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Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Military history
In Hiding tells the story of a Jewish family of four when a Dutch
couple offered to hide them from Nazi atrocities during the Second
World War. The couple agreed that they would hide this family for a
large sum of money, thinking that the war would soon end. When it
appeared that the war would last much longer than first
anticipated, the hostess threatened and physically and mentally
abused the foursome. In Hiding relates the cruelty that this family
had to endure not from the Nazis directly, but from their own
neighbours during more than two years of persecution.
Tennessee's Thirteenth Union Cavalry was a unit composed mostly of
amateur soldiers that eventually turned undisciplined boys into
seasoned fighters. At the outbreak of the Civil War, East Tennessee
was torn between its Unionist tendencies and the surrounding
Confederacy. The result was the persecution of the "home Yankees"
by Confederate sympathizers. Rather than quelling Unionist fervor,
this oppression helped East Tennessee contribute an estimated
thirty thousand troops to the North. Some of those troops joined
the "Loyal Thirteenth" in Stoneman's raid and in pursuit of
Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Join author Melanie Storie
as she recounts the harrowing narrative of an often-overlooked
piece of Civil War history.
In the early days of the Civil War, Richmond was declared the
capital of the Confederacy, and until now, countless stories from
its tenure as the Southern headquarters have remained buried. Mary
E. Walker, a Union doctor and feminist, was once held captive in
the city for refusing to wear proper women's clothing. A coffee
substitute factory exploded under intriguing circumstances. Many
Confederate soldiers, when in the trenches of battle, thumbed
through the pages of Hugo's "Les Miserables." Author Brian Burns
reveals these and many more curious tales of Civil War Richmond.
When Louisiana seceded from the Union on January 26, 1861, no one
doubted that a battle to control the Mississippi River was
imminent. Throughout the war, the Federals pushed their way up the
river. Every port and city seemed to fall against the force of the
Union Navy. The capitol was forced to retreat from Baton Rouge to
Shreveport. Many of the smaller towns, like Bayou Sara and
Donaldsonville, were nearly shelled completely off the map. It was
not until the Union reached Port Hudson that the Confederates had a
fighting chance to keep control of the mighty Mississippi. They
fought long and hard, under supplied and under manned, but
ultimately the Union prevailed.
The Battle of Fredericksburg is known as the most disastrous defeat
the Federal Army of the Potomac experienced in the American Civil
War. The futile assaults by Federal soldiers against the
Confederate defensive positions on Marye's Heights and behind the
infamous stone wall along the "Sunken Road" solidified Ambrose
Burnside's reputation as an inept army commander and reinforced
Robert E. Lee's undefeatable image. Follow historian James Bryant
behind the lines of confrontation to discover the strategies and
blunders that contributed to one of the most memorable battles of
the Civil War.
Leon Greenman was born in London in 1910. His paternal grandparents
were Dutch, and at an early age, after the death of his mother, his
family moved to Holland, where Leon eventually settled with his
wife, Esther, in Rotterdam. Leon was an antiquarian bookseller, and
as such travelled to and from London on a regular basis. In 1938,
during one such trip, he noticed people digging trenches in the
streets and queuing up for gas masks. He hurried back to Holland
with the intention of collecting his wife and return with her to
England. The whispers of war were growing louder and louder.
Lord Derby, Lancashire's highest-ranked nobleman and its principal
royalist, once offered the opinion that the English civil wars had
been a 'general plague of madness'. Complex and bedevilling, the
earl defied anyone to tell the complete story of 'so foolish, so
wicked, so lasting a war'. Yet attempting to chronicle and to
explain the events is both fascinating and hugely important.
Nationally and at the county level the impact and significance of
the wars can hardly be over-stated: the conflict involved our
ancestors fighting one another, on and off, for a period of nine
years; almost every part of Lancashire witnessed warfare of some
kind at one time or another, and several towns in particular saw
bloody sieges and at least one episode characterised as a massacre.
Nationally the wars resulted in the execution of the king; in 1651
the Earl of Derby himself was executed in Bolton in large measure
because he had taken a leading part in the so-called massacre in
that town in 1644.In the early months of the civil wars many could
barely distinguish what it was that divided people in 'this war
without an enemy', as the royalist William Waller famously wrote;
yet by the end of it parliament had abolished monarchy itself and
created the only republic in over a millennium of England's
history. Over the ensuing centuries this period has been described
variously as a rebellion, as a series of civil wars, even as a
revolution. Lancashire's role in these momentous events was quite
distinctive, and relative to the size of its population
particularly important. Lancashire lay right at the centre of the
wars, for the conflict did not just encompass England but Ireland
and Scotland too, and Lancashire's position on the coast facing
Catholic, Royalist Ireland was seen as critical from the very first
months.And being on the main route south from Scotland meant that
the county witnessed a good deal of marching and marauding armies
from the north. In this, the first full history of the Lancashire
civil wars for almost a century, Stephen Bull makes extensive use
of new discoveries to narrate and explain the exciting, terrible
events which our ancestors witnessed in the cause either of king or
parliament. From Furness to Liverpool, and from the Wyre estuary to
Manchester and Warrington...civil war actions, battles, sieges and
skirmishes took place in virtually every corner of Lancashire.
Colditz Castle: a forbidding Gothic tower on a hill in Nazi Germany. You may have heard about the prisoners and their daring and desperate attempts to escape, but that's only part of the real story.
In Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle, bestselling historian Ben Macintyre takes us inside the walls of the most infamous prison in history to meet the real men behind the legends. Heroes and bullies, lovers and spies, captors and prisoners living cheek-by-jowl for years in a thrilling game of cat and mouse - and all determined to escape by any means necessary.
Deeply researched and full of incredible stories, this is a tale of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances - and will change how you think about Colditz forever.
In a plot taken from today's headlines, the U.S. economy is sliding
into another Great Recession, a resurgent Russia plans to
manipulate the oil market, and NSA is listening to everyone. With
his re-election in peril, the President agrees with advisors;
release the anger of Jacqueline Desjardin. Suicidal, suffering from
PTSD, the beautiful French photojournalist seeks revenge for tragic
losses suffered as a child. Manipulated by forces an ocean away,
Desjardin becomes a pawn in a macabre plan devised by a secret
Pentagon hit squad. The K Street Boys takes you inside the White
House, NSA, the Pentagon, and into the minds of military
bureaucrats and politicians protecting their power at any cost. Les
Kinney's storytelling will enchant you with engaging characters and
spell binding action. Get ready for the best read of the year.
For centuries, battleships provided overwhelming firepower at sea.
They were not only a major instrument of warfare, but a visible
emblem of a nation's power, wealth and pride. The rise of the
aircraft carrier following the Japanese aerial strike on Pearl
Harbor in 1941 highlighted the vulnerabilities of the battleship,
bringing about its demise as a dominant class of warship. This book
offers a detailed guide to the major types of battleships to fight
in the two World Wars. Explore HMS Dreadnought, the first of a
class of fast, big-gun battleships to be developed at the beginning
of the 20th century; see the great capital ships that exchanged
salvos at the battle of Jutland, including the German battlecruiser
Derfflinger, which sank the British battleship Queen Mary; find out
about the destruction of HMS Hood, which exploded after exchanging
fire with the Bismarck, which itself was sunk after a
trans-Atlantic chase by a combination of battery fire and
aircraft-launched torpedoes; and be amazed at the
'super-battleship' Yamato, which despite its size and firepower,
made minimal contribution to Japan's war effort and was sunk by air
attack during the defence of Okinawa. Illustrated with more than
120 vivid artworks and photographs, Technical Guide: Battleships of
World War I and World War II is an essential reference guide for
modellers and naval warfare enthusiasts.
In this celebrated, landmark history of the Balkans, Misha Glenny
investigates the roots of the bloodshed, invasions and nationalist
fervour that have come to define our understanding of the
south-eastern edge of Europe. In doing so, he reveals that groups
we think of as implacable enemies have, over the centuries, formed
unlikely alliances, thereby disputing the idea that conflict in the
Balkans is the ineluctable product of ancient grudges. And he
exposes the often-catastrophic relationship between the Balkans and
the rest of Europe, raising profound questions about recent Western
intervention. Updated to cover the last decade's brutal conflicts
in Kosovo and Macedonia, the surge of organised crime in the
region, the rise of Turkey and the rocky road to EU membership, The
Balkans remains the essential and peerless study of Europe's most
complex and least understood region.
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