The 80th Anniversary of D-Day falls on June 6, 2024 In the early hours of that morning, three divisions of paratrooper and glider forces descended on Normandy. Already assembling offshore was the largest seaborne invasion fleet in the history of the world, ready to unleash over 130,000 troops against Hitler's Atlantic Wall. More than 7,000 ......
July 28th, 2024 is the 110th Anniversary of the beginning of the First World War The Great War as it came to be known was the first truly global conflict, and changed the course of world history. When World War I began in 1914, both sides had anticipated a swift and decisive victory, but the war quickly bogged down into a stalemate. The Western ......
The Autobiography of the Most Glamorous Mitford Sister
Diana Mitford, the most glamorous of the Mitfords, rivetingly narrates her life populated with key characters of 20th century history. Evelyn Waugh and Oswald Mosley fell in love with her, while not only Winston Churchill but also Adolf Hitler adored her. She lived in the grandest houses as well as in Holloway Prison. Later the Duke and Duchess of ......
History, Lore, and Recipes from America's Roaring Twenties
How the Prohibition law of 1920 made alcohol, savored in secret, all the more delectable when the cocktail shaker was forced to go "underground" "Roaring Twenties" America boasted famous firsts: women's right to vote, jazz music, talking motion pictures, flapper fashions, and wondrous new devices like the safety razor and the electric vacuum ......
From Triumph to Defeat on the Eastern Front (1941)
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the surprise invasion of the Soviet Union that opened the Eastern Front in World War II. With lightning speed and devastating success, the German army tore through Soviet territory and rolled over the Red Army, scoring some of the most dramatic victories in military history--until the ......
On New Year's Day 1959, Fidel Castro's revolutionary movement overthrew the ruling regime in Cuba, bringing the Cold War to the United States' doorstep and setting the island nation and its superpower neighbor on a collision course. The battle came in April 1961 on the southern coast of Cuba at the Bah?a de los Cochinos--the Bay of Pigs. In a ......
How Hitler's Chief of Intelligence Betrayed the Nazis
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Adolf Hitler’s chief of military intelligence, accomplished something that neither President Franklin D. Roosevelt nor Prime Minister Winston Churchill could ever achieve – he saved the lives of hundreds Jewish refugees and other racial and political undesirables by rescuing them from Nazi Germany and other ......
A History from American Amateurs to Global Professionals
Analyzing how tennis turned pro The arrival of the Open era in 1968 was a watershed in the history of tennis--the year that marked its advent as a professionalized sport. Merging wide-angle history with individual stories of players and off-the-court figures, Greg Ruth charts tennis's evolution into the game we watch today. His vivid account moves ......
History, Lore, and Recipes from America's Golden Age
A delightful romp through America's Golden Age of Cocktails The decades following the American Civil War burst with invention-they saw the dawn of the telephone, the motor car, electric lights, the airplane-but no innovation was more welcome than the beverage heralded as the "cocktail." The Gilded Age, as it came to be known, was the Golden ......