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Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Military history
In A Short History of South Africa, Gail Nattrass, historian and educator, presents the reader with a brief, general account of South Africa’s history, from the very beginning to the present day, from the first evidence of hominid existence, early settlement pre-and post-European arrival and the warfare through the 18th and 19th centuries that lead to the eventual establishment of modern South Africa.
This readable and thorough account, illustrated with maps and photographs, is a culmination of a lifetime of researching and teaching the broad spectrum of South African history, collecting stories, taking students on tours around the country, and working with distinguished historians.
Nattrass’s passion for her subject shines through, whether she is elucidating the reader on early humans in the cradle of humankind, or the tumultuous twentieth-century processes that shaped the democracy that is South Africa today. A must for all those interested in South Africa, within the country and abroad.
In the decade following the first Gulf War, most observers regarded
it as an exemplary effort by the international community to
lawfully and forcefully hold a regional aggressor in check.
Interpretations have changed with the times. The Gulf War led to
the stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia, an important
contributing cause of the 9/11 attacks. The war also led to a long
obsession with Saddam Hussein that culminated in a second, far
longer, American-led war with Iraq. In Into the Desert, Jeffrey
Engel has gathered an all-star cast of contributors to reevaluate
the first Gulf War: Michael Gordon of the New York Times; Sir
Lawrence Freedman, former foreign policy advisor to Tony Blair;
Ambassador Ryan Crocker; Middle East specialist Shibley Telhami;
and Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Engel and his contributors examine the war's origins, the war
itself, and its long-term impact on international relations. All
told, Into the Desert offers an astute reassessment of one of the
most momentous events in the last quarter century.
In the summer of 1781, during the seventh year of the Revolutionary
War, the allied American and French armies of Generals Washington
and Rochambeau were encamped at Dobbs Ferry, Ardsley, Hartsdale,
Edgemont and White Plains. Washington chose lower Westchester for
encampment because of its proximity to the British forces which
controlled Manhattan, and which Washington intended to attack.On
August 14 Washington and Rochambeau received a communication from
French Admiral de Grasse, who suggested a joint sea and land
campaign against General Cornwallis's British troops in Virginia.
Washington risked all on this march. Its success depended on
precise timing and coordination of multiple naval and land
movements including those of Generals Washington, Rochambeau and
Lafayette, and of French Admirals de Grasse and Barras. Success
also required the utmost secrecy, and an elaborate deception was
prepared by Washington in order to convince the British that
Manhattan remained the target of the allied armies. Two months
later, at Yorktown, Virginia, Cornwallis surrendered his entire
army to the American and French forces.
The Isle os are not nearly as well-known as the Cajuns or the
Creoles or the French, but they have had an undeniable and lasting
impact on this state and the south. Adaptable, resourceful, and
undeniably proud, they have shaped their destinies against the
odds. As their settlements failed, they rebuilt. As the governments
changed from Spanish to French to American, they endured. Many
campaigned in the American Revolution; they secured victory in the
famous Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812; and as they began
to understand the surrounding marshes, they learned to make their
livings from trapping and fishing and pass on their wisdom and
culture through oral tradition. They shaped the development of the
state but are too often ignored, even in local 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.
From longstanding political columnist and commentator Daniel Finkelstein, a powerful memoir exploring both his mother and his father’s devastating experiences of persecution, resistance and survival during the Second World War.
Daniel’s mother Mirjam Wiener was the youngest of three daughters born in Germany to Alfred and Margarete Wiener. Alfred, a decorated hero from the Great War, is now widely acknowledged to have been the first person to recognise the existential danger Hitler posed to the Jews and began, in 1933, to catalogue in detail Nazi crimes. After moving his family to Amsterdam, he relocated his library to London and was preparing to bring over his wife and children when Germany invaded the Netherlands. Before long, the family was rounded up, robbed and sent to starve in Bergen-Belsen.
Daniel’s father Ludwik was born in Lwów, the only child of a prosperous Jewish family. In 1939, after Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland, Ludwik’s father was arrested and sentenced to hard labour in the Gulag. Meanwhile, deported to Siberia and working as a slave labourer on a collective farm, Ludwik survived the freezing winters in a tiny house he built from cow dung.
Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad is a deeply moving, personal and at times horrifying memoir about Finkelstein’s parents’ experiences at the hands of the two genocidal dictators of the twentieth century. It is a story of persecution; survival; and the consequences of totalitarianism told with the almost unimaginable bravery of two ordinary families shining through.
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.
'Cozzens is a master storyteller' The Times From the devastating
invasion by Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century to the
relentless pressure from white settlers 150 years later, A Brutal
Reckoning tells the story of encroachment on the vast Native
American territory in the Deep South, which gave rise to the Creek
War, the bloodiest in American Indian history, and propelled Andrew
Jackson into national prominence, as he led the US Army in a
ruthless campaign. It was a war that involved not only white
Americans and Native Americans but also the British and the
Spanish, and ultimately led to the Trail of Tears, in which the
government forcibly removed the entire Creek people, as well as the
neighbouring Chickasaw, Choctaw and Cherokee nations, from their
homelands, leaving the way open for the conquest of the West. No
other single Indian conflict had such a significant impact on the
fate of the country. Wonderfully told and brilliantly detailed, A
Brutal Reckoning is a sweeping history of a crucial period in the
destruction of America's native tribes.
Bush Brothers is not about special forces or heroic, secret missions. Instead, it is an intimate look at the daily life of ordinary soldiers – and the unbreakable bonds they formed under fire.
This is the story of thousands of infantry men who were deployed in the SADF, on or across the Border.
Colourful characters and wild partying are interspersed with the life-and-death choices troops were forced to make as they sacrificed life and limb, not so much for their country, but for each other.
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.
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