The diplomatic origins, so-called, of the War are only thefever chart of the patient; they do not tell us what caused thefever. To probe for underlying causes and deeper forces one mustoperate within the framework of a whole society and try to discoverwhat moved the people in it. --Barbara W. Tuchman The fateful quarter-century leading up to the World War I was atime when the world of Privilege still existed in Olympian luxuryand the world of Protest was heaving in its pain, its power, andits hate. The age was the climax of a century of the mostaccelerated rate of change in history, a cataclysmic shaping ofdestiny. In The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman concentrates on societyrather than the state. With an artist's selectivity, Tuchman bingsto vivid life the people, places, and events that shaped the yearsleading up to the Great War: the Edwardian aristocracy and the endof their reign; the Anarchists of Europe and America, who voicedthe protest of the oppressed; Germany, as portrayed thr

"It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us intotrouble," nineteenth-century humorist Josh Billings remarked. "It’sthe things we know that just ain’t so." In this bold New York Times bestseller, acclaimed author andtalk-radio host Michael Medved zeroes in on ten of the biggestfallacies that millions of Americans believe about our country–inspite of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. The Big Lies exposed and dissected include: ? America was founded on genocide against Native Americans. ? The United States is uniquely guilty for the crime of slaveryand built its wealth on stolen African labor. ? Aggressive governmental programs offer the only remedy foreconomic downturns and poverty. ? The Founders intended a secular, not Christian, nation. Each of the ten lies is a grotesque, propagandisticmisrepresentation of the historical record. Medved’s witty,well-documented rebuttal supplies the ammunition necessary to fireback the next time

In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched throughSanta Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territoriesclaimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of “ManifestDestiny,” this land grab would lead to a decades-long battlebetween the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistantrulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness.In Bloodand Thunder , Hampton Sides gives us a magnificent history ofthe American conquest of the West. At the center of this sweepingtale is Kit Carson, the trapper, scout, and soldier whoseadventures made him a legend. Sides shows us how this illiteratemountain man understood and respected the Western tribes betterthan any other American, yet willingly followed orders that wouldultimately devastate the Navajo nation. Rich in detail and spanningmore than three decades, this is an essential addition to ourunderstanding of how the West was really won.

“Reads like a novel. A fast-paced page-turner, it haseverything: sex, wit, humor, and adventures. But it is animpressively researched and important story.” —David Fromkin, author of Europe’s Last Summer Vienna, 1814 is an evocative and brilliantly researched accountof the most audacious and extravagant peace conference in modernEuropean history. With the feared Napoleon Bonaparte presumablydefeated and exiled to the small island of Elba, heads of some 216states gathered in Vienna to begin piecing together the ruins ofhis toppled empire. Major questions loomed: What would be done withFrance? How were the newly liberated territories to be divided?What type of restitution would be offered to families of thedeceased? But this unprecedented gathering of kings, dignitaries,and diplomatic leaders unfurled a seemingly endless stream ofpersonal vendettas, long-simmering feuds, and romanticentanglements that threatened to undermine the crucial work athand, even as their hard-fought policy dec

Book De*ion Marco Polo?s account of his journey throughout the East in thethirteenth century was one of the earliest European travelnarratives, and it remains the most important. Themerchant-traveler from Venice, the first to cross the entirecontinent of Asia, provided us with accurate de*ions of lifein China, Tibet, India, and a hundred other lands, and recordedcustoms, natural history, strange sights, historical legends, andmuch more. From the dazzling courts of Kublai Khan to the perilousdeserts of Persia, no book contains a richer magazine of marvelsthan the Travels. This edition, selected and edited by the great scholar ManuelKomroff, also features the classic and stylistically brilliantMarsden translation, revised and corrected, as well as Komroff?sIntroduction to the 1926 edition. Book Dimension length: (cm)19.7 width:(cm)12.8

A gripping intellectual adventure story, Sailing fromByzantium sweeps you from the deserts of Arabia to the dark forestsof northern Russia, from the colorful towns of Renaissance Italy tothe final moments of a millennial city under siege…. Byzantium: the successor of Greece and Rome, this magnificentempire bridged the ancient and modern worlds for more than athousand years. Without Byzantium, the works of Homer andHerodotus, Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles and Aeschylus, wouldnever have survived. Yet very few of us have any idea of theenormous debt we owe them. The story of Byzantium is a real-life adventure of electrifyingideas, high drama, colorful characters, and inspiring feats ofdaring. In Sailing from Byzantium, Colin Wells tells of themissionaries, mystics, philosophers, and artists who against greatodds and often at peril of their own lives spread Greek ideas tothe Italians, the Arabs, and the Slavs. Their heroic efforts inspired the Renaissance, the golden age ofIslamic lear

Part of the briefing included familiarizing the men with theenemy uniforms. Private Robert “Lightnin” Hayes had thisrecollection to add: “I remember the day we were assembled in atent for the first time and an officer told us where we were goingto jump. He then paused to watch our reactions. There was a sandtable near by with a facsimile of the terrain on which we weregoing to drop. There were tw...

National Bestseller New York Times Editors’ Choice Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize Silver Medalist for the Arthur Ross Book Award of the Council on Foreign Relations Finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award For six months in 1919, after the end of “the war to end allwars,” the Big Three—President Woodrow Wilson, British primeminister David Lloyd George, and French premier GeorgesClemenceau—met in Paris to shape a lasting peace. In this landmarkwork of narrative history, Margaret MacMillan gives a dramatic andintimate view of those fateful days, which saw new politicalentities—Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among them—born out ofthe ruins of bankrupt empires, and the borders of the modern worldredrawn.

A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an UnnecessaryWar Most Americans consider Abraham Lincoln to be the greatestpresident in history. His legend as the Great Emancipator has grownto mythic proportions as hundreds of books, a national holiday, anda monument in Washington, D.C., extol his heroism and martyrdom.But what if most everything you knew about Lincoln were false? Whatif, instead of an American hero who sought to free the slaves,Lincoln were in fact a calculating politician who waged thebloodiest war in american history in order to build an empire thatrivaled Great Britain's? In The Real Lincoln, author Thomas J.DiLorenzo uncovers a side of Lincoln not told in many history booksand overshadowed by the immense Lincoln legend. Through extensive research and meticulous documentation,DiLorenzo portrays the sixteenth president as a man who devoted hispolitical career to revolutionizing the American form of governmentfrom one that was very limited in scope and highly decentralize

Advance praise for The Memoirs of Catherine the Great “Superb. The translation of the Memoirs is fluid, accessible, andidiomatic, while remaining accurate and as delightful as theoriginal. Students will heartily enjoy this excursion into thehistorical and literary world of the great empress.” –Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, professor and chair, Department ofHistory, Baruch College/CUNY “Several translations of the memoirs of Catherine the Great havebeen published before, but none of them can compare with thislatest edition. Mark Cruse and Hilde Hoogenboom have produced amasterpiece. Their translation fairly sings, capturing withstunning virtuosity all the beguiling wit and charm that make thesememoirs one of the most fascinating works ever penned by a Europeanmonarch.” –Douglas Smith, editor and translator of Love and Conquest:Personal Correspondence of Catherine the Great and Prince GrigoryPotemkin “Catherine the Great’s memoirs are a classic

September 17, 1944. Thousands of Screaming Eagles–101stAirborne Division paratroopers–descend from the sky over Holland,dropping deep behind German lines in a daring daylight mission toseize and secure the road leading north to Arnhem and the Rhine.Their success would allow the Allied army to advance swiftly intoGermany. The Screaming Eagles accomplish their initial objectiveswithin hours, but keeping their sections of “Hell’s Highway” opentakes another seventy-two days of fierce round-the-clock fightingagainst crack German troops and tank divisions. Drawing on interviews with more than six hundred paratroopers,George E. Koskimaki chronicles, with vivid firsthand accounts, thedramatic, never-before-told story of the Screaming Eagles’ valiantstruggle. Hell’s Highway also tellsof the Dutch citizens andmembers of the underground who were liberated after five years ofNazi oppression and never forgot America’s airborne heroes. Thisrenowned force risked their lives for the freedom of a

In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency,” V. S.Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left onehundred years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concisemasterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of asociety traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured ina mythic vision of its past. Drawing on novels, news reports, political memoirs, and his ownencounters with ordinary Indians–from a supercilious prince to anengineer constructing housing for Bombay’s homeless–Naipaulcaptures a vast, mysterious, and agonized continent inaccessible toforeigners and barely visible to its own people. He sees both theburgeoning space program and the 5,000 volunteers chanting mantrasto purify a defiled temple; the feudal village autocrat and theNaxalite revolutionaries who combined Maoist rhetoric with ritualmurder. Relentless in its vision, thrilling in the keenness of itsprose, India: A Wounded Civilization is a work of astonishinginsight an

They Came Before Columbus reveals a compelling,dramatic, and superbly detailed documentation of the presence andlegacy of Africans in ancient America. Examining navigation andshipbuilding; cultural analogies between Native Americans andAfricans; the transportation of plants, animals, and textilesbetween the continents; and the diaries, journals, and oralaccounts of the explorers themselves, Ivan Van Sertima builds apyramid of evidence to support his claim of an African presence inthe New World centuries before Columbus. Combining impressivescholarship with a novelist’s gift for storytelling, Van Sertimare-creates some of the most powerful scenes of human history: thelaunching of the great ships of Mali in 1310 (two hundred masterboats and two hundred supply boats), the sea expedition of theMandingo king in 1311, and many others. In They Came BeforeColumbus, we see clearly the unmistakable face and handprint ofblack Africans in pre-Columbian America, and their overwhelmingimpact on the civilizatio

In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte, only twenty-eight, set sail forEgypt with 335 ships, 40,000 soldiers, and a collection ofscholars, artists, and scientists to establish an eastern empire.He saw himself as a liberator, freeing the Egyptians fromoppression. But Napoleon wasn’t the first—nor the last—whotragically misunderstood Muslim culture. Marching across seeminglyendless deserts in the shadow of the pyramids, pushed to the limitsof human endurance, his men would be plagued by mirages, suicides,and the constant threat of ambush. A crusade begun in honor woulddegenerate into chaos. And yet his grand failure also yielded atreasure trove of knowledge that paved the way for modernEgyptology—and it tempered the complex leader who believed himselfdestined to conquer the world.

Includes a complete copy of the Constitution.Fifty-five menmet in Philadelphia in 1787 to write a document that would create acountry and change a world. Here is a remarkable rendering of thatfateful time, told with humanity and humor. "The best popularhistory of the Constitutional Convention available."--LibraryJournal From the Paperback edition.

A firsthand look at the Battle of Gettysburg offers Union andConfederate viewpoints of the conflict, recreating the three daysand discussing the decisions of Lee, Longstreet, and Meade.Reprint.

"Narrative history in the great tradition . . ." ChicagoTribune Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and bestselling authorBarbara W. Tuchman analyzes the American Revolution in abrilliantly original way, placing the war in the historical contextof the centuries-long conflicts between England and both France andHolland. This compellingly written history paints a magnificentportrait of General George Washington and recounts in rivetingdetail the events responsible for the birth of our nation.

In this perfect companion to London: The Biography ,Peter Ackroyd once again delves into the hidden byways of history,describing the river's endless allure in a journey overflowing withcharacters, incidents, and wry observations. Thames: TheBiography meanders gloriously, rather like the river itself. Inshort, lively chapters Ackroyd writes about connections between theThames and such historical figures as Julius Caesar and Henry VIII,and offers memorable portraits of the ordinary men and women whodepend upon the river for their livelihoods. The Thames as a sourceof artistic inspiration comes brilliantly to life as Ackroydinvokes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Turner, Shelley, and other writers,poets, and painters who have been enchanted by its many moods andcolors.

A memoir by a World War II ordinance officer offers abehind-the-scenes account of his ordnance inspections during theEuropean campaign, detailing his experiences on the front line andhis job coordinating the recovery and repair of damaged Americantanks. Reprint.

Here’s the real history of our country. How Capitalism SavedAmerica explodes the myths spun by Michael Moore, the liberalmedia, Hollywood, academia, and the rest of the anticapitalistestablishment. Whether it’s Michael Moore or the New York Times, Hollywood oracademia, a growing segment in America is waging a war oncapitalism. We hear that greedy plutocrats exploit the Americanpublic; that capitalism harms consumers, the working class, and theenvironment; that the government needs to rein in capitalism; andon and on. Anticapitalist critiques have only grown more fevered inthe wake of corporate scandals like Enron and WorldCom. Indeed, the2004 presidential campaign has brought frequent calls tore-regulate the American economy. But the anticapitalist arguments are pure bunk, as Thomas J.DiLorenzo reveals in How Capitalism Saved America. DiLorenzo, aprofessor of economics, shows how capitalism has made America themost prosperous nation on earth—and how the sort of governmentregulation th

Gather Together in My Name continues Maya Angelou’s personalstory, begun so unforgettably in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.The time is the end of World War II and there is a sense ofoptimism everywhere. Maya Angelou, still in her teens, has givenbirth to a son. But the next few years are difficult ones as shetries to find a place in the world for herself and her child. Shegoes from job to job–and from man to man. She tries to returnhome–back to Stamps, Arkansas–but discovers that she is no longerpart of that world. Then Maya’s life takes a dramatic turn, and shefaces new challenges and temptations. In this second volume of her poignant autobiographical series,Maya Angelou powerfully captures the struggles and triumphs of herpassionate life with dignity, wisdom, humor, and humanity.

In Absolute War, acclaimed historian and journalist ChrisBellamy crafts the first full account since the fall of the SovietUnion of World War II's battle on the Eastern Front, one of thedeadliest conflicts in history. The conflict on the Eastern Front, fought between the SovietUnion and Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945, was the greatest,most costly, and most brutal conflict on land in human history. Itwas arguably the single most decisive factor of the war, and shapedthe postwar world as we know it. In this magisterial work, Bellamyoutlines the lead-up to the war, in which the fragile alliancebetween the two dictators was unceremoniously broken, and examinesits far-reaching consequences, arguing that the cost of victory wasultimately too much for the Soviet Union to bear. With breadth ofscope and a surfeit of new information, this is the definitivehistory of a conflict whose reverberations are still felttoday.

Despite five centuries of investigation by historians, thesinister deaths of the boy king Edward V and his younger brotherRichard, Duke of York, remain two of the most fascinating murdermysteries in English history. Did Richard III really kill “thePrinces in the Tower,” as is commonly believed, or was the murderersomeone else entirely? Carefully examining every shred ofcontemporary evidence as well as dozens of modern accounts, AlisonWeir reconstructs the entire chain of events leading to the doublemurder. We are witnesses to the rivalry, ambition, intrigue, andstruggle for power that culminated in the imprisonment of theprinces and the hushed-up murders that secured Richard’s claim tothe throne as Richard III. A masterpiece of historical research anda riveting story of conspiracy and deception, The Princes in theTower at last provides a solution to this age-old puzzle. Look for special features inside. Join the Circle for author chats and more. RandomHouseReadersCircle.com