At a few minutes past ten o’clock of the morning of November 11, 1918, the Secretary of War in Washington received from General Pershing a communication informing the Government that eleven o’clock a.m. that day, French time, an armistice with Germany had gone into effect. No message more momentous had ever come to the American War Department. The World War was at an end. It was peace. It was victory.Over there on that American front which had penetrated the supposedly impregnable A...

A thriller and love story set in 10th-century Japan.Lady Shonagon is an imperial courtesan, living at the court of the Japanese Emperor in the 10th century. When a series of disturbing thefts within the palace walls throws the court into confusion and unrest, Shonagon is appointed guide and assistant to Lieutenant Yukinari as he investigates.Together, Shonagon and Yukinari must solve the mysteries and escalating crimes that plague the Japanese court, and their romance bloss...

General Smedley Butler’s frank book shows how American war efforts were animated by big-business interests. This extraordinary argument against war by an unexpected proponent is relevant now more than ever.Originally printed in 1935, War Is a Racket is General Smedley Butler’s frank speech describing his role as a soldier as nothing more than serving as a puppet for big-business interests. In addition to photos from the notorious 1932 anti-war book The Horror of It by Fred...

War Is a Racket is written by the most decorated American soldier in U.S. history, Major General Smedley D. Butler. Butler frankly discusses from his experience as a career military officer how business interests commercially start and benefit from warfare. After his retirement from the Marine Corps, Gen. Butler made a nationwide tour giving his speech "War is a Racket". The speech was so well received that he wrote a longer version as this small book with the same title which helped popul...

In the 1970s, during the ruinous 30-year dictatorship of General Mobutu, periodic rebellions led to the hasty insertion once again of Belgian and French paratroops to save European lives.From the mid-1990s the country split again, becoming the battleground for the largest African war in history, as armies and rebel groups from Rwanda, Angola, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Namibia and other countries crossed into the Congo to support one side or the other, or simply to loot the...

The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind. Very few of us realize with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organization by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we scheme fo...

"A wide-ranging exploration of World War I and how it changed the United States forever" with photos, illustrations, and maps that bring history to life ( Kirkus Reviews) .On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany and joined World War I. German submarine attacks on American ships in March 1917 were the overt motive for declaring war, but the underlying reasons were far more complex.Even after the United States officially jo...

Land mines and their antecedents have been used on the battlefield from ancient times, through the world wars, to the modern conflicts in the developing world. Their use in the developing world caused tens of thousands of civilian casualties, and the resulting international outrage transformed rapidly into a highly effective global movement to ban land mines and a multi million dollar mine action business. This book describes how technology and military tactics defined land mine developmen...

MEN OF MIND In the companion volume of this series, "Men of Action," the attempt was made to give the essential facts of American history by sketching in broad outline the men who made that history—the discoverers, pioneers, presidents, statesmen, soldiers, and sailors—and describing the part which each of them played. It was almost like watching a great building grow under the hands of the workmen, this one adding a stone and that one adding another; but there was one great difference. Fo...

Burton Jesse Hendrick was an American author. He won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for The Victory at Sea which he co-authored with William Sowden Sims, the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page and again in 1929 for The Training of An American. Hendrick wrote the Age of Big Business in 1919, using a series of individual biographies, as an enthusiastic look at the foundation of the corporation in America and the rapid rise of the United States as a world power.Th...

The Audacious War by Clarence W. Barron is an analysis of the early stages of World War I, written from an American perspective shortly after the conflict began. As a prominent financial journalist, Barron brings a unique economic lens to the war, examining its causes, impact on international finance, and the shifting power dynamics in Europe. He describes the war as "audacious" due to the scale of its destruction and the bold strategies employed by the belligerent nations, particularly Ge...