Books Military History

Books Military History - More than two decades after he first saw Shoah, Freedland, a British journalist who wrote thrillers under the pseudonym Sam Bourne, decided to revisit Vrba's story, which he deemed prescient for this "age of post-truth and fake news."

Drawing on personal papers, photographs, and interviews with Vrba's first and second wives, Freedland meticulously outlines his subject's life and surprisingly controversial legacy. On the surface, Sarah and Angelina Grimke had little in common with their brother Henry.

Books Military History

Ardent abolitionists who abandoned their Southern roots in favor of the more sympathetic streets of Philadelphia, the sisters abhorred slavery and racial inequality. Henry, on the other hand, was a “notoriously violent and sadistic” enslaver who showed little regard for the three sons he'd fathered with an enslaved woman, writes historian Kerri K. Greenidge in her sweeping biography of the Grimke family.

The Grimkes The Legacy Of Slavery In An American Family By Kerri K Greenidge

USS Saratoga and her sister ship USS Lexington were the two largest aircraft carriers in the world until 1944. The keel of the battle cruiser USS Saratoga (CC-3) was laid by New York Shipbuilding in Camden, New Jersey, on September 25, 1920

.Work... The Vickers Armstrong Wellington, affectionately dubbed the "Wimpy" after the hamburger-scoffing cartoon character, lays claim to two distinctions within the RAF WWII annals. The first is related to its geodetic structure, with a cloth covering that proves to be superior to previous...

The 16th-century contemporaries Catherine de' Medici and Elizabeth I had much in common. Both wielded power in an age dominated by men. Both had at-times tense relationships with Mary, Queen of Scots. And both showed a single-minded determination to do what they deem best for their respective kingdoms of France and England.

The Aleutians were the only North American territory to be invaded and occupied during the war. The fighting for these remote islands off the Alaskan mainland lasted for more than a year and claimed more than 3,800 Japanese and Americans...

Blood Fire And Gold The Story Of Elizabeth I And Catherine De Medici By Estelle Paranque

In the years after the Holocaust, scholars and the Jewish community alike viewed Vrba with a skeptical eye, in part due to his refusal to “serve up a morally comfortable narrative in which the only villains were the Nazis,” wrote Freedland.

Reminiscing on the night he first heard of Vrba, Freedland wrote, “I left the cinema that night convinced that the name of Rudolf Vrba deserved to stand alongside Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler and Primo Levi in ​​the first rank of stories that define the Shoah.

That day may never come. But maybe, through this book, [he] might perform one last act of escape: Perhaps he might escape our forgetfulness and be remembered.” This year, the ten history books we've chosen to highlight serve a dual purpose.

Some offer a response from reality, transporting readers to such varied locales as Renaissance Italy, the Nile River and Yellowstone National Park. Others reflect on the fraught nature of the current moment, detailing how the nation's past—including the military's racist treatment of Black World War II soldiers and the government's collaboration with a Mexican dictator—informs its present and future.

Civil Rights Queen Constance Baker Motley And The Struggle For Equality By Tomiko Brown-Nagin

From a searing exploration of slavery's lasting consequences to a dual biography of two European queens, these are some of Smithsonian magazine's favorite history books of 2022. Based on the M4A2 and M4A3 Sherman tank chassis, and equipped with a 3-inch M7 gun, the M10 was numerically the most important US tank destroyer of WWII.

The M10 was built in response to the stunning successes of the German... The destroyers of the Akizuki "Autumn Moon" class were very different from the standard fleet type of Imperial Japanese Navy destroyers inaugurated with the Fubuki class.

They were designed for the protection of the Imperial Japanese Navy's carrier task forces,... In 1962, attorney Constance Baker Motley became the first Black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, defending James Meredith in his quest to gain admission to the University of Mississippi.

A protege of Justice Thurgood Marshall, Motley wrote the original complaint for Brown v. Board of Education, defended Martin Luther King Jr. on contempt of court charges and won nine of the ten civil rights cases she presented to the court.

Bad Mexicans Race Empire Revolution In The Borderlands By Kelly Lytle Hernández

Hoover, who headed the FBI for 48 years, from 1924 until his death at age 77 in 1972, arrived at the agency when it was a “law enforcement backwater, riddled with scandal and failure and controversy,” wrote Gage.

Under his leadership, the FBI became "a political surveillance force without precedent in American life," continuously reshaped "according to his own priorities and in his own image." The latest book from historian Kelly Lytle Hernández takes its title from a disparaging nickname coined by Mexican President Porfirio Díaz, who served seven terms between 1876 and 1911. Bestowed upon a revolutionary group headed by anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón, the label malos Mexicanos believed the movement's

noble aims, including securing justice for the country's most marginalized citizens: “poor men and women, mostly miners, farmworkers and cotton pickers, many of them displaced from Mexico when President Díaz gave their land to foreign investors,” according to Lytle Hernández.

Based on an adaptation of the White Scout Car, the US half-track vehicle of WWII combined the cross-country ability of a fully tracked vehicle with the road performance of a medium truck. A myriad of variations of these vehicles were...

Blood Fire Gold The Story Of Elizabeth I Catherine De Medici

When commissioned on December 14, 1927, USS Lexington and her sister ship, USS Saratoga, were the world's largest aircraft carriers. The Lexington-class carriers, as the ships were known, were the result of an effort to make lemonade from lemons....

In Blood, Fire and Gold, Paranque deftly shows how these experiences shaped the women rulers' relationships with their subjects, advisers and each other. Placed in a unique position that few others could understand, "they might have been rivals, but they were also united in their power, each admiring the force of the other."

Paranque concluded, "Both of them are brave and intelligent women, they were unlike any other rulers of the age, and while this might divide them, it would also bring them closer together." A brilliant and beautifully written deep dive into the complicated relationship between Elizabeth I and Catherine de Medici, two of the most powerful women in Renaissance Europe who shaped each other as profoundly as they shaped the course of history.

Instead of prompting a racial reckoning, Black soldiers' protests often resulted in court-martials and convictions—a trend that led a prominent Black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, to observe, “From slavery to slave labor has been the fate of the Negro who

The Divorce Colony How Women Revolutionized Marriage And Found Freedom On The American Frontier By April White

become a soldier or sailor. As a slave, the Negro revolted—fought, bled and died to break the chains that bound him. As a labor slave in the Army and Navy, he is doing no less." Schiffer Publishing, Ltd.

processes all European orders via their overseas partner Gazelle Book Services. We welcome you to browse Schiffer's titles at Gazelle's website, https://gazellebookservices.co.uk/, and place your order with them directly. Whether these trials were worth it depends on who you ask.

As the Washington Post notes in its review, a "fundamental disagreement" over the Nile's source "would poison the remainder of each explorer's life." Speke died in a probable hunting accident (speculated by some to be suicide) in 1864, at age 37, while Burton died in relative obscurity in 1890, at age 69. Bombay died in Africa in 1885 at age 65.

When Blanche Molineux arrived in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on November 16, 1902, she had a singular goal in mind: securing a divorce from her husband, Roland. Like other wealthy white women at the turn of the 20th century, she'd settled on Sioux Falls—home to what the press dubbed the “divorce colony”—due to South Dakota's lax divorce laws.

Saving Yellowstone Exploration And Preservation In Reconstruction America By Megan Kate Nelson

While New York required proof of adultery to end a marriage, this frontier state had far fewer limitations; Crucially, it also has some of the shortest residency requirements in the U.S., allowing women to divorce after calling South Dakota home for between 90 days and six months.

Experience aerial combat at the controls of the fearsome AH-64 Apache attack helicopter during the Operation Iraqi Freedom “Surge.” Author Dan McClinton was an Apache pilot with the US Army's 1st Cavalry Division through three combat deployments to Iraq.

US... In 1935, Fascist Italy invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), one of just two independent states in Africa at the time. Italy first invaded Ethiopia in 1895 and was driven out by the army of Emperor Menelik II.

In 1935, the defensive... With their unmistakable silhouette, the Douglas DC-9 family of twin-engine passenger jets was a familiar sight on many of the world's airfields well into the 1990s. Douglas initiated development of the DC-9 at the beginning of the 1960s and, in doing so,...

Half American The Epic Story Of African Americans Fighting World War Ii At Home And Abroad By Matthew Delmont

Wetzler and Vrba wrote a report detailing the Nazis' carefully orchestrated system of mass murder. Contrary to Vrba's increasingly naive expectations, the Vrba-Wetzler report failed to spark widespread resistance or prevent the deportations of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews.

The report's impact was limited by delays in distribution; what Vrba perceived as inadequate responses by Jewish leaders; and Hungarian Jews’ refusal “to believe in the possibility of their own imminent destruction, even, perhaps especially, when that destruction is certain,” according to Freedland.

The striking P-61 Black Widow was the first purpose-built American night fighter. Designed by Jack Northrop and Vladimir Pavlecka, the P-61's menacing appearance was matched by the plane's advanced technology and fearsome weaponry. Interestingly, the Widow is credited with the...

2022 was a momentous year for Yellowstone, the United States' first national park. Established 150 years ago, on March 1, 1872, Yellowstone marked this milestone with a slate of anniversary programming and fundraising campaigns. Then, in June, extreme flooding devastated the park, closing it to the public for the first time in 34 years.

The Escape Artist The Man Who Broke Out Of Auschwitz To Warn The World By Jonathan Freedland

Blanche, for her part, had a good reason for wanting a divorce. Aside from the fact that she wasn't in love with Roland, there was the small matter of her husband's suspected involvement in two murders, including the killing of Blanche's one-time lover.

Author of the definitive A Collector's Guide to the Savage 99 Rifle and Its Predecessors, the Model 1895 and 1899, David Royal now presents the beautiful and elaborately engraved variants of the 99. Although widely perceived as utilitarian, Savage's Models...

This book examines the American Air Force aircrews who flew tactical reconnaissance combat missions from World War I to the Gulf War. The book employs primary-source interviews, unit histories, mission documents, declassified operational studies, and photos to tell their stories....

On July 17, 1944, an explosion rocked a port in California's Bay Area, killing 320 sailors and civilians in the deadliest home-front disaster of World War II. Two-thirds of the dead were enlisted Black sailors—men who'd been forced to load heavy munitions onto ships bound for the Pacific without receiving adequate training.

G-Man J Edgar Hoover And The Making Of The American Century

After the disaster, when 50 Black sailors refused to continue the dangerous work, the military responded by placing them on trial and sentencing each to up to 15 years in prison. On March 18, 1945, the B-17G "Lady Jane II" lifted off from her base at Deenethorpe, England;

she never returned. The story is one of deep tragedy and survival, of sacrifice, and of the love the crew had for each... The storied history of the US Army's elite 10th Mountain Division is presented here in precise detail by Dennis Chapman, a former officer in the division.

The reader will first learn of the outfit's 1943 activation, then the dramatic story... Better known as the magonistas, Magón's followers defied Díaz's dictatorial regime, objecting to his emphasis on American investment over the well-being of his people.

In Bad Mexicans, Lytle Hernández outlines these rebels' activism and how it paved the way for the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920. Drawing on long-overlooked archival records that center the voices of Indigenous people and women, Bad Mexicans argues that the magonistas and

River Of The Gods Genius Courage And Betrayal In The Search For The Source Of The Nile By Candice Millard

the revolution they helped spark also shaped the United States. The influx of refugees escaping Díaz's wrath marked the beginning of what has been a century of Mexicans seeking economic opportunity across the northern border. A Note to our Readers

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