The Independent Companies of Foreigners are widely regarded as the worst examples of foreign units in the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars. They were formed, in the last years of these wars, to receive French deserters who had come over to the British in Spain. Each company was intended to serve separately in the garrisons of the West Indies. Instead two of them were used in an active role on the East Coast of America a " this did not turn out well. Drawing of British, French and American sources, this book provides a fuller picture of the men, why the units were formed, why they were used as they were and what actually happened. Judgement can then be made whether the bad reputation of the units, and the soldiers in them, is justified.

The first political history of the Second World War, of building the Grand Alliance to defeat Hitler, by the Sunday Times-bestselling author of Appeasing Hitler.

After the fall of France in June 1940, only Britain stood between Hitler and total victory. Desperate for allies, Winston Churchill did everything he could to bring the United States into the conflict, drive the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany apart and persuade neutral countries to resist German domination.

By 1942, after the German invasion of Russia and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the British-Soviet-American alliance was in place. Yet it was an improbable and incongruous coalition, divided by ideology and politics and riven with mistrust and deceit. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin were partners in the fight to defeat Hitler, yet they were also rivals who disagreed on strategy, imperialism and the future of liberated Europe. Only by looking at their points of conflict, as well as of co-operation, are we able to understand the course of the war and world that developed in its aftermath.

Allies at War is a fast-paced, narrative history, based on material drawn from over a hundred archives. Using vivid, first-hand accounts and unpublished diaries, we enter the rooms where the critical decisions were made while going beyond the confines of the Grand Alliance to examine, among other themes, the doomed Anglo-French alliance, fractious relations with General de Gaulle and the Free French, and interactions with Poland, Greece and Nationalist China.

Ambitious and compelling, revealing the political drama behind the military events, Allies at War offers a fresh perspective on the Second World War and the origins of the Cold War.

One of the preeminent Black scholars of his era traces the life and bold aspirations of a man who devoted his life to opposing slavery at any cost. W.E.B. Du Bois examines John Brown as a man as well as a motive force behind the abolitionist sympathies that helped lead to the Civil War. He traces Brown's sympathy for slaves to an incident in his youth when he was warmly received by a family that treated their slave with casual brutality. At the time it was written, John Brown was widely considered a fanatic at best, a lunatic at worst, but here he is seen clearly as a man driven by his Christianity and his personal morals to oppose what he clearly perceived as a tremendous wrong in society, and to do so regardless of whatever toll it might take upon him. The author examines Brown's impact on the minds of those who understood that the abolitionist cause was supported primarily by Blacks, on the lives of Blacks who discovered a white man willing to fight and die for their freedom, and by the masses who found that slavery was not only an actionable moral issue, but one of deadly urgency. Originally published in 1909, on the 50th anniversary of Brown's execution, this is W.E.B. Du Bois's only work of biography. Although less known than the author's The Souls of Black Folk or Black Reconstruction in America, John Brown remains a classic distinguished by its author's deep understanding and eloquence. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of John Brown is both modern and readable.