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.

In the terrifying summer of 1942 in Belgium, when the Nazis began the brutal roundup of Jewish families, parents searched desperately for safe haven for their children. As Suzanne Vromen reveals in Hidden Children of the Holocaust, these children found sanctuary with other families and schools--but especially in Roman Catholic convents and orphanages.
Vromen has interviewed not only those who were hidden as children, but also the Christian women who rescued them, and the nuns who gave the children shelter, all of whose voices are heard in this powerfully moving book. Indeed, here are numerous first-hand memoirs of life in a wartime convent--the secrecy, the humor, the admiration, the anger, the deprivation, the cruelty, and the kindness--all with the backdrop of the terror of the Nazi occupation. We read the stories of the women of the Resistance who risked their lives in placing Jewish children in the care of the Church, and of the Mothers Superior and nuns who sheltered these children and hid their identity from the authorities. Perhaps most riveting are the stories told by the children themselves--abruptly separated from distraught parents and given new names, the children were brought to the convents with a sense of urgency, sometimes under the cover of darkness. They were plunged into a new life, different from anything they had ever known, and expected to adapt seamlessly. Vromen shows that some adapted so well that they converted to Catholicism, at times to fit in amid the daily prayers and rituals, but often because the Church appealed to them. Vromen also examines their lives after the war, how they faced the devastating loss of parents to the Holocaust, struggled to regaintheir identities and sought to memorialize those who saved them.
This remarkable book offers an inspiring chronicle of the brave individuals who risked everything to protect innocent young strangers, as well as a riveting account of the "hidden children" who lived to tell their stories.

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.

Holocaust survivor Eddie Jaku made a vow to smile every day and now believes he is the ‘happiest man on earth’. In his inspirational memoir, he pays tribute to those who were lost by telling his story and sharing his wisdom.

Life can be beautiful if you make it beautiful. It is up to you.

Eddie Jaku always considered himself a German first, a Jew second. He was proud of his country. But all of that changed in November 1938, when he was beaten, arrested and taken to a concentration camp.

Over the next seven years, Eddie faced unimaginable horrors every day, first in Buchenwald, then in Auschwitz, then on a Nazi death march. He lost family, friends, his country.

The Happiest Man on Earth is a powerful, heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful memoir of how happiness can be found even in the darkest of times.

Five daring escapes carried out by the famous fighting force during WWII.

From the infamous 1944 desert campaign to the unforgiving terrain of the Vosges Mountains; from a perilous escape across Europe aided by Resistance networks to three Captains fleeing an Italian Prisoner of War camp in 1943, and a death-defying return to Britain via boat, tunnel and train.

These inspirational true stories bring to life the do-or-die spirit of the SAS, as they faced an enemy hell-bent on wreaking vengeance.

Damien Lewis has worked closely with World War Two veterans and the families of those portrayed, accessing never-before-seen wartime diaries, letters, mission reports, interrogation transcripts and more, to reveal terrifying yet astounding feats of survival from the band of elite soldiers.

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.

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.

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.

A MAIL ON SUNDAY AND WASHINGTON POST BOOK OF THE YEAR. The little-known true story of the woman who headed the largest spy network in Vichy France during World War II. In 1941, a thirty-one-year-old Frenchwoman, a young mother born to privilege and known for her beauty and glamour, became the leader of Alliance, a vast Resistance organisation - the only woman to hold such a role. Brave, independent, and a lifelong rebel against her country's conservative, patriarchal society, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was temperamentally made for the job. No other French spy network lasted as long or supplied as much crucial intelligence as Alliance - and as a result, the Gestapo pursued its members relentlessly, capturing, torturing, and executing hundreds of its three thousand agents, including Fourcade's own lover and many of her key spies. Fourcade herself lived on the run and was captured twice by the Nazis. Both times she managed to escape. Though so many of her agents died defending their country, Fourcade survived the occupation to become active in post-war French politics. Now, in a dramatic account of the war that split France in two and forced its people to live side by side with their hated German occupiers, Lynne Olson tells the fascinating story of a woman who stood up for her nation, her fellow citizens, and herself.