Otros libros que te pueden interesar

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  Fall of Rome The: The History...

  Editors Charles River

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  For the people of the ancient Mediterranean and beyond, the city of Rome had been a symbol of power for centuries, and entering the early 5th century CE, the Eternal City hadn’t been taken by an enemy force since the Gauls had done it about 800 years, an unheard of period of tranquility in a world wracked with almost constant warfare. 
  	Thus, when the Visigoths, whom the Romans considered uncultured and inferior, took the city of Rome and sacked it in 410, the world was stunned. It made theologians of the newly Christianized empire question God’s plan on Earth, and it encouraged many leading Romans to look east to Constantinople for their future. Indeed, the Western Roman Empire would completely collapse in the late 5th century, less than 70 years after the Visigoths sacked Rome, and just how it went from being a superpower to a poorly led, weak, and vulnerable shadow of its former self has preoccupied historians for centuries.  
  	To this day, it remains difficult to trace just when the decline began, but it’s fair to say that the sack of Rome was the result of a number of factors that had been coalescing for many years. Only Roman arrogance kept the empire from seeing the grave peril its capital was in, which helped bring about the events leading up to the fall of Rome itself. The Latin phrase imperium sine fine (“empire without end”) neatly summed up not just the geographic reach of the mighty empire, but the feeling that it would never end. Nonetheless, little more than 300 years after the end of the Pax Romana, the Western Roman Empire had all but ceased to exist. During the same period, the population of the city of Rome itself declined from over a million people to less than 30,000. Within the walls of Rome, vast areas returned to pastureland and shepherds grazed their flocks in a surreal landscape among the ruins of structures representing the might of the empire.

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  Stand Watie: The Life and Legacy...

  Editors Charles River

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  Stand Watie’s life connects the traditional Cherokee homeland in Tennessee and Georgia, the fight within the tribe over leaving for the West or staying on their homeland and trying to resist, and the Trail of Tears. At the same time, his life also includes the ongoing split between mixed-blood and full-blood Cherokee in the Cherokee Nation, and the chaos of Indian Territory during the Civil War.  
  	On the surface, Indian Territory was peaceful and fairly prosperous, but old resentments simmered under the surface. The most dangerous of these was in the Cherokee Nation. Following the Cherokee removal, the leaders of the faction of the tribe that had actually signed the Treaty of New Echota suffered violence. There had been a law that giving away Cherokee land was punishable by death, and several of the leaders who signed the treaty were murdered. Stand Watie was one of the signers, and he barely escaped, but one of his brothers was executed. 
  	The Principal Chief was John Ross. He and his faction managed to retain political control of the Cherokee tribe, but there was lasting enmity between the Watie and Ross factions of the tribe. In a broad sense, the signers of the hated treaty were mixed-blood Cherokee, and the resistance had been led by full-bloods. Stand Watie headed the mixed-blood faction and John Ross the full-blood faction. Ironically, John Ross himself was mixed-blood and Watie was a full-blood, but regardless, this tribal split had important ramifications for the Cherokee in the coming war. 
  	Like the country as a whole, the Cherokee Nation was split over the question of slavery, and with an estimated 100 slaves owned, Watie was the biggest native slaveholder in the region. At the start of the war, Watie was commissioned as a colonel in Confederate service and later as a brigadier general. His 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles Regiment fought more engagements than any other Confederate unit west of the Mississippi River.

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  Panzergrenadier Aces - German...

  Franz Kurowski

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  This WWII history sheds light on the operations and combat experiences of Hitler’s “armored infantry”. As the foot soldiers who went into battle alongside the Third Reich’s fearsome tanks, the panzergrenadiers occupied a unique position in the German war machine. Whether in the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS, these troops endured all the horrors of infantry combat—fighting hand-to-hand, storming enemy positions, and rescuing fallen comrades—but they did so in the shadow of thundering armored fighting vehicles like the Tiger and Panther.   In Panzergrenadier Aces, Franz Kurowski vividly recounts many of these soldier’s most dramatic stories, offering a rare window into their role in the larger conflict while bringing them and their actions to life.

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  Appearances - Memory History...

  Carol Dyhouse

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  What does it mean to obsess about clothes and appearances? For some of us, deciding what to wear can involve tension and torment as well as delight. What do we mean by 'looking classy' or 'power dressing'? What are the connections – or contradictions – between dress and desire, glamour and feminism? Do our choices reflect or challenge social values and constraints in women's lives?
  
  
  Appearances is both memoir and cultural history. It considers attitudes to personal appearance through four generations of women in the author's family, weaving memory through a wide-ranging exploration of fashion, femininity and feminism in the recent past.

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  Royal Navy Versus the Slave...

  Bernard Edwards

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  On 16 March 1807, the British Parliament passed The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. In the following year the Royal Navy's African Squadron was formed, its mission to stop and search ships at sea suspected of carrying slaves from Africa to the Americas and the Middle East. With typical thoroughness, the Royal Navy went further, and took the fight to the enemy, sailing boldly up uncharted rivers and creeks to attack the barracoons where the slaves were assembled ready for shipment. 
   
   
   
  For much of its long campaign against the evil of slavery, Britain's Navy fought alone and unrecognized. Its enemies were many and formidable. Ranged against it were the African chiefs, who sold their own people into slavery, the Arabs, who rode shotgun on the slave caravans to the coast, and the slave ships of the rest of the world, heavily armed, and prepared to do battle to protect their right to traffic in the forbidden so-called "black ivory." 
   
   
   
  The war was long and bitter and the cost to the Royal Navy in ships and men heavy, but the result was worthy of the sacrifices made. The abolition of the slave trade led to a scramble for empires and, in place of slaves, Africa began to export cocoa, coffee, timber, palm oil, cotton and ores, all very much in demand in the West.

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  Fall of the Third Reich The: The...

  Phaistos Publishers

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  Few events have had a greater impact on human history than the ascension to power of the Nazi Party in Germany in January 1933. This was no coup: the party gained some power via democratic elections, although once it was established, it quickly took absolute control over all aspects of the state. Other parties were outlawed, and further elections were deemed “unnecessary.” 
  However, Germany’s image as a nation united under one man and committed to expansion through the application of science and technology was in reality an illusion. Nazi Germany was wracked by internal dissent, a chaotic system of rule and a leader who was willing to ignore the economic and resource needs of his nation. By the end of 1941, Germany appeared to be unassailable. Most of its European enemies had either been defeated or seemed to be on the point of defeat. The almost unbroken string of spectacular successes enjoyed by the German Army and air force suggested to many that these were simply unbeatable. Within less than four years, Germany had been utterly defeated, Hitler was dead and Germany itself was occupied by foreign armies. 
  The factors that led to this sudden and complete collapse had been present from the very beginning of the Nazi regime, but they had been hidden by early success in the face of uncertain and vacillating adversaries. In retrospect, we can clearly see that the fall of the Third Reich was probably inevitable, though it would shake Europe to its foundations, bring about an entirely new world order, and involve the deaths of tens of millions of people.

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