massacre was a result of racial animosity and mistrust within a culture of political and economic corruption. In its wake, Black Tulsans were denied redress and even the right to rebuild on their own property, yet they ultimately prevailed and even prospered despite systemic racism and the rise during the 1920s of the second Ku Klux Klan. As Krehbiel considers the context and consequences of the violence and devastation, he asks, Has the city - indeed, the nation - exorcised the prejudices that led to this tragedy?

In what has become the era of the mass shooting, we are routinely taken to scenes of terrible violence. Often neglected, however, is the long aftermath, including the efforts to effect change in the wake of such tragedies. On April 16, 2007, thirty-two Virginia Tech students and professors were murdered. Then the nation's deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman, the tragedy sparked an international debate on gun culture in the United States and safety on college campuses. Experiencing profound grief and trauma, and struggling to heal both physically and emotionally, many of the survivors from Virginia Tech and their supporters put themselves on the front lines to advocate for change. Yet since that April, large-scale gun violence has continued at a horrifying pace. In After Virginia Tech, award-winning journalist Thomas Kapsidelis examines the decade after the Virginia Tech massacre through the experiences of survivors and community members who advocated for reforms in gun safety, campus security, trauma recovery, and mental health. Undaunted by the expansion of gun rights, they continued their national leadership despite an often-hostile political environment and repeated mass violence. Kapsidelis also focuses on the trauma suffered by police who responded to the shootings, and the work by chaplains and a longtime police officer to create an organization dedicated to recovery. The stories Kapsidelis tells here show how people and communities affected by profound loss ultimately persevere long after the initial glare and attention inevitably fade. Reaching beyond policy implications, After Virginia Tech illuminates personal accounts of recovery and resilience that can offer a ray of hope to millions of Americans concerned about the consequences of gun violence.

""The Worst Journey in the World" is to travel writing what "War and Peace" is to the novel . . . a masterpiece."--"The New York Review of Books
""When people ask me, 'What is your favorite travel book?' I nearly always name this book. It is about courage, misery, starvation, heroism, exploration, discovery, and friendship." --Paul Theroux
"National Geographic Adventure "magazine hailed this volume as the #1 greatest adventure book of all time. Published in 1922 by an expedition survivor, it recounts the riveting tale of Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated race to the South Pole. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the youngest member of the party, offers sensitive characterizations of each of his companions. Their journal entries complement his narrative, providing vivid perspectives on the expedition's dangers and hardships as well as its inspiring examples of optimism, strength, and selflessness.
Hoping to prove a missing link between reptiles and birds, the author and his companions traveled through the dead of Antarctic winter to the remote breeding grounds of the Emperor Penguin. They crossed a frozen sea in utter darkness, dragging an 800-pound sledge through blizzards, howling winds, and average temperatures of 60 below zero. This "worst journey" was followed by the disastrous trek to the South Pole. Cherry-Garrard's compelling account constitutes a moving testament to Scott and to the other men of the expedition. This new edition of the adventure classic features several pages of vintage photographs.

Born out of a meticulous, well-researched historical and current traditional land-use study led by Cega Kinna Nakoda Oyate (Carry the Kettle Nakoda First Nation), Owoknage is the first book to tell the definitive, comprehensive story of the Nakoda people (formerly known as the Assiniboine), in their own words. From pre-contact to current-day life, from thriving on the Great Plains to forced removal from their traditional, sacred lands in the Cypress Hills via a Canadian "Trail of Tears" starvation march to where they now currently reside south of Sintaluta, Saskatchewan, this is their story of resilience and resurgence.

Some have called it the tortilla curtain. Others have viewed it as a Third World entity where primitive conditions and poverty exist alongside the latest marvels of the computerized Information Age. But the border region between Mexico and the United States is more dynamic than ever since its transition into a sort of Mexamerica a world fueled by corporate colonialism, the North American Free Trade Agreement (or NAFTA) and contraband of every stripe, from illegal drugs to illegal aliens. Forging the Tortilla Curtain reveals how the borderlands got to be that way. Thomas Torrans's narrative is a sweeping history of the 2,000-mile-long borderlands from the time of the early intrusions of the Spaniards in their endless quest for gold to the recent invasions of multinationals in their endless quest for cheap labor. It is a fascinating story of the long struggle to establish a boundary as an institution and cultural margin of the two Americas an Anglo North and a Latin South. It was a difficult and hazardous course heavily peopled with westering adventurers: filibusters William Walker and Henry Alexander Crabb, among many others; scalp hunters like John Glanton; dreamers and schemers vanquished Confederate generals Alexander Watkins Terrell and John B. Magruder, who hoped to establish a new Confederacy south of the border, and Albert Kimsey Owen who founded a short-lived socialist utopia at Topolobampo; empire builders like William Cornell Greene and William Randolph Hearst; and profiteers in the industry of contraband. Americans, contained at the Rio Grande since the 1840s by the Mexican-American War and the boundary that later developed across the desert Southwest to the Pacific, did not accept that contentedly. Thwarted in efforts to secure a port on the Sea of Cortez the Gulf of California they nonetheless were successful in bridging the continent by a climatically favorable southerly route. Even so, in the minds of many the notion of further aggrandizement long prevailed: for example, some argued that even Baja California properly should be United States territory, a sort of geographically balanced equivalent, so to speak, to the Florida peninsula itself. From the outset the frontier that would become the border was a work in progress and remains so today.

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This volume contains an English translation of the extraordinary story of Johann Schiltberger (1381-?1440), who was captured in battle as a teenager and enslaved by Bayezid I. On the latter's defeat by Timur (Tamburlane) in 1402, Schiltberger fell into the hands of the legendary Scourge of God, and in his service and that of his sons, he travelled to Armenia, Georgia and other Caucasian territories, down the river Volga, to Siberia and to the Crimea, eventually escaping and returning to his home in 1427.

For more than one hundred years, Jewish women and men of the Dallas area have responded to Tikkun Olam, the religious challenge to heal the world. Repairing Our World: The First 100 Years of the National Council of Jewish Women, Greater Dallas Section is a history of this passion to create a more humane society. Organized by decades from the group's beginnings in 1913, the book identifies both leadership and accomplishments of the NCJW. Its content is richly enhanced with personal essays from the organization's members, historical highlights, and graphics. Through education, community service, advocacy, and collaboration, members work to address the needs of all peoples and faiths within the community. Advocacy efforts aim to correct the root causes of current social problems. More than one thousand members devote countless volunteer hours to advance NCJW's mission. Leaders dare to have a vision of what is possible.

After Ross Benes left Nebraska for New York, he witnessed his polite home state become synonymous with 'Trump country.' Long dismissed as 'flyover' land, the area where he was born and raised suddenly became the subject of TV features and frequent opinion columns. With the rural-urban divide overtaking the national conversation, Benes knew what he had to do: go home. In Rural Rebellion, Benes explores Nebraska's shifting political landscape to better understand what's plaguing America. He clarifies how Nebraska defies red-state stereotypes while offering readers insights into how a frontier state with a tradition of nonpartisanship succumbed to the hardened right. Extensive interviews with US senators, representatives, governors, state lawmakers, and other power brokers illustrate how local disputes over health-care coverage and education funding became microcosms for our current national crisis. Rural Rebellion is also the story of one man coming to terms with both his past and present. Benes writes about the dissonance of moving from the most rural and conservative region of the country to its most liberal and urban centers as they grow further apart at a critical moment in history. He seeks to bridge America's current political divides by contrasting the conservative values he learned growing up in a town of three hundred with those of his liberal acquaintances in New York City, where he now lives. At a time when social and political differences are too often portrayed in stark binary terms, and people in the Trump-supporting heartland are depicted in reductive, one-dimensional ways, Benes tells real-life stories to add depth and nuance to our understanding of rural Americans' attitudes about abortion, immigration, big government, and other contentious issues. His argument and conclusion are simple but powerful: that Americans in disparate places would be less hostile to one another if they just knew each other a little better. Part memoir, journalism, and social science, Rural Rebellion is a book for our times.

'A daily taste of eternity in the midst of time' BBC Radio 4 staple Thought for the Day has been running for 50 years, aiming to capture the mood of the country and speak to it in a way that reaches people of all faiths and none. Take a tour of half a century of daily reflections from some of our most prominent and insightful thinkers, including Pope Benedict XVI, Desmond Tutu and Mona Siddiqui. Covering our changing attitudes to sexuality, science, politics, national life, international relations and more, Thought for the Day charts the constant evolution of British society from its uniquely timeless perspective.

A wonderfully concise and readable, yet comprehensive, history of the Mediterranean Sea, the perfect companion for any visitor -- or indeed, anyone compelled to stay at home.

'The grand object of travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean.'
Samuel Johnson, 1776

The Mediterranean has always been a leading stage for world history; it is also visited each year by tens of millions of tourists, both local and international. Jeremy Black provides an account in which the experience of travel is foremost: travel for tourism, for trade, for war, for migration, for culture, or, as so often, for a variety of reasons. Travellers have always had a variety of goals and situations, from rulers to slaves, merchants to pirates, and Black covers them all, from Phoenicians travelling for trade to the modern tourist sailing for pleasure and cruising in great comfort.

Throughout the book the emphasis is on the sea, on coastal regions and on port cities visited by cruise liners - Athens, Barcelona, Naples, Palermo. But it also looks beyond, notably to the other waters that flow into the Mediterranean - the Black Sea, the Atlantic, the Red Sea and rivers, from the Ebro and Rhone to the Nile.

Much of western Eurasia and northern Africa played, and continues to play, a role, directly or indirectly, in the fate of the Mediterranean. At times, that can make the history of the sea an account of conflict after conflict, but it is necessary to understand these wars in order to grasp the changing boundaries of the Mediterranean states, societies and religions, the buildings that have been left, and the peoples' cultures, senses of identity and histories.

Black explores the centrality of the Mediterranean to the Western experience of travel, beginning in antiquity with the Phoenicians, Minoans and Greeks. He shows how the Roman Empire united the sea, and how it was later divided by Christianity and Islam. He tells the story of the rise and fall of the maritime empires of Pisa, Genoa and Venice, describes how galley warfare evolved and how the Mediterranean fired the imagination of Shakespeare, among many artists. From the Renaissance and Baroque to the seventeenth-century beginnings of English tourism - to the Aegean, Sicily and other destinations - Black examines the culture of the Mediterraean. He shows how English naval power grew, culminating in Nelson's famous victory over the French in the Battle of the Nile and the establishment of Gibraltar, Minorca and Malta as naval bases. Black explains the retreat of Islam in north Africa, describes the age of steam navigation and looks at how and why the British occupied Cyprus, Egypt and the Ionian Islands. He looks at the impact of the Suez Canal as a new sea route to India and how the Riviera became Europe's playground. He shows how the Mediterranean has been central to two World Wars, the Cold War and ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. With its focus always on the Sea, the book looks at the fate of port cities particularly - Alexandria, Salonika and Naples.

Understanding Contemporary Asia Pacific provides a comprehensive introduction to one of the most complex and rapidly changing regions in the world today. This thoroughly revised new edition reflects more than a decade of major developments in the region (encompassing China, Japan, the Koreas, and all of the ASEAN member states), including the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. With accessible discussions of history, politics, economics, international relations, society, and culture, it provides the tools essential to understanding the dynamic Asia Pacific and its influence in the global arena.

The story of western correspondents in Russia is the story of Russia's attitude to the west. Russia has at different times been alternately open to western ideas and contacts, cautious and distant or, for much of the twentieth century, all but closed off. From the revolutionary period of the First World War onwards, correspondents in Russia have striven to tell the story of a country known to few outsiders. Their stories have not always been well received by political elites, audiences, and even editors in their own countries-but their accounts have been a huge influence on how the West understands Russia. Not always perfect, at times downright misleading, they have, overall, been immensely valuable. In Assignment Moscow, former foreign correspondent James Rodgers analyses the news coverage of Russia throughout history, from the coverage of the siege of the Winter Palace and a plot to kill Stalin, to the Chernobyl explosion and the Salisbury poison scandal.

"Ambitious, fast-paced, fact-filled, and accessible." -Science "A compelling case for why achieving the right balance of time with our families...is vital to the economic success and prosperity of our nation... A must read." -Maria Shriver From backyard barbecues to the blogosphere, working men and women across the country are raising the same worried question: How can I get ahead at my job while making sure my family doesn't suffer? A visionary economist who has looked at the numbers behind the personal stories, Heather Boushey argues that resolving the work-life conflict is as vital for us personally as it is essential economically. Finding Time offers ingenious ways to help us carve out the time we need, while showing businesses that more flexible policies can actually make them more productive. "Supply and demand curves are suddenly 'sexy' when Boushey uses them to prove that paid sick days, paid family leave, flexible work schedules, and affordable child care aren't just cutesy women's issues for families to figure out 'on their own time and dime,' but economic issues affecting the country at large." -Vogue "Boushey argues that better family-leave policies should not only improve the lives of struggling families but also boost workers' productivity and reduce firms' costs." -The Economist

First Impressions: A Reader's Journey to Iconic Places of the American Southwest tells the story of fifteen iconic sites across Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and southern Colorado through the eyes of the explorers, missionaries, and travelers who were the first nonnatives to describe them. Noted borderlands historians David J. Weber and William deBuys lead readers through centuries of historical, cultural, and environmental change at sites ranging from Carlsbad Caverns, the Grand Canyon, and Mesa Verde to such living Native communities as Acoma and Zuni. Lovers of the Southwest, both residents and visitors alike, will delight in the authors' skillful evocation of the region's sweeping landscapes, its rich Hispanic and Native heritage, and the sense of discovery that so enchanted its early explorers.

In the 1980s, The Nature Conservancy began work on the fast-growing Outer Banks by protecting Nags Head Woods, one of the last intact maritime forests on the East Coast that was in danger of becoming a housing development. In the late nineteenth century the woods was home to about forty families and remnants of their time there can be seen during a walk in the preserve to this day. Based on oral histories, this book documents the social and cultural history of a community that worked the land and waters of this unique place. Originally published in 1987, this reissue edition contains a foreword by David S. Cecelski and an afterword by the authors.