Showing results for title "World" in Americas

1914. Hace ahora cien años...Europa vivía una plenitud dorada. Los adelantos científicos y técnicos prometían un futuro feliz, sin hambrunas ni guerras. Pero un terrorista serbio asesinó, durante un desfile en Sarajevo, al heredero del Imperio austrohúngaro y a su esposa. Ese hecho aislado provocó un efecto dominó que arrastró a la guerra a más de cincuenta países. En cuatro años de contienda, la Gran Guerra arrasó a Europa y arruinó a los cuatro imperios que dominaban a la Tierra.

Best-selling author and founder of George Mason University's History News Network Rick Shenkman is a historian, a rebel, and a myth-debunker par excellence. In Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of World History, Shenkman shatters some of the most honored and long-held misconceptions about famous people and events - from the glory days of the Roman Empire to the dark days of World War II...from kings and despots to battles and empires, from religions to inventions.

Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck—or some combination of them all—leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity. Among their number are scientists, artists, writers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers, from across the centuries and around the world. They hold in common the silenced aftermath of failure, the name that rings no bells.

Ranging with dazzling expertise through anthropology, history, and literature, Wright reconfigures our self-perception, arguing that the "essence" of America can be traced to the foundations of our history--literally to the collision of worlds that began in 1492, as one civilization subsumed another--and exploring how these currents continue to shape our world.

Danger prowled under both the cold gray waters of the North Sea and the shimmering blue waves of the tropical Atlantic during World War II as Adolf Hitler's Third Reich attempted to strangle Allied shipping lanes with U-boat attacks. German and British submarines combed the vast oceanic battlefield for prey, while scientists developed new technologies and countermeasures.

Just 75 years ago, the American government did something that most would consider unthinkable today: It rounded up over 100,000 of its own citizens based on nothing more than their ancestry and, suspicious of their loyalty, kept them in concentration camps for the better part of four years. How could this have happened? Uprooted takes a close look at the history of racism in America and carefully follows the treacherous path that led one of our nation's most beloved presidents to make this decision.

At the height of the ideological antagonism of the Cold War, the US State Department unleashed an unexpected tool in its battle against Communism: jazz. From 1956 through the late 1970s, America dispatched its finest jazz musicians to the far corners of the earth, from Iraq to India, from the Congo to the Soviet Union, in order to win the hearts and minds of the Third World and to counter perceptions of American racism.

In Double Victory, a broad spectrum of American voices emerge to illustrate the various struggles and victories fought during wartime: a Japanese-American at an internment camp; a Native American code breaker using the Navajo language for the first time; a Mexican-American woman, "Rosarita, the riveter", who was able to work a job during wartime other than as a housecleaner or a maid.

Submarines exercised a decisive impact on the outcome of the Pacific Theater in World War II. The US submarine fleet, largely though not exclusively under the overall command of Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood, strangled the supply lines and shipping traffic of the Empire of Japan. Their commerce raiding crippled both Japan's ability to keep its frontline units supplied and to manufacture the weapons, vessels, and vehicles needed to successfully carry on the struggle.

In an increasingly urbanized world, urban terrain has become a greater factor in military operations. Simultaneously, advances in military technology have given military forces sharply increased capabilities. The conflict comes from how urban terrain can negate or degrade many of those increased capabilities. What happens when advanced weapons are used in a close-range urban fight with an abundance of cover? Storming the City analyzes the performance of the US Army and US Marine Corps in urban combat in four major urban battles of the mid-20th century.

Transporting listeners back to a dramatic time in the late 1800s, Dobrow spotlights a trio of men who reshaped our image of the West and earned national fame: John M. Burke of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, Tody Hamilton of the Barnum & Bailey Circus, and Moses P. Handy of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Drawing on scores of original source materials, Dobrow brings to light the surprisingly sophisticated techniques of these Gilded Age press agents.

After the end of World War II, General George Patton declared that artillery had won the war. Yet howitzers did not achieve victory on their own. Crucial to the success of these big guns were forward observers, artillerymen on the front lines who directed the artillery fire. In Bracketing the Enemy, John R. Walker offers the first full-length history of forward observer teams during World War II.

Agnes Baker Pilgrim, known to most as Grandma Aggie, is in her 90s and is the oldest living member of the Takelma Tribe, one of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz. A descendant of both spiritual and political tribal leaders, Grandma Aggie travels tirelessly around the world to keep traditions alive, to help those in need, and to be a voice for the voiceless, helping everyone to remember to preserve our Earth for animals and each other in a spiritual environment.

Abraham Lincoln's determination to hold the North and South together would ultimately lead to the bloodiest war in American history, the abolition of slavery, and his own untimely death from an assassin’s bullet. But to see Lincoln solely as a tragic figure consumed with the strife of mid-19th century America is to miss meeting him as a man who never allowed himself to be defeated by adversity, grief, or turmoil.

Two days after Germany's invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany, and World War II began in earnest. As most people now know, the invasion of Poland was merely the preface to the Nazi blitzkrieg of most of Western Europe, which would include Denmark, Belgium, and France by the summer of 1940.

Before Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492, no European had ever seen, much less tasted, tobacco or chocolate. Initially dismissed as dry leaves and an odd Indian drink, these two commodities came to conquer Europe on a scale unsurpassed by any other American resource or product. A fascinating story of contact, exploration, and exchange in the Atlantic world, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures traces the ways in which these two goods of the Americas both changed and were changed by Europe.

New York Times bestselling author Sally Bedell Smith takes us inside the Kennedy White House with unparalleled access and insight. Having interviewed scores of Kennedy intimates, including many who have never spoken before, and drawing on letters and personal papers made available for the first time, Smith paints a richly detailed picture of the personal relationships behind the high purpose and political drama of the twentieth century's most storied presidency.

In this fascinating work, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota and Red Lake Ojibwe Nation member Brenda J. Child spotlights the remarkable women of the Ojibwe Nation. A stunning look at a seldom explored subject in history, Holding Our World Together shows how American Indian women have profoundly influenced Native American life - from the days of the European fur trade to the present - in activism, community, and beyond.

World War I, also known in its time as the "Great War" or the "War to End all Wars", was an unprecedented holocaust in terms of its sheer scale. Fought by men who hailed from all corners of the globe, it saw millions of soldiers do battle in brutal assaults of attrition which dragged on for months with little to no respite. Tens of millions of artillery shells and untold hundreds of millions of rifle and machine gun bullets were fired in a conflict that demonstrated man's capacity to kill each other on a heretofore unprecedented scale.

When scholars write the history of the world twenty years from now, what will they say was the most crucial development in the first few years of the twenty-first century? The attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Iraq war? Or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations?