He has been compared to Shakespeare for his outpouring of creativity and to Saint Francis of Assisi for his spiritual wisdom. Yet his life has long remained the stuff of legend rather than intimate knowledge.In this breakthrough biography, Brad Gooch brilliantly brings to life the man and puts a face to the name Rumi, vividly coloring in his time and place—a world as rife with conflict as our own. The map of Rumi’s life stretched over 2,500 miles. Gooch traces this epic journey from Central Asia, where Rumi was born in 1207, traveling with his family, displaced by Mongol terror, to settle in Konya, Turkey. Pivotal was the disruptive appearance of Shams of Tabriz, who taught him to whirl and transformed him from a respectable Muslim preacher into a poet and mystic. Their vital connection as teacher and pupil, friend and beloved, is one of the world’s greatest spiritual love stories. When Shams disappeared, Rumi coped with the pain of separation by composing joyous poems of reunion, both human and divine.Ambitious, bold, and beautifully written, Rumi’s Secret reveals the unfolding of Rumi’s devotion to a "religion of love," remarkable in his own time and made even more relevant for the twenty-first century by this compelling account.

    

    During both wars, fantastic atrocity stories were invented by Allied propaganda to create hatred of the German people for the purpose of bringing public opinion around to support the wars. The "Holocaust" propaganda which emerged after World War II further solidified this image of Germany as history's ultimate villain. But how true is this "official" story? Was Germany really history's ultimate villain? In this book, the author paints a different picture. He explains that Germany was not the perpetrator of World War I nor World War II, but instead, was the victim of Allied aggression in both wars. The instability wrought by World War I made the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia possible, which brought world Communism into existence. Hitler and Germany recognized world Communism, with its base in the Soviet Union, as an existential threat to Western, Christian Civilization, and he dedicated himself and Germany to a death struggle against it. Far from being the disturber of European peace, Germany served as a bulwark which prevented Communist revolution from sweeping over Europe. The pity was that the United States and Britain did not see Communist Russia in the same light, ultimately with disastrous consequences for Western Civilization. The author believes that Britain and the United States joined the wrong side in the war.

    Under their sultan, Solyman the Magnificent, the Turks had conquered most of Eastern Europe. The rulers of Christian Europe were at their wits' end to stem the tide of disaster. The Knights of St John, the fighting religious order drawn from most of the nations of Christendom had been driven from their island fortress of Rhodes 40 years earlier. From their new base of Malta their galleys had been so successful in their raids on Turkish shipping that the Sultan realised that only they stood between him and total mastery of the Mediterranean. He determined to obliterartethe Knights of Malta.

    In 1921, a tightly knit band of killers set out to avenge the deaths of almost one million victims of the Armenian Genocide. They were a humble bunch: an accountant, a life insurance salesman, a newspaper editor, an engineering student, and a diplomat. Together they formed one of the most effective assassination squads in history. They named their operation Nemesis, after the Greek goddess of retribution. The assassins were survivors, men defined by the massive tragedy that had devastated their people. With operatives on three continents, the Nemesis team killed six major Turkish leaders in Berlin, Constantinople, Tiflis, and Rome, only to disband and suddenly disappear. The story of this secret operation has never been fully told, until now. Eric Bogosian goes beyond simply telling the story of this cadre of Armenian assassins by setting the killings in the context of Ottoman and Armenian history, as well as showing in vivid color the era's history, rife with political fighting and massacres. Casting fresh light on one of the great crimes of the twentieth century and one of history's most remarkable acts of vengeance, Bogosian draws upon years of research and newly uncovered evidence. Operation Nemesis is the result -- both a riveting read and a profound examination of evil, revenge, and the costs of violence.

    But it was not the first inquisition nor the last, as Cullen Murphy shows in this far-ranging, informed, and (dare one say?) witty account of its reach down to our own time, in worldly affairs more than ecclesiastical ones.” — Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, former editor, Commonweal The Inquisition conducted its last execution in 1826 — the victim was a Spanish schoolmaster convicted of heresy. But as Cullen Murphy shows in this provocative new work, not only did its offices survive into the twentieth century, in the modern world its spirit is more influential than ever. God’s Jury encompasses the diverse stories of the Knights Templar, Torquemada, Galileo, and Graham Greene. Established by the Catholic Church in 1231, the Inquisition continued in one form or another for almost seven hundred years. Though associated with the persecution of heretics and Jews — and with burning at the stake — its targets were more numerous and its techniques more ambitious. The Inquisition pioneered surveillance and censorship and “scientific” interrogation. As time went on, its methods and mindset spread far beyond the Church to become tools of secular persecution. Traveling from freshly opened Vatican archives to the detention camps of Guantánamo to the filing cabinets of the Third Reich, Murphy traces the Inquisition and its legacy. With the combination of vivid immediacy and learned analysis that characterized his acclaimed Are We Rome?, Murphy puts a human face on a familiar but little-known piece of our past, and argues that only by understanding the Inquisition can we hope to explain the making of the present.

    In this course brought to you in partnership with HISTORY, you will be visiting some of history’s deepest rabbit-holes, across centuries and continents, in search of secret societies in all their varieties. You will journey to some very dark places, and frankly some odd and sometimes silly ones as well. During 24 eye-opening lectures, Dr. Richard B. “Rick” Spence, Professor of History at the University of Idaho, guides you through the fascinating, often mystifying - sometimes disturbing - world of brotherhoods, sisterhoods, orders, cults, and cabals that have influenced human culture from ancient times to the present.You’ll understand how and why secret societies have attracted some of history’s most brilliant, and some of its most evil, minds. Often demonized by their enemies, many secret societies have become the stuff of myths and conspiracy theories. Why do they exist? And when they are invented or imagined, why would someone pretend they exist? What do secret societies believe? Who do they recruit? Most important, what influence do they have? Buckle up and get ready to find out.

    Seekers learn ancient spiritual practices to overcome the destructive characters such as anger, jealousy, malice, laziness, stinginess, greed, cowardice, and more. Through this training: one’s ego is subdued, the heart is filled with light, and dark thoughts and tendencies are eradicated. In this new state, one learns the hidden secrets reserved for very few about their true self, the life of this world and all creation, and existence in the Eternal Reality, where one is blessed beyond imagination.

    It also shows how enlightenment is earned by personal dedication to a spiritual code of conduct.

    Marcus Rashford. Jan Morris. Diana Dors. Bob Geldof. David Olusoga. Elizabeth David. Zaha Hadid. Frank Crichlow. Quentin Crisp. Dusty Springfield. Captain Tom.Who made modern Britain the country it is today? How do we sum up the kind of people we are? What does it mean to be the new Elizabethans?In this wonderfully told history, spanning back to when Queen Elizabeth became queen in 1953, Andrew Marr traces the people who have made Britain the country it is today. From the activists to the artists, the sports heroes to the innovators, these people pushed us forward, changed the conversation, encouraged us to eat better, to sing, think and to protest. They got things done. How will our generation be remembered in a hundred years’ time? And when you look back at Britain’s toughest moments in the past seventy years, what do you learn about its people and its values?In brilliantly entertaining style and with unexpected insights into some of our sung and unsung heroes, Andrew Marr offers up a first draft of the history we are all living. This is our story as the new Elizabethans – the story of how 1950s Britain evolved into the diverse country we live in today. In short, it is the history of modern Britain.

    What they discovered sent shockwaves through Christianity concerning the Vatican s advanced telescope, which sits on top of Mt. Graham in Arizona (USA) where the Jesuits admit they are monitoring something approaching the earth. After the author s initial report was published in Exo-Vaticana, the pope s top astronomer took to the airwaves and on the Vatican Observatory website to try and explain the role that he and other church astronomers are playing with regards to emerging ET Friendly theology, their association with the LUCIFER device at Mt. Graham, and their developing doctrines concerning extraterrestrial life and the impact it may have on planet Earth s religions; Christianity in particular. Now, armed with fresh information from the native peoples (that failed before a federal appeals court to stop the construction of the Vatican s observatory on one of their four holiest mountains), the authors set out with cameras and field investigators to unearth their most astonishing discovery yet. The mountain is said to be a portal, a gateway to another dimension. And, as the Vatican knows and the authors uncovered, it is not the only one. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, ON THE PATH OF THE IMMORTALS REVEALS... *Unveiled! What Mt. Graham really is, and why NASA and the Vatican are there *Disclosed! What the Bible says about gateways and the beings that wait behind them *Discovered! Scientific evidence of, and signals from, life beneath the surface of the earth *Found! The ancient stargates and their association with vortex manifestations *Revealed! The role of CERN s Large Hadron Collider and its search for a portal *Uncovered! Gobekli tepe, Baalbek, and the secrets of the coming immortals *Deciphered! The worldwide grid that ties them all together *Exposed! The occult s countdown calendar for the return of their gods *Unearthed! Giants, cryptids, and their mysterious connection with gates In On the Path of the Immortals, internationally acclaimed, investigative authors Thomas Horn and Cris Putnam continue the greatest investigation of our time by exposing the facts kept hidden from the public by elitists and intellectuals who are planning mankind s assimilation under a coming savior, one whom the prophet Daniel foresaw as an alien god.

    John and their charismatic Grand Master, Jean de Valette. The Knights had been expelled from Rhodes by the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, and now stood as the last bastion against a Muslim invasion of Sicily, southern Italy, and beyond. The siege force of Turks, Arabs, and Barbary corsairs from across the Muslim world outnumbered the defenders of Malta many times over, and its arrival began a long hot summer of bloody combat, often hand to hand, embroiling knights and mercenaries, civilians and slaves, in a desperate struggle for this pivotal point in the Mediterranean.Bruce Ware Allen's The Great Siege of Malta describes the siege's geopolitical context, explains its strategies and tactics, and reveals how the all-too-human personalities of both Muslim and Christian leaders shaped the course of events. The siege of Malta was the Ottoman empire's high-water mark in the war between the Christian West and the Muslim East for control of the Mediterranean. Drawing on copious research and new source material, Allen stirringly recreates the two factions' heroism and chivalry, while simultaneously tracing the barbarism, severity, and indifference to suffering of sixteenth-century warfare.The Great Siege of Malta is a fresh, vivid retelling of one of the most famous battles of the early modern world--a battle whose echoes are still felt today.

    The place was called Birobidzhan.The idea of an autonomous Jewish region was championed by Jewish Communists, Yiddishists, and intellectuals, who envisioned a haven of post-oppression Jewish culture. By the mid-1930s tens of thousands of Soviet Jews, as well as about a thousand Jews from abroad, had moved there. The state-building ended quickly, in the late 1930s, with arrests and purges instigated by Stalin. But after the Second World War, Birobidzhan received another influx of Jews--those who had been dispossessed by the war. In the late 1940s a second wave of arrests and imprisonments swept through the area, traumatizing Birobidzhan's Jews into silence and effectively shutting down most of the Jewish cultural enterprises that had been created. Where the Jews Aren't is a haunting account of the dream of Birobidzhan--and how it became the cracked and crooked mirror in which we can see the true story of the Jews in twentieth-century Russia.(Part of the Jewish Encounters series)

    Yet two centuries later, the Knights were suddenly arrested and accused of blasphemy, heresy and orgies, their order was abolished, and their leaders burnt at the stake. Their dramatic end shocked their contemporaries and has gripped peoples' imaginations ever since.This new book explains the whole context of Templar history, including, for the first time, the new evidence discovered by the Vatican that the Templars were not guilty of heresy. It covers the whole swathe of Templar history, from its origins in the mysteries of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem through to the nineteenth century development of the Freemasons.The book also features a guide to Templar castles and sites, and coverage of the Templars in books, movies and popular culture, from Indiana Jones to the Xbox360 game Assassin's Creed.

    Today's view of history cannot account for ancient anomalies, such as the Pyramids and advanced knowledge contained in India's Vedas-but in 1894 an Indian sage gave us an explanation not only for our hidden past, but for the trends of today and for our future enlightenment-the 24,000 year yuga cycle