One by one his companions died, but he carried on alone, eventually reaching the fabled city of gold, Timbuktu. His five-and-a-half-year, 10,000-mile adventure ranks among the greatest journeys in the annals of exploration, and his discoveries are considered indispensable by modern scholars of Africa.Yet because of shifting politics, European preconceptions about Africa, and his own thorny personality, Barth has been almost forgotten. The general public has never heard of him, his epic journey, or his still-pertinent observations about Africa and Islam; and his monumental five-volume Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa is rare even in libraries. Though he made his journey for the British government, he has never had a biography in English. Barth and his achievements have fallen through a crack in history.

    memory. In recent years, the culture wars over the way that slavery is remembered and taught have reached a new crescendo. From the argument about the display of the Confederate flag over the state house in Columbia, South Carolina, to the dispute over Thomas Jefferson's relationship with his slave Sally Hemings and the ongoing debates about reparations, the questions grow ever more urgent and more difficult.Edited by noted historians James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, this collection explores current controversies and offers a bracing analysis of how people remember their past and how the lessons they draw influence American politics and culture today. Bringing together some of the nation's most respected historians, including Ira Berlin, David W. Blight, and Gary B. Nash, this is a major contribution to the unsettling but crucial debate about the significance of slavery and its meaning for racial reconciliation.Contributors: Ira Berlin, University of MarylandDavid W. Blight, Yale UniversityJames Oliver Horton, George Washington UniversityLois E. Horton, George Mason UniversityBruce Levine, University of IllinoisEdward T. Linenthal, University of Wisconsin-OshkoshJoanne Melish, University of KentuckyGary B. Nash, University of California, Los AngelesDwight T. Pitcaithley, New Mexico State UniversityMarie Tyler-McGraw, Washington, D.C.John Michael Vlach, George Washington University

    Though most of us will board an aircraft at some point in our lives, we know little about how they work and the procedures surrounding their operation. It is that mystery that makes these losses, such as the vanishing of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, so terrifying. Without a Trace explores the most interesting of these disappearances: mysteries that have baffled investigators for years. Occasionally tragic, frequently amusing, Without a Trace is unerringly accurate and informative. The two Without a Trace volumes span 150 years and explore mysteries from around the world. This is volume one, beginning just before the golden age of aviation with a manned balloon swept over the English Channel, and ending with a top-secret spy plane disappearing at the height of the cold war. Each case is laid out in rich detail and presented chronologically, highlighting the historical context, official accident reports and contemporary news surrounding each mystery. Where did they go? Sylvia Wrigley introduces the crews, innocent bystanders and rescuers in this collection of true stories. Documenting the popular theories from each case, she uses her knowledge and experience as a pilot and an aviation journalist to demystify aviation jargon and narrow down each disappearance to the most likely explanations. This collection takes a hard look at the human failings of great aviators, explorers and celebrities who have pushed the limits of flight and ended up at the heart of a mystery. The stories encompass airships, military jets and commercial airlines - all of which have vanished without a trace.

    And what we do know is colored by romance - safaris and treks and camel caravans, Solomon's mine and Tutankhamun's curse, the shores of Tripoli and the snows of Kilimanjaro. Yet the ancestor of all humankind may have lived in Africa. The world's longest-lived, literate civilization was African. Through the ages, great civilizations rose and fell in what was once called "darkest" Africa, leaving behind mysterious fortresses and splendid art. Christianity and Islam battled age-old beliefs - and each other. Traders on camels were followed by explorers in caravels and by a plague of invaders, hungry for ivory and diamonds and the "black gold" of slavery. In just the last half century, independence has swept away the old maps and colonial ways to jar the balance of the world. Here is Africa's story.

    Drawing on new research, Les Standiford vividly captures the larger-then-life engineer and the breathtaking scope of his six-year, $23 million project that would transform a region, a state, and a nation at the dawn of its greatest century.With energy and colorful detail, Water to the Angels brings to life the personalities, politics, and power—including bribery, deception, force, and bicoastal financial warfare—behind this dramatic event. At a time when the importance of water is being recognized as never before—considered by many experts to be the essential resource of the twenty-first century—Water to the Angels brings into focus the vigor of a fabled era, the might of a larger than life individual, and the scale of a priceless construction project, and sheds critical light on a past that offers insights for our future.Water to the Angels includes 8 pages of photographs.

    Truman was thrust into a job he neither sought nor wanted by a call summoning him to the White House. There First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt told him that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was dead. Two hours later, with little formality, he was sworn into office. "I had come to see the president," Truman recalls in this autobiography. "Now, having repeated that simply worded oath, I myself was president." With World War II raging in the Pacific, the looming decision of whether to drop the atomic bomb, and seemingly intractable labor issues at home, no chief executive ever fell heir to such a burden on such short notice. This book is an invaluable record of Truman's tumultuous first year in office, his youth in Missouri, and his rise in politics. He shares glimpses of his family life; clear-eyed appraisals of world leaders, including Winston Churchill, Charles De Gaulle, and Joseph Stalin; and candid disclosures about history-making national and international events.

    But far from the battlefields, Allied scientists are struggling.Intelligence reports put them a distant second behind the Germans in a competition that could determine the outcome of the war: the race to build the world's first nuclear weapon.For the Allies' top scientists, the race is deeply personal. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Samuel Goudsmit have known Hitler's chief atomic scientist, Werner Heisenberg, for years. A brilliant, world-renowned physicist and once a good friend, he's anti-Nazi but also a loyal German.Fear that he's put country first and is building a bomb haunts Oppenheimer and Fermi all through their months and years developing the Allied bomb. That same anxiety drives Goudsmit, now a top Allied intelligence officer, to risk his life as he attempts to track down Heisenberg and the site of Hitler's suspected atom bomb program.

    On the first day that Chagak’s womanhood is acknowledged within her Aleut tribe, she unexpectedly finds herself betrothed to Seal Stalker, the most promising young hunter in the village. A bright future lies ahead of Chagak—but in one violent moment, she loses her entire way of life. Left with her infant brother, Pup, and only a birdskin parka for warmth, Chagak sets out across the icy waters on a quest for survival and revenge.In My Sister the Moon, Gray Bird wanted only sons. His daughter, Kiin, would have been killed at birth to make way for a male heir if not for the tribal chief, Kayugh, who claimed the infant as a future wife for one of his two young sons. Sixteen years later, Kiin is caught between the two brothers: one to whom she is promised, the other whom she desires. But the evil spawned by her own family takes her far from her people to a place where savage cruelties, love, and fate will strengthen and change her, and lead her to her ultimate destiny.And in Brother Wind, in the tribe of the First Men, courageous, beautiful Kiin, an accomplished ivory carver, is finally content with her hard-won life, which includes twin sons and a loving warrior husband. When she is suddenly pulled back into her nightmarish former existence as slave to the Raven, shaman of the Walrus People, her husband’s brother, Samiq, vows to bring her back to their tribe. Across the land, Kukutux, the wife of a Whale Hunter, finds the loss of her husband and the hostility of her clan too much to bear. The lives of Kiin, Samiq, and Kukutux, and the paths of their tribesmen will converge in a final dramatic confrontation that tests the strength of their hearts and spirits against the cruelty of man, nature, and fate.

    But her life has been so endlessly cast and recast that we have lost sight of the remarkable girl at the heart of it—a teenaged peasant girl who, after claiming to hear voices, convinced the French king to let her lead a disheartened army into battle. In the process she changed the course of European history.In The Virgin Warrior, Larissa Juliet Taylor paints a vivid portrait of Joan as a self-confident, charismatic and supremely determined figure, whose sheer force of will electrified those around her and struck terror into the hearts of the English soldiers and leaders. The drama of Joan’s life is set against a world where visions and witchcraft were real, where saints could appear to peasants, battles and sieges decided the fate of kingdoms and rigged trials could result in burning at the stake.  Yet in her short life, Joan emboldened the French soldiers and villagers with her strength and resolve.  A difficult, inflexible leader, she defied her accusers and enemies to the end.  From her early years to the myths and fantasies that have swelled since her death, Taylor teases out a nuanced and engaging story of the truly irresistible "ordinary" girl who rescued France.

    The first, which describes the force of gravity, is widely known: Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. But the theory that explains everything else--the Standard Model of Elementary Particles--is virtually unknown among the general public.In The Theory of Almost Everything, Robert Oerter shows how what were once thought to be separate forces of nature were combined into a single theory by some of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. Rich with accessible analogies and lucid prose, The Theory of Almost Everything celebrates a heretofore unsung achievement in human knowledge--and reveals the sublime structure that underlies the world as we know it.

    

    It also shines a light on topics such as the origins of scalping, the famous Lincoln County War, the grim medical reality of Western gunfights, cowboy jargon, and the first rodeo.

    Casualty lists reached unimagined proportions as the same ground -- places like Ypres and the Somme -- was fought over again and again. Other major bloody battles remain vivid in memory to this day: Gallipoli and the Battle of Jutland are but two examples. Europe was at war with itself, and the effect on Western civilization was profound, its repercussions felt even today.World War I saw the introduction of modern technology into the military arena: The tank, airplane, machine gun, submarine, and -- most lethal of all -- poison gas, all received their first widespread use. Professor Stokesbury analyzes these technological innovations and the war's complex military campaigns in lucid detail. At the same time he discusses the great political events that unfolded during the war, such as the Russian Revolution and the end of the Hapsburg dynasty, putting the social and political side of the war into the context of modern European history.A Short History of World War I is the first history of this war to be written in twenty years. It incorporates recent research and current thinking about the war in a highly readable and lively style.

    Noel Gerson explores the life of this fascinating woman who literally changed the course of American history with her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harriet Beecher Stowe reveals a towering literary figure who was also a remarkable woman, a crusading feminist, and a woman who led a life more dramatic than anything she wrote. In an age when women were usually confined to the kitchen, the bedroom, and the parlour, Harriet Beecher Stowe argued emancipation with President Lincoln, had an extraordinary woman-to-woman relationship with Queen Victoria, and was regarded by Emile Zola as a comrade-in-arms in their separate crusades for a better world. Her super-abundant energy and refreshing humour enabled her to combine the duties of a devoted wife and mother of five with a renowned literary career and to become in the process one of the greatest celebrities of the nineteenth century. ‘Harriet Beecher Stowe’ is an impressive biography of a literary giant who changed the course of history forever. Noel Bertram Gerson (1913-1988) was a prolific American author, who wrote 325 books under his own name and under several pseudonyms. He channeled his own wartime experience in military intelligence into many of his novels, as well as writing widely about American history. His titles include ‘Liner’, ‘Daughter of Earth and Water: A Biography of Mary Shelley’, ‘The Conqueror’s Wife’ and ‘I’ll Storm Hell: A Novel of Mad Anthony Wayne’. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.

    That crusade almost wiped out the Cathars, a group of heretical Christians whose beliefs threatened the authority of the Catholic Church. But decades of harrowing repression-enforced by the ruthless Pope Boniface VIII , the Machiavellian French King Philip the Fair of France, and the pitiless grand inquisitor of Toulouse, Bernard Gui (the villain in The Name of the Rose)-had bred resentment. In the city of Carcassonne, anger at the abuses of the Inquisition reached a boiling point and a great orator and fearless rebel emerged to unite the resistance among Cathar and Catholic alike. The people rose up, led by the charismatic Franciscan friar Bernard Délicieux and for a time reclaimed control of their lives and communities. Having written the acclaimed chronicle of the Cathars The Perfect Heresy , Stephen O'Shea returns to the medieval world to chronicle a rare and remarkable story of personal courage and principle standing up to power, amidst the last vestiges of the endlessly fascinating Cathar world.Praise for The Perfect Heresy :"At once a cautionary tale about the corruption of temporal power...and an accounting of the power of faith ...It is also just a darn good read."-Baltimore Sun "An accessible, readable history with lessons ...that were not learned by broad humanity until it saw 20th-century tyrants applying the goals and methods of the Inquisition on a universal scale."-New York Times