Ambassador Morgenthau's story: a personal account of the Armenian Genocide

By Morgenthau, Henry

Publishing Date: 2008, ©1918

Classification: 900

Call Number: 940.31 MOR

A German superman at Constantinople -- The "boss system" in the Ottoman Empire and how it proved useful to Germany -- "The personal representative of the Kaiser" : Wangenheim opposes the sale of American warships to Greece -- Germany mobilizes the Turkish army -- Wangenheim smuggles the Goeben and the Breslau through the Dardanelles -- Wangenheim tells the American ambassador how the Kaiser started the war -- Germany's plans for new territories, coaling stations, and indemnities -- A classic instance of German propaganda -- Germany closes the Dardanelles and so separates Russia from her Allies -- Turkey's abrogation of the capitulations : Enver living in a palace, with plenty of money and an imperial bride -- Germany forces Turkey into the war -- The Turks attempt to treat alien enemies decently, but the Germans insist on persecuting them -- The invasion of the Notre Dame de Sion school -- Wangenheim and the Bethlehem steel company : a "holy war" that was made in Germany -- Djemal, a troublesome Mark Antony : the first German attempt to get a German peace -- The Turks prepare to flee from Constantinople and establish a new capital in Asia minor : the allied fleet bombarding the Dardanelles -- Enver as the man who demonstrated "the vulnerability of the British fleet" : old-fashioned defenses of the Dardanelles -- The allied armada sails away, though on the brink of victory -- A fight for three thousand civilians -- More adventures of the foreign residents -- Bulgaria on the auction block -- The Turk reverts to the ancestral type -- The "revolution" at Van -- The murder of a nation -- Talaat tells why he deports the Armenians -- Enver Pasha discusses the Armenians -- "I shall do nothing for the Armenians," says the German ambassador -- Enver again moves for peace : farewell to the sultan and to Turkey -- Von Jagow, Zimmerman, and German-Americans.

Survival in Auschwitz: the Nazi assault on humanity

By Levi, Primo

Publishing Date: 1996

Classification: 900

Call Number: 940.5318 LEV

In 1943, Primo Levi, a 25-year-old chemist and "Italian citizen of Jewish race," was arrested by Italian fascists and deported from his native Turin to Auschwitz. This is Levi's classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story of systematic cruelty and miraculous endurance. Remarkable for its simplicity, restraint, compassion, and even wit, Survival in Auschwitz remains a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit. Included in this new edition is an illuminating conversation between Philip Roth and Primo Levi never before published in book form.--From publisher description.

Wannsee: the road to the final solution

By Longerich, Peter

Publishing Date: 2021

Classification: 900

Call Number: 940.5318 LON

"On 20 January 1942, fifteen high-ranking Nazi Party, government, and SS officials arrived for a meeting in a luxurious villa on the shores of the Wannsee, a lake on the western outskirts of Berlin. The elegance and grandeur of the villa, with its exquisite lakeside position and opulent interiors, stood in stark contrast, however, to the purpose of that meeting: to discuss the implementation of the 'final solution to the Jewish question'." -- inside front book jacket flap.

Hitler's American gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany's march to global war

By Simms, Brendan

Publishing Date: 2021

Classification: 900

Call Number: 940.5343 SIM

"By early December 1941, war and genocide had changed Europe beyond recognition. Nazi Germany had occupied most of the continent and opened concentration camps, while millions of soldiers had died on the front. In Asia, the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War had turned mainland China into a battleground and the Pacific Islands into an armed camp. Still, these far-off conflicts were not yet inextricably linked, and the greatest power the world had yet seen, the United States, was at peace. Hitler's American Gamble explores the five critical days that changed everything: December 7th-11th, from Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor to Hitler's declaration of war on the United States. Historians have conventionally believed that Japan's pre-emptive strike led inexorably to the German-U.S. war and the outbreak of a truly global conflict. Tracing diplomatic and strategic developments in real time, historians Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman reveal how in fact an American declaration of war against Germany was far from inevitable. Roosevelt faced a Congress and country unwilling to break with the isolationism it had embraced at the end of World War I. The outbreak of an expensive Pacific war with Japan on December 7th failed to convince many Americans that the nation should also intervene in Europe, despite the fervent hopes of Allied leaders and the Roosevelt administration. Only with Hitler's intervention on December 11th was the United States irrevocably roped into war with Germany. This was not the foolhardy decision of a man so bloodthirsty he forgot all sense of strategy, but a decision Hitler took rationally and a gamble that made sense for Germany, even as it expanded its theatre of war. Backed by deep archival research, Hitler's American Gamble revises our understanding of World War II, uncovering the rationale behind Hitler's greatest strategic error and offering a new perspective on America's rise to global power"--

Stalin's war: a new history of World War II

By McMeekin, Sean

Publishing Date: 2021

Classification: 900

Call Number: 940.5347 MCM

"Drawing on ambitious new research in European and U.S. archives, Stalin's War revolutionizes our understanding of World War II by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler's genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war that emerged in Europe in August 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, was the Pacific war of 1941-1945 the direct result of Stalin's maneuverings, which he orchestrated to unleash the furies of war between capitalist powers Japan and the U.S. This groundbreaking reassessment of the Second World War elucidates Stalin's conquest of most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism"--

Ritchie Boy Secrets: How a Force of Immigrants and Refugees Helped Win World War II

By Eddy, Beverley D

Publishing Date: [2021]

Classification: 900

Call Number: 940.54 EDD

"This is the story of the 15,000 immigrants and refugees who used their native language skills and knowledge of their home countries to help America to victory in World War II. Beverley Driver Eddy tells their story thoroughly and colorfully, drawing heavily on interviews with surviving Ritchie Boys"--

Rebellion: the history of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution

By Ackroyd, Peter

Publishing Date: 2014

Classification: 900

Call Number: 941.06 ACK

Peter Ackroyd has been praised as one of the greatest living chroniclers of Britain and its people. In Rebellion, he continues his dazzling account of the history of England, beginning with the progress south of the Scottish king, James VI, who on the death of Elizabeth I became the first Stuart king of England, and ending with the deposition and flight into exile of his grandson, James II. The Stuart monarchy brought together the two nations of England and Scotland into one realm, albeit a realm still marked by political divisions that echo to this day. More importantly, perhaps, the Stuart era was marked by the cruel depredations of civil war, and the killing of a king. Shrewd and opinionated, James I was eloquent on matters as diverse as theology, witchcraft, and the abuses of tobacco, but his attitude to the English parliament sowed the seeds of the division that would split the country during the reign of his hapless heir, Charles I. Ackroyd offers a brilliant, warts-and-all portrayal of Charles's nemesis, Oliver Cromwell, Parliament's great military leader and England's only dictator, who began his career as a political liberator but ended it as much of a despot as "that man of blood," the king he executed. England's turbulent seventeenth century is vividly laid out before us, but so too is the cultural and social life of the period, notable for its extraordinarily rich literature, including Shakespeare's late masterpieces, Jacobean tragedy, the poetry of John Donne and Milton and Thomas Hobbes's great philosophical treatise, Leviathan. In addition to its account of England's royalty, Rebellion also gives us a very real sense of the lives of ordinary English men and women, lived out against a backdrop of constant disruption and uncertainty. - (McMillan Palgrave)

Charles I's killers in America: the lives & afterlives of Edward Whalley & William Goffe

By Jenkinson, Matthew

Publishing Date: 2019

Classification: 900

Call Number: 941.0620 JEN

When the British monarchy was restored in 1660, King Charles II was faced with the conundrum of what to do with those who had been involved in the execution of his father eleven years earlier. Facing a grisly fate at the gallows, some of the men who had signed Charles I's death warrant fled to America. 'Charles I's Killers in America' traces the gripping story of two of these men - Edward Whalley and William Goffe - and their lives in America, from their welcome in New England until their deaths there. With fascinating insights into the governance of the American colonies in the seventeenth century, and how a network of colonists protected the regicides, Matthew Jenkinson overturns the enduring theory that Charles II unrelentingly sought revenge for the murder of his father. 'Charles I's Killers in America' also illuminates the regicides' afterlives, with conclusions that have far-reaching implications for our understanding of Anglo-American political and cultural relations. Novels, histories, poems, plays, paintings, and illustrations featuring the fugitives were created against the backdrop of America's revolutionary strides towards independence and its forging of a distinctive national identity. The history of the 'king-killers' was distorted and embellished as they were presented as folk heroes and early champions of liberty, protected by proto-revolutionaries fighting against English tyranny. Jenkinson rewrites this once-ubiquitous and misleading historical orthodoxy, to reveal a far more subtle and compelling picture of the regicides on the run.

Foundation: the history of England from its earliest beginnings to the Tudors

By Ackroyd, Peter

Publishing Date: 2012

Classification: 900

Call Number: 942 ACK

Peter Ackroyd, whose work has always been underpinned by a profound interest in and understanding of England's history, now tells the epic story of England itself. In Foundation, the chronicler of London and of its river, the Thames, takes us from the primeval forests of England's prehistory to the death, in 1509, of the first Tudor king, Henry VII. He guides us from the building of Stonehenge to the founding of the two great glories of medieval England: common law and the cathedrals. He shows us glimpses of the country's most distant past--a Neolithic stirrup found in a grave, a Roman fort, a Saxon tomb, a medieval manor house--and describes in rich prose the successive waves of invaders who made England English, despite being themselves Roman, Viking, Saxon, or Norman French. With his extraordinary skill for evoking time and place and his acute eye for the telling detail, Ackroyd recounts the story of warring kings, of civil strife, and foreign wars. But he also gives us a vivid sense of how England's early people lived: the homes they built, the clothes the wore, the food they ate, even the jokes they told. All are brought vividly to life in this history of England through the narrative mastery of one of Britain's finest writers. - (McMillan Palgrave)

Tudors: a history of England

By Ackroyd, Peter

Publishing Date: 2012

Classification: 900

Call Number: 942.05 ACK

Rich in detail and atmosphere and told in vivid prose, 'Tudors' recounts the transformation of England from a settled Catholic country to a Protestant superpower. It is the story of Henry VIII's cataclysmic break with Rome, and his relentless pursuit of both the perfect wife and the perfect heir.

A history of Wales

By Davies, John

Publishing Date: 2007

Classification: 900

Call Number: 942.9 DAV

Stretching from the Ice Ages to the present day, this account traces the political, social and cultural history of the land that has come to be called Wales.

Paris under water: how the city of light survived the great flood of 1910

By Jackson, Jeffrey H

Publishing Date: 2011

Classification: 900

Call Number: 944.3608 JAC

Alexander II: the last great tsar

By Radzinskiĭ, Ėdvard

Publishing Date: c2005

Classification: 900

Call Number: 947.08 RAD

Alexander II was Russia's Lincoln, and the greatest reformer tsar since Peter the Great. He was also one of the most contradictory, and fascinating, of history's supreme leaders. He freed the serfs, yet launched vicious wars. He engaged in the sexual exploits of a royal Don Juan, yet fell profoundly in love. He ruled during the "Russian Renaissance" of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev -- yet his Russia became the birthplace of modern terrorism. His story could be that of one of Russia's greatest novels, yet it is true. It is also crucially important today.It is a tale that runs on parallel tracks. Alexander freed 23 million Russian slaves, reformed the justice system and the army, and very nearly became the father of Russia's first constitution and the man who led that nation into a new era of western-style liberalism. Yet it was during this feverish time that modern nihilism first arose. On the sidelines of Alexander's state dramas, a group of radical, disaffected young people first experimented with dynamite, and first began to use terrorism. Fueled by the writings of a few intellectuals and zealots, they built bombs, dug tunnels, and planned ambushes. They made no less than six unsuccessful attempts on Alexander's life. Finally, the parallel tracks joined, when a small cell of terrorists, living next door to Dostoevsky, built the fatal bomb that ended the life of the last great Tsar. It stopped Russian reform in its tracks.Edvard Radzinsky is justly famous as both a biographer and a dramatist, and he brings both skills to bear in this vivid, page-turning, rich portrait of one of the greatest of all Romanovs. Delving deep into the archives, he raises intriguing questions about the connections between Dostoevsky and the young terrorists, about the hidden romances of the Romanovs, and about the palace conspiracies that may have linked hard-line aristocrats with their nemesis, the young nihilists.Alexander's life proves the timeless lesson that in Russia, it is dangerous to start reforms, but even more dangerous to stop them. It also shows that the traps and dangers encountered in today's war on terrorists were there from the start. - (Simon and Schuster)

The Viking heart: how Scandinavians conquered the world

By Herman, Arthur

Publishing Date: 2021

Classification: 900

Call Number: 948.022 HER

"From a New York Times best-selling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist, a sweeping epic of how the Vikings and their descendants have shaped history and America"--

The little book of the Icelanders: 50 miniature essays on the quirks and foibes of the Icelandic people

By Alda Sigmundsdóttir

Publishing Date: 2012

Classification: 900

Call Number: 949.12 ALD

"After more than 20 years away, Alda Sigmundsdottir returned to her native Iceland as a foreigner. With a native person's insight yet an outsider's perspective, Alda quickly set about dissecting the national psyche of the Icelanders. Among the fascinating subjects broached in The Little Book of the Icelanders: The appalling driving habits of the Icelanders' naming conventions and custom, the Icelanders' profound fear of commitment, the irreverence of the Icelanders, why Icelandic women are really men, how the Icelanders manage to make social interactions really complicated, the importance of the family in Icelandic society, where to go to meet the real Icelanders (and possibly score some free financial advice), rituals associated with weddings, confirmations, graduations, and deaths ... and many, many more. One chapter leads to the next, creating a continuous chain of storytelling. It feels as if you're sitting in the author's kitchen, enjoying a cup of coffee and conversing with her about the quirks of her countrymen, every now and then bursting out laughing ..." ... amazon.com

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the epic story of the Taiping Civil War

By Platt, Stephen R

Publishing Date: 2012

Classification: 900

Call Number: 951.034 PLA

This narrative history of China's nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion (which cost some twenty million lives) brims with unforgettable characters and vivid re-creations of massive and sometimes gruesome battles, in a portrait of the largest civil war in history, a conflict that shaped the fate of modern China. The story begins in the early 1850s, the waning years of the Qing dynasty, when word spread of a major revolution brewing in the provinces, led by a failed civil servant who claimed to be the son of God and brother of Jesus. The Taiping rebels drew their power from the poor and the disenfranchised, unleashing the ethnic rage of millions of Chinese against their Manchu rulers. This homegrown movement seemed all but unstoppable until Britain and the United States stepped in and threw their support behind the Manchus. After years of massive carnage, all opposition to Qing rule was effectively snuffed out for generations. Here the author recounts these events in detail, building his story on two fascinating characters with opposing visions for China's future: the conservative Confucian scholar Zeng Guofan, an accidental general who emerged as the most influential military strategist in China's modern history; and Hong Rengan, a brilliant Taiping leader whose grand vision of building a modern, industrial, and pro-Western Chinese state ended in tragic failure. This is the history of the rise and fall of the movement that, a century and a half ago, might have launched China on an entirely different path into the modern world.

Flight: an Air America pilot's story of adventure, descent and redemption

By Hansen, Neil Graham

Publishing Date: [2018]

Classification: 900

Call Number: 959.7043 HAN

In 1964, I embarked on a journey that was to be my life's adventure. I hired on as a pilot for Air America and its clandestine operations in Southeast Asia. Flying for the CIA's secret airline was a dream come true. Air America's operations were unknown. Its schedules were irregular. Its pilots were shadow people. It was the world of spooks, covert air ops and adventure. I had already been a pilot for more than half of my life when I left my home in Detroit for the wild escapades that awaited me in Southeast Asia. Air America had been the pinnacle of my life and, had the trajectory remained steady, my world and my career should have gone onward and upward from that point. The intent of telling my story is to take the reader on an historical journey of a little-known place in time through my own personal account. Within the context of history, my narrative is not to be considered anything but my own experience. The ranks of Air America were comprised of a host of patriotic professionals who deserve a place of honor in the annals of history. However, many colorful characters wore the Air America wings, and inside the course of my narrative, the reader will be subjected to people and situations that cannot be filed neatly under anything resembling normal sanity. Most names, except those of a known or high-ranking or public nature, and those I wish to recognize for heroic performances, have been changed to protect the innocent and guilty alike.

American revolutions: a continental history, 1750-1804

By Taylor, Alan

Publishing Date: [2016]

Classification: 900

Call Number: 973.3 TAY

The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the ideal framework for a democratic, prosperous nation. Alan Taylor, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, gives us a different creation story in this magisterial history of the nation's founding. Rising out of the continental rivalries of European empires and their native allies, Taylor's Revolution builds like a ground fire overspreading Britain's mainland colonies, fueled by local conditions, destructive, hard to quell. Conflict ignited on the frontier, where settlers clamored to push west into Indian lands against British restrictions, and in the seaboard cities, where commercial elites mobilized riots and boycotts to resist British tax policies. When war erupted, Patriot crowds harassed Loyalists and nonpartisans into compliance with their cause. Brutal guerrilla violence flared all along the frontier from New York to the Carolinas, fed by internal divisions as well as the clash with Britain. Taylor skillfully draws France, Spain, and native powers into a comprehensive narrative of the war that delivers the major battles, generals, and common soldiers with insight and power. With discord smoldering in the fragile new nation through the 1780s, nationalist leaders such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton sought to restrain unruly state democracies and consolidate power in a Federal Constitution. Assuming the mantle of "We the People," the advocates of national power ratified the new frame of government. But their opponents prevailed in the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, whose vision of a western "empire of liberty" aligned with the long-standing, expansive ambitions of frontier settlers. White settlement and black slavery spread west, setting the stage for a civil war that nearly destroyed the union created by the founders.

Founding fathers: the fight for freedom and the birth of American liberty

By Kostyal, K. M.

Publishing Date: [2014]

Classification: 900

Call Number: 973.3092 KOS

Kostyal tells the story of the great American heroes who created the Declaration of Independence, fought the American Revolution, shaped the US Constitution--and changed the world.

Bunker Hill: a city, a siege, a revolution

By Philbrick, Nathaniel

Publishing Date: [2013]

Classification: 900

Call Number: 973.3312 PHI

In the opening volume of his acclaimed American Revolution series, Nathaniel Philbrick turns his keen eye to pre-Revolutionary Boston and the spark that ignited the American Revolution. In the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party and the violence at Lexington and Concord, the conflict escalated and skirmishes gave way to outright war in the Battle of Bunker Hill. It was the bloodiest conflict of the revolutionary war, and the point of no return for the rebellious colonists. Philbrick gives us a fresh view of the story and its dynamic personalities, including John Adams, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and George Washington. With passion and insight, he reconstructs the revolutionary landscape—geographic and ideological—in a mesmerizing narrative of the robust, messy, blisteringly real origins of America. - (Penguin Putnam)