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Realm of Ice and Sky
Arctic explorer and American visionary Walter Wellman pioneered both polar and trans-Atlantic airship aviation, making history’s first attempts at each. Wellman has been cast as a self-promoting egomaniac known mostly for his catastrophic failures. Instead he was a courageous innovator who pushed the boundaries of polar exploration and paved the way for the ultimate conquest of the North Pole - which would be achieved not by dogsled or airplane, but by airship. American explorer Dr. Frederick Cook was the first to claim he made it to the North Pole in 1908. A year later, so did American Robert Peary, but both Cook’s and Peary’s claims had been seriously questioned. There was enough doubt that Norwegian explorer extraordinaire Roald Amundsen - who’d made history and a name for himself by being first to sail through the Northwest Passage and first man to the South Pole - picked up where Walter Wellman left off, attempting to fly to the North Pole by airship. He would go in the Norge, designed by Italian aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile. The 350-foot Norge flew over the North Pole on May 12, 1926, and Amundsen was able to accurately record and verify their exact location. However, the engineer Nobile felt slighted by Amundsen. Two years later, Nobile returned, this time in the Italia, backed by Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. This was an Italian enterprise, and Nobile intended to win back the global accolades and reputation he believed Amundsen had stripped from him. The journey ended in disaster, death, and accusations of cannibalism, launching one of the great rescue operations the world had ever seen. Realm of Ice and Sky is the riveting tale of the men who first flew the most advanced technological airships of their time to the top of the world, risking and even giving their lives for science, country, and polar immortality.
Soviet and Russian Destroyer Exports Volume 1
Though generally underestimated in the West, the Soviet export of destroyers played a vital role in buildup of the navies of Moscow?s allies and satellites. Soviet and Russian-built Destroyers in service with foreign Navies 1904-2023, Volume 1 examines Russian and Soviet military ship exports between 1904 and the 1930s, including Japan, Finland, Indochina, Germany, Estonia and Peru and their little-known participation in a number of military confrontations.The export of Soviet warships has gained modest attention compared with aircraft, tanks or SAMs, with coverage usually limited to the description of submarines and fast-attack boats exports. Soviet and Russian-built Destroyers in service with foreign Navies, 1904-2023 provides a detailed description of Soviet-made destroyers? service in foreign navies, including the purchase negotiations and transfers, their participation in a number of confrontations, and subsequent modernisation of the vessels, and the careers of many of their commanding officers. This work also looks at the building of ships to Soviet and Russian designs in the shipyards of China and India.Included in Soviet and Russian-built Destroyers in service with foreign Navies, 1904-2023 is the deeper background to the history of Russian shipbuilding, stretching back over two centuries to the early post-Napoleonic period, with Volume 1 focussing on exports and service between 1904 and the 1930s. This work is illustrated by many extremely rare photographs along with specially commissioned color artworks.
To War with The Old Gent
An extensively researched account of an exceptional battalion at war
“Perhaps you can try and imagine being faced with the prospect, on a cold Sunday evening in November, of rising from your sleeping bag at two-thirty the following morning to lead your men through hedges and over fields in an attack down to a canal bank two miles away, leaping into the icy water and paddling across the length of a cricket pitch on a flattened jerrycan, and then sitting on the far bank in your soaking uniform to help your soldiers across with ropes. To do this when subject to continuous machine-gun fire but with the possibility that if you are successful and survive, you may never need to fight another battle."
Many of us had a relation who served in the Great War, the majority of those men defending trench lines or attacking from them. They undertook wiring parties and raids on enemy trenches, but well over half their time was in reserve, in training and repairing trenches, tracks and roadways. They endured bitter cold, terrible rains, deep mud and moments of terror. Some suffered from trench foot or shell shock. They were ordinary men doing extraordinary things, all for their fellow soldiers, their country and their King.
The ‘1/8th Worcesters’ rose to the challenges to become one of the most effective infantry battalions of the War. This is their story, written with the help of letters, diaries, memoirs and newspaper articles, as well as conversations with the surviving sons of two of the most bemedalled young officers.
Repeat
Are we seeing history repeat itsel? e live in an eerily familiar age. A time of populists and dictators, ideology and dishonesty, racism and political murder. Tank battles are being fought and cities flattened. Things are falling apart and the centre cannot hold. The 1920s and 1930s are back. Can the cataclysm of the 1940s be far awa? he world needs to learn the lessons of those decades. Urgently. Dennis Glover outlines the story of the interwar years, the warnings of those who spoke out and the lessons now being ignored. If history is repeating, how can make it sto? n urgent, surprising and altogether persuasive read, Repeat: A Warning from History will open your eyes.
The Man Who Stole Himself
The life story of Hans Jonathan, Iceland's first Black citizen. The island nation of Iceland is known for many things—majestic landscapes, volcanic eruptions, distinctive seafood—but racial diversity is not one of them. So the little-known story of Hans Jonathan, a free Black man who lived and raised a family in early nineteenth-century Iceland, is improbable and compelling, the stuff of novels. In The Man Who Stole Himself, Gisli Palsson lays out the story of Hans Jonathan (also known as Hans Jónatan) in stunning detail. Born into slavery in St. Croix in 1784, Hans was taken as a slave to Denmark, where he eventually enlisted in the navy and fought on behalf of the country in the 1801 Battle of Copenhagen. After the war, he declared himself a free man, believing that he was due freedom not only because of his patriotic service, but because while slavery remained legal in the colonies, it was outlawed in Denmark itself. He thus became the subject of one of the most notorious slavery cases in European history, which he lost. Then Hans ran away—never to be heard from in Denmark again, his fate unknown for more than two hundred years. It’s now known that Hans fled to Iceland, where he became a merchant and peasant farmer, married, and raised two children. Today, he has become something of an Icelandic icon, claimed as a proud and daring ancestor both there and among his descendants in America. The Man Who Stole Himself brilliantly intertwines Hans Jonathan’s adventurous travels with a portrait of the Danish slave trade, legal arguments over slavery, and the state of nineteenth-century race relations in the Northern Atlantic world. Throughout the book, Palsson traces themes of imperial dreams, colonialism, human rights, and globalization, which all come together in the life of a single, remarkable man. Hans literally led a life like no other. His is the story of a man who had the temerity—the courage—to steal himself.
Midnight Flyboys
The untold history of a top-secret operation in the run-up to D-Day in which American flyers and Allied spies carried out some of the most daring cloak-and-dagger operations of World War II.In 1943, the OSS—precursor to the CIA—came up with a plan to increase its support to the French resistance forces that were fighting the Nazis. To start, the OSS recruited some of the best American bomber pilots and crews to a secret airfield twenty miles west of London and briefed them on the intended mission. Given a choice to stay or leave, every airman volunteered for what became known as Operation Carpetbagger. Their dangerous plan called for a new kind of flying: taking their B-24 Liberator bombers in the middle of the night across the English Channel and down to extremely low altitudes in Nazi-occupied France to find drop zones in dark fields. On the ground, resistance members waited to receive steel containers filled with everything from rifles and hand grenades to medicine and bicycle tires. Some nights, the flyers also dropped Allied secret agents by parachute to assist the French partisans. Though their story remained classified for more than fifty years, the Carpetbaggers ultimately received a Presidential Unit Citation from the US military, which declared: “it is safe to say that no group of this size has made a greater contribution to the war effort.” Along with other members of the wartime OSS, they were also awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Based on exclusive research and interviews, the definitive story of these heroic flyers—and of the brave secret agents and resistance leaders they aided—can now be told. Written in Bruce Henderson’s “spellbinding” (USA TODAY) prose, Midnight Flyboys is an astonishing tale of patriotism, courage, and sacrifice.
Where The Hell Have You Been?
''A terrific read'' Andy McNabIn November 1942, two nights after the Battle of El Alamein, a young British army officer was captured. As the Nazis deliberated about what to do with him, Richard Carver had particular reason to be afraid: unknown to anyone, he was the stepson of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the Allied Commander who had just inflicted the first defeat on the Third Reich. This gripping story tells of Richard''s internment in a POW camp in northern Italy. Having decided to risk making his way back to Allied HQ in the south, he embarked on a gruelling 500-mile journey through German-occupied territory, evading capture again and again and ultimately being saved by a family of brave Italians who jeopardised not just their own lives but those of an entire village to hide him. In the winter of 1943, a year after he disappeared, he staggered back into Army HQ, to be greeted by his stepfather with the words, ''Where the hell have you been?''This is a great adventure story - a reminder of a lost age, and of a generation forced to rise to extraordinary feats of valour in the service of a cause greater than themselves.''Riveting and remarkable'' Ben Macintyre, author of Operation Mincemeat ''This account is a gem. It reminds one of the gallantry and devotion to duty of a generation that has left us.'' Patrick Cordingley, Commander of the Desert Rats, Iraq, 1991Where the Hell Have You Been? provides a completely new way of seeing the prickly old warrior, Monty'' The Daily Telegraph
The Apothecary's Wife
The running joke in Europe for centuries was that anyone in a hurry to die should call the doctor. As far back as ancient Greece, physicians were notorious for administering painful and often fatal treatments – and charging for the privilege. For the most effective treatment, the ill and injured went to the women in their lives. This system lasted hundreds of years. It was gone in less than a century.Contrary to the familiar story, medication did not improve during the Scientific Revolution. Yet somehow, between 1650 and 1740, the domestic female and the physician switched places in the cultural consciousness: she became the ineffective, potentially dangerous quack, he the knowledgeable, trustworthy expert. The professionals normalized the idea of paying them for what people already got at home without charge, laying the foundation for Big Pharma and today’s global for-profit medication system.A revelatory history of medicine, The Apothecary’s Wife challenges the myths of the triumph of science and instead uncovers the fascinating truth. Drawing on a vast body of archival material, Karen Bloom Gevirtz depicts the extraordinary cast of characters who brought about this transformation. She also explores domestic medicine’s values in responses to modern health crises, such as the eradication of smallpox, and what benefits we can learn from these events.
A Short History of the World in 50 Tyrants
<p><b>Explore the tyrants who have shaped the course of history. All power corrupts, but absolute power can turn people into absolute monsters. The true stories behind the men and women who led tyrannies around the world. This is history ... but not as you know it.</b><br><br>Leading readers through all of <b>world history</b>, Ben Gazur looks at how tyrants and their regimes have <b>shaped the course of humanity</b> from the earliest times right up until the modern day. From the first <b>Ancient Greek</b> tyrants to those who still dominate nations today, dictators have always been pulling the strings.<br><br>In <b>50 bite-sized chapters</b> spanning thousands of years,<i> A Short History of the World in 50 Tyrants </i>examines their rise to power, how they stayed there and how they were overthrown, <b>investigating their lives and crimes</b>. Readers will learn how <b>Catherine the Great</b> seized the throne from her own husband, how <b>Adolf Hitler</b> created a cult of personality to assume complete control, and how <b>Julius Caesar</b> met his end under a rain of stabs on the senate floor.<br><br>Follow the whims, eccentricities and evil acts of <b>dictators across the millennia</b>, such as the deadly search for immortality by the first Chinese Emperor, the wily machinations of the Emperor Augustus and the crushing brutality of <b>Pol Pot</b>’s rule.<br><br><b>Also available:</b><br><i>A Short History of the World in 50 Places</i> (9781789291971)<br><i>A Short History of the World in 50 Animals</i> (9781789292954)<br><i>A Short History of the World in 50 Books</i> (9781789294088)<br><i>A Short History of the World in 50 Lies</i> (9781789294606)<br><i>A Short History of the World in 50 Failures</i> (9781789296938)</p>
The Life and Death of States
An intellectual history of sovereignty that reveals how the Habsburg Empire became a crucible for our contemporary world orderSprawled across the heartlands of Europe, the Habsburg Empire resisted all the standard theories of singular sovereignty. The 1848 revolutions sparked decades of heady constitutional experimentation that pushed the very concept of “the state” to its limits. This intricate multinational polity became a hothouse for public law and legal philosophy and spawned ideas that still shape our understanding of the sovereign state today. The Life and Death of States traces the history of sovereignty over one hundred tumultuous years, explaining how a regime of nation-states theoretically equal under international law emerged from the ashes of a dynastic empire. Natasha Wheatley shows how a new sort of experimentation began when the First World War brought the Habsburg Empire crashing down: the making of new states. Habsburg lands then became a laboratory for postimperial sovereignty and a new international order, and the results would echo through global debates about decolonization for decades to come. Wheatley explores how the Central European experience opens a unique perspective on a pivotal legal fiction—the supposed juridical immortality of states. A sweeping work of intellectual history, The Life and Death of States offers a penetrating and original analysis of the relationship between sovereignty and time, illustrating how the many deaths and precarious lives of the region’s states expose the tension between the law’s need for continuity and history’s volatility.
Enemy Literature
An entire forgotten corpus of US writing on the Nazi German enemy boomed in a matter of a few years, peaked during World War II, and collapsed within months of the war ending. For a fleeting moment in history, significant parts of the intellectual world in the United States converged to provide a cool-headed analysis of the Nazi threat and a clear identification of the enemy. Starting in 1944, these writers also offered an elaborate plan for a postwar re-education that would transform the National Socialist German nation into a democratic ally. Readers alarmed by the current resurgence of authoritarianism will learn from the work of those activists who analyzed Nazi Germany during World War II. This book, the first monographic study of this literature, provides pointed introductions to the main intellectual projects, their unique collaborative spirit, and their epochal results.
The Ryukyu Islands
The first comprehensive history of the Ryukyu Islands region in English. The Ryukyu Islands between Japan and Taiwan consist of around 160 islands and are home to about 1.5 million inhabitants. Across the islands’ history, sea-lanes and trade patterns have connected them to the East China Sea region, giving them a unique vantage point on the region’s changes and making them a useful lens through which to view and understand those transformations. In this book, Gregory Smits marshals his expertise to canvass the environmental, political, and social history of this fascinating area, emphasizing the diversity of influences from China, Japan, and Korea that have shaped it. Smits begins by tracing the islands’ early history from the time of the oldest extant human remains, through massive inflows of settlers from Japan, until the emergence of a centralized state in the sixteenth century. He then traces the development of the Ryukyu Kingdom from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, examining its major cultural formations and the interplay of local and external influences driving its evolution. Finally, Smits ushers readers to the modern era, from the end of the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879 through World War II, the era of American military control, and on to the present. He concludes with their present-day status as a tourist destination affected by ongoing geopolitical, economic, and environmental challenges. Synthesizing decades of research, this book is an indispensable, comprehensive guide to the islands’ history for scholars and nonspecialists alike.
Trailing the Bolsheviki
A special correspondent of The New York Times, Carl W. Ackerman traveled from Vladivostok to Irkutsk to Omsk to Ekaterinburg in the fall of 1918 in the midst of the Russian Civil War. He met with officers of the American and Japanese expeditionary forces, with members of the Czecho-Slovak corps fighting the Red Army, with ministers of the democratic Russian government in Omsk, and with military dictator Admiral Alexander Kolchak, who became the ruler of anti-Bolshevik Russia after a coup that displaced the Democrats. In fact, Ackerman was the first foreign journalist who visited the Ipatiev House in Eka-terinburg, the place of Tsar Nicholas II and his family’s imprisonment until they were murdered in July 1918. With his notes and newspaper articles to consult, Ackerman wrote Trailing the Bolsheviki soon after his return to the United States. His book was one of the very first American accounts of the Russian Civil War in Siberia and the Far East, providing his readers with the wealth of his observation and the entertainment of his travel feats. Moreover, Ackerman was among the first Americans to notice the basic split between the new political system materializing in Russia and the universalism of the Woodrow Wilson approach. Thus, he became one of the proponents of the first Red Scare and an early forerunner of the Cold War.
Urbanism and Empire in Roman Sicily
Sicily has been the fulcrum of the Mediterranean throughout history. The island's central geographical position and its status as ancient Rome's first overseas province make it key to understanding the development of the Roman Empire. Yet Sicily's crucial role in the empire has been largely overlooked by scholars of classical antiquity, apart from a small number of specialists in its archaeology and material culture. Urbanism and Empire in Roman Sicily offers the first comprehensive English-language overview of the history and archaeology of Roman Sicily since R. J. A. Wilson's Sicily under the Roman Empire (1990). Laura Pfuntner traces the development of cities and settlement networks in Sicily in order to understand the island's political, economic, social, and cultural role in Rome's evolving Mediterranean hegemony. She identifies and examines three main processes traceable in the archaeological record of settlement in Roman Sicily: urban disintegration, urban adaptation, and the development of alternatives to urban settlement. By expanding the scope of research on Roman Sicily beyond the bounds of the island itself, through comparative analysis of the settlement landscapes of Greece and southern Italy, and by utilizing exciting evidence from recent excavations and surveys, Pfuntner establishes a new empirical foundation for research on Roman Sicily and demonstrates the necessity of including Sicily in broader historical and archaeological studies of the Roman Empire.
No Uncertain Sound
A deeply researched, well crafted biography of Admiral Sir Jock Slater, whose career culminated as First Sea Lord from 1995 to 1998. It illuminates pivotal moments in the evolution of British naval and air power during the late twentieth century. Reveals what made Slater one the most successful and longest serving admirals of the Cold War eraTouches on Slater’s relations with the Royal familyDiscloses previously unknown episodes in the making of British defence and naval policyUses as primary sources the memories of those who took part in events, such as the making nuclear policy, the decision to send women to sea, the end of the gay ban, UK-Russia relations and the establishment of British Maritime DoctrineThis book will appeal to anyone interested in naval history.
The Libyan Pharaohs of Egypt
A comprehensive account of the Libyan pharaohs of Egypt, who ruled from the tenth through the seventh centuries BC, accessibly written by renowned Egyptologist Aidan DodsonDuring the tenth through the seventh centuries BC, Egypt was ruled by a series of pharaohs of Libyan ancestry, who ranged from Shoshenq I, conqueror of Jerusalem, to individuals so obscure that some may actually be spelling errors. The Libyans had hitherto been enemies of the Egyptians, with conflicts going back into the third millennium BC. Yet during the eleventh century we find Libyan names among members of Egyptian elite families, and early in the next century a pharaoh of Libyan descent ascended the Egyptian throne. There is no evidence of any violent take-over, so it appears likely that ongoing immigration and intermarriage with the Egyptian elites had brought a Libyan line to this point. Although the earlier Libyan pharaohs seem to have maintained the tradition of a unitary Egyptian state, as time went by, Libyan ideas of decentralized control became more prevalent. As a result, we find individuals holding both Libyan and Egyptian titles controlling distinct territories around Egypt, some of whom assumed the names and titles of a pharaoh. Conflict sometimes accompanied this process, with a long civil war fought for the control of southern Egypt and the great religious capital of Thebes. Some degree of central control was imposed with the advent of a further set of rulers from Nubia during the eight century, but a single Egyptian state would not be restored until the middle of the seventh century.The Libyan Pharaohs of Egypt reconstructs the story of this era, covering not only its complex political history, but also its monuments – both for the living and the dead—and its aftermath, including the rediscovery of its kings and monuments in modern times.
A Diary of the Russian Revolution
"When an astonishing revolution toppled the Russian autocracy early in 1917, James L. Houghteling Jr., a special attaché to the US embassy in Russia, was one of the very few Americans present who daily recorded the striking events he witnessed and the comments he heard from both Russian and foreign observers. The diary of the thirty-three-year-old Chicago native therefore provides a rare and valuable record of dramatic developments in the streets of the wartime capital, Petrograd. It also offers unusual insights into how Russian elites and foreign diplomats, journalists, and business owners viewed the actions of soldiers, workers, and political leaders who shaped the revolution.
The Village: Russian Impressions
Chicago native, political activist, and journalist Ernest Poole (1880-1950) provides a distinctive view of the Bolshevik Revolution in his work, The Village: Russian Impressions. This work is unusual in the library of American accounts of Revolutionary Russia because it addresses the world of the Russian peasants, far away from the revolutionary centers of Petrograd and Moscow. He associated with a Russian priest, a doctor, a teacher, and a mill owner who offered a perspective not normally seen in the history of the Bolshevik Revolution. Poole''s own views and those of the people he visited provide a fascinating account of the revolutionary era that helps readers a century later understand the complexity of this fascinating time.
One Man’s Freedom
From the acclaimed author of The Fire Is upon Us, the dramatic untold story of Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr.’s decade-long clash over the meaning of freedom—and how their conflicting visions still divide American politicsIn the mid-1950s, Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the leaders of two diametrically opposed freedom movements that changed the course of American history—and still divide American politics. King mobilized civil rights activists under the banner of “freedom now,” insisting that true freedom would not be realized until all people—regardless of race—were empowered politically, economically, and socially. Goldwater rallied conservatives to the cause of “extremism in defense of liberty,” advocating radical individualism. In One Man’s Freedom, Nicholas Buccola tells the compelling story of Goldwater and King’s dramatic decade-long debate over the meaning of an all-important American ideal. Part dual biography, part history, One Man’s Freedom traces the actions and words of Goldwater and King over a crucial and eventful decade, from their dizzying rise through 1964, which ended with Goldwater’s landslide defeat in the presidential election and King’s Nobel Peace Prize. The book chronicles why Goldwater and King, who never met in person, came to view each other as perhaps the greatest threat to freedom in America. It explains how their ideas of freedom could be so vastly different, yet both so deeply rooted in American history and their times. And it shows how their disagreement continues to shape and explain politics today, when the bitter divisions between Republicans and Democrats often come down to the question of what kind of freedom Americans want—the one defined by Goldwater or by King?
V kategórii populárno - náučné encyklopédie nájdete široký výber kníh, ktoré vám poskytnú poznatky z rôznych oblastí zaujímavým a zrozumiteľným spôsobom. Encyklopédie vám pomôžu získať komplexný prehľad o rôznych témach, ako ľudské telo a človek, príroda, vesmír, veda a technika a história.
Naša ponuka encyklopédií populárno-náučného charakteru vám umožní objaviť fascinujúci svet poznania a rozšíriť svoje vedomosti o rôznych témach.




























