With his characteristic enthusiasm and erudition, PeterAckroyd follows his acclaimed London: A Biography with aninspired look into the heart and the history of the Englishimagination. To tell the story of its evolution, Ackroyd rangesacross literature and painting, philosophy and science,architecture and music, from Anglo-Saxon times to thetwentieth-century. Considering what is most English about artistsas diverse as Chaucer, William Hogarth, Benjamin Britten andViriginia Woolf, Ackroyd identifies a host of sometimescontradictory elements: pragmatism and whimsy, blood and gore, apassion for the past, a delight in eccentricity, and much more. Abrilliant, engaging and often surprising narrative, Albion reveals the manifold nature of English genius.

Drawing from Smith's own personal journals, this concisebiography paints a rich and detailed portrait of one of America'smost intriguing founding fathers. Historian John Thompson guides usthrough annotated selections of Smith's most important andcompelling writings, adding authoritative perspective andcommentary to round out the picture. The volume includes some ofthe earliest primary source accounts of life in colonial Virginia,including excerpts from Proceedings of the English Colony ofVirginia (1612), Generall Historie of Virginia (1624), and The TrueAdventures and Observations of Captain John Smith (1630). Readers share eyewitness accounts of Smith's capture andimprisonment by the Indians, his explorations of the Chesapeake Bayregion, and various other adventures and exploits in the New World.We get a firsthand look at Smith's pivotal role in the founding andgovernance of colonial Jamestown and his attempts to establishtrade relationships with the Native Americans. We also learn thereal facts behind Smi

At the end of 1618, a blazing green star soared across thenight sky over the northern hemisphere. From the Philippines to theArctic, the comet became a sensation and a symbol, a warning ofdoom or a promise of salvation. Two years later, as the Pilgrimsprepared to sail across the Atlantic on board the Mayflower, theatmosphere remained charged with fear and expectation. Men andwomen readied themselves for war, pestilence, or divineretribution. Against this background, and amid deep economicdepression, the Pilgrims conceived their enterprise of exile. Within a decade, despite crisis and catastrophe, they built athriving settlement at New Plymouth, based on beaver fur, corn, andcattle. In doing so, they laid the foundations for Massachusetts,New England, and a new nation. Using a wealth of new evidence fromlandscape, archaeology, and hundreds of overlooked or neglecteddocuments, Nick Bunker gives a vivid and strikingly originalaccount of the Mayflower project and the first decade of thePlymouth Colon

By the end of World War I, in November 1918, Europe’s oldauthoritarian empires had fallen, and new and seemingly democraticgovernments were rising from the debris. As successor states foundtheir place on the map, many hoped that a more liberal Europe wouldemerge. But this post-war idealism all too quickly collapsed underthe political and economic pressures of the 1920s and '30s. HowardM. Sachar chronicles this visionary and tempestuous era byexamining the fortunes of Europe’s Jewish minority, a group whoseprecarious status made them particularly sensitive to changes inthe social order. Writing with characteristic lucidity and verve,Sachar spotlights an array of charismatic leaders–from HungarianCommunist Bela Kun to Germany’s Rosa Luxemburg, France’s SocialistPrime Minister Léon Blum and Austria’s Sigmund Freud–whosecollective experience foretold significant democratic failures longbefore the Nazi rise to power. In the richness of its humantapestry and the acuity of its social insights, Dream

In Lone Star Nation , Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W.Brands demythologizes Texas’s journey to statehood and restores thegenuinely heroic spirit to a pivotal chapter in Americanhistory. From Stephen Austin, Texas’s reluctant founder, to the alcoholicSam Houston, who came to lead the Texas army in its hour of crisisand glory, to President Andrew Jackson, whose expansionistaspirations loomed large in the background, here is the story ofTexas and the outsize figures who shaped its turbulent history.Beginning with its early colonization in the 1820s and taking inthe shocking massacres of Texas loyalists at the Alamo and Goliad,its rough-and-tumble years as a land overrun by the Comanches, andits day of liberation as an upstart republic, Brands’ livelyhistory draws on contemporary accounts, diaries, and letters toanimate a diverse cast of characters whose adventures, exploits,and ambitions live on in the very fabric of our nation.

In 1863, after surviving the devastating Battle of Corinth,Newton Knight, a poor farmer from Mississippi, deserted theConfederate Army and began a guerrilla battle against theConfederacy. For two years he and other residents of Jones Countyengaged in an insurrection that would have repercussions far beyondthe scope of the Civil War. In this dramatic account of an almostforgotten chapter of American history, Sally Jenkins and JohnStauffer upend the traditional myth of the Confederacy as a heroicand unified Lost Cause, revealing the fractures within Civil-Warera Southern society. No man better exemplified these complexitiesthan Newton Knight, a pro-Union sympathizer in the deep South whorefused to fight a rich man’s war for slavery and cotton.

At the age of thirty-three, Ekow Eshun—born in London toAfrican-born parents—travels to Ghana in search of his roots. Hegoes from Accra, Ghana’s cosmopolitan capital city, to the storiedslave forts of Elmina, and on to the historic warrior kingdom ofAsante. During his journey, Eshun uncovers a long-held secret abouthis lineage that will compel him to question everything he knowsabout himself and where he comes from. From the London suburbs ofhis childhood to the twenty-first century African metropolis,Eshun’s is a moving chronicle of one man’s search for home, and ofthe pleasures and pitfalls of fashioning an identity in thesevibrant contemporary worlds.

In a journey across four continents, acclaimed science writerSteve Olson traces the origins of modern humans and the migrationsof our ancestors throughout the world over the past 150,000 years.Like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, Mapping Human Historyis a groundbreaking synthesis of science and history. Drawing on awide range of sources, including the latest genetic research,linguistic evidence, and archaeological findings, Olson reveals thesurprising unity among modern humans and "demonstrates just hownaive some of our ideas about our human ancestry have been"(Discover).Olson offers a genealogy of all humanity, explaining,for instance, why everyone can claim Julius Caesar and Confucius asforebears. Olson also provides startling new perspectives on theinvention of agriculture, the peopling of the Americas, the originsof language, the history of the Jews, and more. An engaging andlucid account, Mapping Human History will forever change how wethink about ourselves and our relations with others.

An analysis of the Civil War, drawing on letters and diariesby more than one thousand soldiers, gives voice to the personalreasons behind the war, offering insight into the ideology thatshaped both sides. Reprint. PW.

Until World War II aircraft had played only a minor role incombat, but with the RAF and Luftwaffe fiercely dueling in theBattle of Britain it was apparent that air superiority would be thedeciding factor in the war. The Eighth Air Force quickly grew fromits first modest effort into the mightiest aerial armada inhistory, eventually launching thousand-plane raids. WhileFortresses and Liberators attacked factories, fuel supplies, andtransportation networks, Lightnings, Thunderbolts, and Mustangsshot enemy fighters from the skies. But the road to victory was paved with sacrifice. From itsinaugural mission on July 4, 1942, until V-E Day, the Eighth AirForce lost more men than did the entire United States Marine Corpsin all its campaigns in the Pacific. The Mighty Eighth chroniclesthe testimony of the pilots, bombardiers, navigators, and gunnerswho daily put their lives on the line. Their harrowing accountsrecall the excitement and terror of dogfights against Nazi aces,maneuvering explosive-laden aircr

The Boys’ Crusade is the great historian PaulFussell’s unflinching and unforgettable account of the Americaninfantryman’s experiences in Europe during World War II. Based inpart on the author’s own experiences, it provides a stirringnarrative of what the war was actually like, from the point of viewof the children—for children they were—who fought it. While dealingdefinitively with issues of strategy, leadership, context, andtactics, Fussell has an additional purpose: to tear away the veilof feel-good mythology that so often obscures and sanitizes war’sbrutal essence. “A chronicle should deal with nothing but the truth,” Fussellwrites in his Preface. Accord-ingly, he eschews every kind ofsentimentalism, focusing instead on the raw action and humanemotion triggered by the intimacy, horror, and intense sorrows ofwar, and honestly addressing the errors, waste, fear, misery, andresentments that plagued both sides. In the vast literature onWorld War II, The Boys’ Crusade stands

The myths of the ancient Greeks have inspired us for thousandsof years. Where did the famous stories of the battles of their godsdevelop and spread across the world? The celebrated classicistRobin Lane Fox draws on a lifetime’s knowledge of the ancientworld, and on his own travels, answering this question by pursuingit through the age of Homer. His acclaimed history explores how theintrepid seafarers of eighth-century Greece sailed around theMediterranean, encountering strange new sights—volcanic mountains,vaporous springs, huge prehistoric bones—and weaving them into themyths of gods, monsters and heroes that would become thecornerstone of Western civilization.

The Groundbreakers series examines the lives and work of pioneering men and women whose achievements and discoveries have had a lasting impact on our world. Each book tells us about the experiences that inspired these amazing individuals to think in new ways, and discusses how the environment they lived in affected their work. Information on their supporters, colleagues,and rivals adds to the story. Finally, a look at the person's legacy shows how their achievements and discoveries continue to affect people today.

Churchill's six-volume history of World War II -- the definitivework, remarkable both for its sweep and for its sense of personalinvolvement, universally acknowledged as a magnificent historicalreconstruction and an enduring work of literature. From Britian'sdarkest and finest hour to the great alliance and ultimate victory,the Second World War remains the pivotal event in our century.Churchill was not only its greatest leader, but the free world'smost eloquent voice of defiance in the face of Nazi tyranny. Hisepic account of those times, published in six volumes, won theNobel Prize in 1953.

By the world-renowned novelist, playwright, critic, and authorof Wizard of the Crow, an evocative and affecting memoir ofchildhood. Ngugi wa Thiong’o was born in 1938 in rural Kenya to a fatherwhose four wives bore him more than a score of children. The manwho would become one of Africa’s leading writers was the fifthchild of the third wife. Even as World War II affected the lives ofAfricans under British colonial rule in particularly unexpectedways, Ngugi spent his childhood as very much the apple of hismother’s eye before attending school to slake what was thenconsidered a bizarre thirst for learning. In Dreams in a Time of War, Ngugi deftly etches a bygone era,capturing the landscape, the people, and their culture; the socialand political vicissitudes of life under colonialism and war; andthe troubled relationship between an emerging Christianized middleclass and the rural poor. And he shows how the Mau Mau armedstruggle for Kenya’s independence against the British informed noton

In this classic study, Pulitzer Prize-winning author James M.McPherson deftly narrates the experience of blacks--former slavesand soldiers, preachers, visionaries, doctors, intellectuals, andcommon people--during the Civil War. Drawing on contemporaryjournalism, speeches, books, and letters, he presents an eclecticchronicle of their fears and hopes as well as their essentialcontributions to their own freedom. Through the words of theseextraordinary participants, both Northern and Southern, McPhersoncaptures African-American responses to emancipation, the shiftingattitudes toward Lincoln and the life of black soldiers in theUnion army. Above all, we are allowed to witness the dreams of adisenfranchised people eager to embrace the rights and the equalityoffered to them, finally, as citizens.

No one in Vietnam had to tell door gunner and gunship crewchief Al Sever that the odds didn’t look good. He volunteered forthe job well aware that hanging out of slow-moving choppers overhot LZs blazing with enemy fire was not conducive to a long life.But that wasn’t going to stop Specialist Sever. From Da Nang to Cu Chi and the Mekong Delta, Sever spentthirty-one months in Vietnam, fighting in eleven of the war’ssixteen campaigns. Every morning when his gunship lifted off, oftento the clacking and muzzle flashes of AK-47s hidden in the dawnfog, Sever knew he might not return. This raw, gritty,gut-wrenching firsthand account of American boys fighting and dyingin Vietnam captures all the hell, horror, and heroism of thattragic war.

In this heartbreaking but ultimately triumphant story ofcourage and will, journalist Robert Whitaker carefullydocuments--and exposes--one of the worst racial massacres inAmerican history. Whitaker's important book commemorates a legalstruggle, "Moore v. Dempsey, " that paved the way for the civilrights era, and tells too of a man, Scipio Africanus Jones, whosename surely deserves to be known by all Americans. "Whitaker has ... placed the massacre and the Supreme Courtdecision in their full legal and historical context. At the sametime, he has revived the story of a great African-American lawyer,Scipio Africanus Jones." --"New York Times Book Review"

Paul Kriwaczek begins this illuminating and immenselypleasurable chronicle of Yiddish civilization during the Romanempire, when Jewish culture first spread to Europe. We see theburgeoning exile population disperse, as its notable diplomats,artists and thinkers make their mark in far-flung cities and founda self-governing Yiddish world. By its late-medieval heyday, thiseconomically successful, intellectually adventurous, and self-awaresociety stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Kriwaczektraces, too, the slow decline of Yiddish culture in Europe andRussia, and highlights fresh offshoots in the New World.Combiningfamily anecdote, travelogue, original research, and a keenunderstanding of Yiddish art and literature, Kriwaczek gives us anexceptional portrait of a culture which, though nearlyextinguished, has an influential radiance still.

John Julius Norwich’s A History of Venice has been dubbed“indispensable” by none other than Jan Morris. Now, in his secondbook on the city once known as La Serenissima, Norwich advances thestory in this elegant chronicle of a hundred years of Venice’shighs and lows, from its ignominious capture by Napoleon in 1797 tothe dawn of the 20th century. An obligatory stop on the Grand Tour for any cultured Englishman(and, later, Americans), Venice limped into the 19th century–firstunder the yoke of France, then as an outpost of the AustrianHapsburgs, stripped of riches yet indelibly the most ravishing cityin Italy. Even when subsumed into a unified Italy in 1866, itremained a magnet for aesthetes of all stripes–subject or settingof books by Ruskin and James, a muse to poets and musicians, in itsway the most gracious courtesan of all European cities. Byrefracting images of Venice through the visits of such extravagant(and sometimes debauched) artists as Lord Byron, Richard Wagner,and the inimi

"These four slim volumes offer new insight into the particular age by means of a highly readable text interspersed with color photos of classical art, architecture, and maps...These titles promise to be useful to students needing research materials but may also appeal to casual readers. Highly Recommended." -- Book Report, May/June 1999 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.