Western Wars

History for busy people. Listen to a concise history of World War One in just one hour. World War One brought with it the world’s first experience of Total War, involving all of the world’s great powers, polarized between the Triple Entente, led by Britain, France and Russia, and the Central Powers, dominated by Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary. Around nine million men lost their lives in a conflict that introduced the horrors of trench warfare, machine guns, and toxic gas attacks.

Bert Trautmann is famed as the goalkeeper who broke his neck in an FA Cup final and played on. But his early life is no less extraordinary: he grew up in Nazi Germany and fought for the Germans in World War Two. In 1945 he was captured and sent to a British POW camp where, for the first time, he saw a better way of life. He embraced England as his new home and before long became an England football hero. This is his extraordinary story.

Robbers Roost was a hideout for outlaws and hunted men long before Butch Cassidy found it in 1884. The wastelands of the high desert in Southeastern Utah seemed impenetrable. Cut through by canyons along the Green and Colorado rivers, bounded by the Dirty Devil river, the terrain was a natural barrier discouraging lawmen from pursuit.

The first in a series of novellas featuring Jeff Boon, a Confederate Civil War veteran who returns home after the war to find home is not the way he remembered it. Union raiders struck his home town, burning buildings and killing residents, including his mother. And he finds the survivors are not as he remembered them. War can change people, and he finds it has changed him, too. A stirring novella of the aftermath of war, and the affect it can have on the people who fight the battles, and the people left behind.

On Christmas Eve 1914, a group of German soldiers laid down their arms, lit lanterns, and started to sing Christmas carols. The British troops in nearby trenches responded by singing songs of their own. The next day, men from both sides met in No Man's Land. They shook hands, took photos, and exchanged food and souvenirs. Some even played improvised football games, kicking around empty bully-beef cans and using helmets for goalposts. Both sides also saw the lull in fighting as a chance to bury the bodies of their comrades.

Laura Elliston and William Kindle are on the run - from the army and from every miscreant in the West eager to claim the $500 bounty for Laura's capture as their own. But the danger isn't just from those pursuing them. Laura and Kindle both have demons of their own and pasts that won't stay dead. Exhausted, scared, scarred, and surrounded by enemies, neither realizes the greatest danger is yet to come.

When Sheriff Ben Stillman’s deputy and best friend, Leon McMannigle, shoots a young woman who was about to shoot Stillman in the back, Leon takes the outlaw girl’s lifeless body back to her mountain ranch to turn her over to her family. He feels the need to explain himself, to personally account for the girl’s death. His explanation falls on deaf ears. Old Watt Hollister sends his wild sons led by his eldest boy, Nash, out on the trail to exact revenge for their poor dead sister. Wounded, McMannigle is alone and on the run in the Two-Bear Mountains, hunted.

In The Dutch Moment, Wim Klooster shows how the Dutch built and eventually lost an Atlantic empire that stretched from the homeland in the United Provinces to the Hudson River and from Brazil and the Caribbean to the African Gold Coast. The fleets and armies that fought for the Dutch in the decades-long war against Spain included numerous foreigners, largely drawn from countries in northwestern Europe. Likewise, many settlers of Dutch colonies were born in other parts of Europe or the New World.

Reverend Maloney isn't the world's greatest spiritual advisor. He drinks gin out of his coffee cup and has sex dreams about the Holy Ghost. His best friend Eli isn't perfect either, but he's a chess genius, so Maloney sees an opportunity in traveling around the country so Eli can win major chess tournament after chess tournament (while Maloney pockets Eli's winnings).

This is a great package of several titles in one book. The topics are all related to the history of the Netherlands.

Admired by some, condemned by others, and feared by all - the military might of the West is undeniably colossal. In On Western Terrorism, world-renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky discusses Western power and propaganda with filmmaker and investigative journalist Andre Vltchek. It offers the perfect introduction to Chomsky’s significant political thought and provides an accessible approach for anyone who wishes to better understand the West’s fraught role in the world.

History called on Harry Truman to unite the Western world against Soviet communism, but first he had to rally Republicans and Democrats behind America’s most dramatic foreign policy shift since George Washington delivered his farewell address. How did one of the least prepared presidents to walk into the Oval Office become one of its most successful?

First serialized in 1919, the novel takes place during WWI and tellls the story of Kurt Dorn, a wheat farmer in the state of Washington whose father is German and his mother American. Though he has a successful farm, there are groups that would like to prevent wheat from being harvested at all, including a group of Bolsheviks, the Industrial Workers of the World, which is led by a German spy financed not only by Germany but also secretly by a German wheat magnate.

Conventional histories of the Great War have tended to focus on the terrible attritional battles of Ypres, of Arras and of the Somme. What they do not tell us is what life was like for the ordinary soldier, what mattered to him, and how he survived, both physically and mentally. Now for the first time, one of Britain's leading military historians, Richard van Emden tells the story of the Great War exclusively through the words and images of soldiers on the ground.

Stuart Hills embarked his Sherman DD tank on to an LCT at 6:45 a.m., Sunday, June 4th, 1944. He was 20 years old, un-blooded, fresh from a public-school background, and officer cadet training. He was going to war. Two days later, his tank sunk; he and his crew landed from a rubber dinghy with just the clothes they stood in. After that, the struggles through the Normandy bocage in a replacement tank, engaging the enemy in a constant round of close encounters, led to a swift mastering of the art of tank warfare and remarkable survival in the midst of carnage and destruction.

Jon Hunner’s concise account of Oppenheimer’s life and the emergence of an Atomic West distills a vast literature for students and general listeners. In this brisk, engaging biography, the author recounts how Oppenheimer helped locate the atomic weapons research lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and helped establish leading physics departments at the University of California–Berkeley and Caltech.

The bloody two-day battle of Shiloh changed the course of the American Civil War. The conflagration at Shiloh had its roots in the strong Union advance that resulted in the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee. The offensive collapsed General Albert S. Johnston's advanced line in Kentucky and forced him to withdraw to northern Mississippi. Anxious to attack the enemy, Johnston began concentrating Southern forces at Corinth, a major railroad center just below the Tennessee border.

The first World War was one of the most devastating conflicts in our history. The tumult and chaos that remained in the wake of the first World War had far-reaching and devastating consequences, not just for Europe and the survivors of the war, but for the entire world. The ruins of Europe provided a fertile breeding ground for fierce nationalism, which led to the rise of the Third Reich and allowed the evil of Adolf Hitler to go unchecked for far too long.

History of the Early Settlement and Indian Wars of Western Virginia is an account of the various expeditions that took place in the region up to 1795. It also includes biographical sketches of Col. Ebenezer Zane, Major Samuel M'Collach, and other pioneers.

Combining impeccable scholarship and literary elegance, David Wetzel depicts the drama of machinations and passions that exploded in a war that forever changed the face of European history.