Visitors stand on bridges that were crossed by Julius Caesar and Cicero, walk around temples visited by Roman emperors, and step into churches that have hardly changed since popes celebrated mass in them sixteen centuries ago.These architectural survivals are all the more remarkable considering the violent disasters that have struck the city. Afflicted by earthquakes, floods, fires and plagues, it has most of all been repeatedly ravaged by roving armies. Rome: A History in Seven Sackings examines the most important of these attacks and reveals, with fascinating insight, how they transformed the city - and not always for the worse. From the Gauls to the Nazis, Kneale vividly recounts those threatening the city, while drawing an intense and vibrant portrait of the city and its inhabitants, both before and after being attacked. In these troubled times when our cities can seem fragile, Rome's history offers a picture that is both shocking and also reassuring. Like the Neapolitans from Norman Lewis's Naples 44, Romans have repeatedly shrugged off catastrophes and made their city anew.A meticulously researched, magical and novel blend of travelogue, social and cultural history, Rome: A History in Seven Sackings is part celebration of the fierce courage, panache and vitality of the Roman people, and part passionate love letter to Rome. This is a popular history of the famous, incomparable city like no other.

    Maybe your teacher took the controversial stand that the Civil War was all about states’ rights… or maybe you learned all about the horrors slavery, but never quite figured out why things didn’t get better after the war ended. If you didn’t go to school in the United States, things are even more confusing. When the media is full of references to the Confederate flag, the legacy of slavery, and poverty in the American South, you might have a vague sense that things are bad because of the Civil War… but why? Why does a war that happened over a hundred and fifty years ago still cast a shadow over the United States? This book will tell you why. It will lead you, step-by-step, through the causes of the Civil War, and the effects. But unlike your high school history teacher, it won’t put you to sleep with long-winded biographies and lists of dates. The names you’ll learn are the big players, the ones with big personalities, who made big differences. In just a few minutes a day, you can read bite-sized stories from the Civil War – quick, easy explanations to guide you through the main points, with just enough scary, surprising, or just plain strange facts to keep you coming back for more. Each chapter ends with a bonus helping of trivia and some quick questions to test your knowledge. By the time you’re finished, you’ll know all the facts your history teacher never taught you – from who said slavery was a “positive good” (and why they thought that), to who dressed up in women’s clothing to escape from Union soldiers.

    Married for political advantage at the age of seven to her six-year-old Hungarian cousin, Joanna saw her brilliant, cultivated world shattered twelve years later by the brutal assassination of her husband. Accused of the murder by her powerful in-laws, Joanna was forced to flee her kingdom and stand trial for her life before the papal court at Avignon on March 15, 1348. The account of how, despite her youth and sex, she triumphed over her enemies, raised an army, and took back her realm makes for one of the most compelling sagas of any age.Joanna went on to rule for a further thirty years, weathering war, plague, and treason to become one of the most powerful and influential leaders in Italy. Dedicated to the welfare of her subjects and realm, she reduced crime, built hospitals and churches, encouraged the licensing of women physicians, and expertly navigated the dangerous complexity of papal politics. Her elegant court became a window on the century, luring some of the most important writers and artists of the period, including Giovanni Boccaccio, author of the The Decameron, and Francesco Petrarch. Her reign rivaled that of Elizabeth I in power and scope - until the violence and treachery of the medieval world ultimately betrayed her.As she did in her acclaimed Four Queens, Nancy Goldstone takes us back to the turbulent Middle Ages, and with skill and passion brings fully to life one of history's most remarkable women. Her research is impeccable, her eye for detail unerring. From the pageantry and splendor of the royal court to the ferocity of the battlefield and the intricacy of medieval politics, The Lady Queen paints a captivating portrait of medieval royalty, and reclaims the life of a woman notorious throughout history for a crime she did not commit.

    Caterina Riario Sforza was one of the most prominent women in Renaissance Italy—and one of the most vilified. In this glittering biography, Elizabeth Lev reexamines her extraordinary life and accomplishments.Raised in the court of Milan and wed at age ten to the pope’s corrupt nephew, Caterina was ensnared in Italy’s political intrigues early in life. After turbulent years in Rome’s papal court, she moved to the Romagnol province of Forlì. Following her husband’s assassination, she ruled Italy’s crossroads with iron will, martial strength, political savvy—and an icon’s fashion sense. In finally losing her lands to the Borgia family, she put up a resistance that inspired all of Europe and set the stage for her progeny—including Cosimo de Medici—to follow her example to greatness.A rich evocation the Renaissance,The Tigress of Forlì reveals Caterina Riario Sforza as a brilliant and fearless ruler, and a tragic but unbowed figure.

    But the wonderful development, however, in a few months, of a large, heterogeneous collection of men into a solid, keen, self-sacrificing unit, was but another instance of the way in which war improves the character and temperament of man. It was entirely new for men who were formerly in a regiment, full of traditions, to find themselves in the[...].

    From that exhilarating portrait, he takes us back more than two thousand years to the city's foundation, one mired in mythologies and superstitions that would inform Rome's development for centuries.From the beginning, Rome was a hotbed of power, overweening ambition, desire, political genius, and corruption. Hughes details the turbulent years that saw the formation of empire and the establishment of the sociopolitical system, along the way providing colorful portraits of all the major figures, both political (Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Nero, Caligula) and cultural (Cicero, Martial, Virgil), to name just a few. For almost a thousand years, Rome would remain the most politically important, richest, and largest city in the Western world.From the formation of empire, Hughes moves on to the rise of early Christianity, his own antipathy toward religion providing rich and lively context for the brutality of the early Church, and eventually the Crusades. The brutality had the desired effect—the Church consolidated and outlasted the power of empire, and Rome would be the capital of the Papal States until its annexation into the newly united kingdom of Italy in 1870.As one would expect, Hughes lavishes plenty of critical attention on the Renaissance, providing a full survey of the architecture, painting, and sculpture that blossomed in Rome over the course of the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, and shedding new light on old masters in the process. Having established itself as the artistic and spiritual center of the world, Rome in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries saw artists (and, eventually, wealthy tourists) from all over Europe converging on the bustling city, even while it was caught up in the nationalistic turmoils of the Italian independence struggle and war against France.Hughes keeps the momentum going right into the twentieth century, when Rome witnessed the rise and fall of Italian Fascism and Mussolini, and took on yet another identity in the postwar years as the fashionable city of "La Dolce Vita." This is the Rome Hughes himself first encountered, and it's one he contends, perhaps controversially, has been lost in the half century since, as the cult of mass tourism has slowly ruined the dazzling city he loved so much. Equal parts idolizing, blasphemous, outraged, and awestruck, Rome is a portrait of the Eternal City as only Robert Hughes could paint it.

    He explains how the mafia began, how it responds to threats and challenges, and introduces us to the real-life characters that inspired the American imagination for generations, making the mafia an international, larger than life cultural phenomenon. Dickie's dazzling cast of characters includes Antonio Giammona, the first "boss of bosses''; New York cop Joe Petrosino, who underestimated the Sicilian mafia and paid for it with his life; and Bernard "the Tractor" Provenzano, the current boss of bosses who has been hiding in Sicily since 1963.

    It was a sport so popular that it created the geography of Italy in the minds of her citizens, and some have said that it was cycling, not political change, that united Italy.Pedalare! Pedalare! is the first complete history of Italian cycling to be published in English. The book moves chronologically from the first Giro d'Italia (Italy's equivalent of the Tour de France) in 1909 to the present day. The tragedies and triumphs of great riders such as Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali appear alongside stories of the support riders, snow-bound mountains and the first and only woman to ride the whole Giro.Cycling's relationship with Italian history, politics and culture is always up front, with reference to fascism, the cold war and the effect of two world wars. The sport is explored alongside changes in Italian society as a whole, from the poor peasants who took up cycling in the early, pioneering period, to the slick, professional sport of today. Scandals and controversy appear throughout the book as constant features of the connection between fans, journalists and cycling.Concluding with an examination of doping, which has helped to destroy what was at one time the most popular sport of all, Pedalare, Pedalare is an engrossing history of a national passion.

    A fresh view of Louis XVI's France. A NY Times cloth bestseller. 200 illustrations.

    It is primarily a story to share with family and friends about my personal involvement in the conflict and the turbulent decade of the 60s and does not attempt to question the politics of the era. It begins with a brief description of my quest to gain admittance to the United States Air Force Academy, my four years at the Academy, and the subsequent year of pilot training. I flew three different types of aircraft in combat and the book provides insight into the training that took place for the C-130 Hercules, the F-105 Thunderchief, and the A-1 Skyraider. Each of the three tours in combat over Laos and Vietnam is described with emphasis on the more memorable flights including a bailout in the A-1 and the final crash on takeoff that ended my active duty Air Force career. My time in various hospitals is described at the end of the book and the epilogue tells briefly of my life after retirement from the United States Air Force. The book has been described as a combination of Band of Brothers, Top Gun, and Forrest Gump.

    Lauro Martines, whose decades of scholarship have made him one of the most admired historians of Renaissance Italy, here provides a remarkably fresh perspective on Girolamo Savonarola, the preacher and agitator who flamed like a comet through late fifteenth-century Florence. The Dominican friar has long been portrayed as a dour, puritanical demagogue who urged his followers to burn their worldly goods in the bonfire of the vanities. But as Martines shows, this is a caricature of the truth--the version propagated by the wealthy and powerful who feared the political reforms he represented. In fact, Savonarola emerges as a complex and subtle man: compassionate, wise, a poet and scholar, and even, at critical moments, a force for moderation. The friar, a mesmerizing preacher, set the city afire with his message of Christian charity wedded to republican ideals. It is this reality--of Savonarola as both religious and civic leader--that Martines captures in all its complexity, showing how he inspired an outpouring of political debate in a city newly freed from the tyranny of the Medici. In the end, the volatile passions he unleashed--and the powerful families he threatened--sent the friar to his own fiery death. But the fusion of morality and politics that he represented would leave a lasting mark on Renaissance Florence. For the many readers fascinated by histories of Renaissance Italy--such as Brunelleschi's Dome or Galileo's Daughter, and Martines's acclaimed April Blood--Fire in the City offers a vivid portrait of one of the most memorable characters from that dazzling era.

    Defining folly as the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives, Tuchman details four decisive turning points in history that illustrate the very heights of folly in government: the Trojan War, the breakup of the Holy See provoked by Renaissance Popes, the loss of the American colonies by Britain's George III & the USA's persistent folly in Vietnam. THE MARCH OF FOLLY brings the people, places & events of history alive for today's reader.

    Hitler is dead, and the Third Reich little more than smoking rubble. No GI wants to be the last man killed in action against the Germans. But for cigar-chewing, rough-talking, hard-drinking, hard-charging Captain Jack Lee and his men, there is one more mission: rescue fourteen prominent French prisoners held in an SS-guarded castle high in the Austrian Alps. It’s a dangerous mission, but Lee has help from a decorated German Wehrmacht officer and his men, who voluntarily join the fight.Based on personal memoirs, author interviews, and official American, German, and French histories, The Last Battle is the nearly unbelievable story of the most improbable battle of World War II — a tale of unlikely allies, bravery, cowardice, and desperate combat between implacable enemies.

    It is better to study her annals than those of any other one country in Europe, if the reader would get a general view of universal history. France has been a participant in, or interested spectator of, nearly every great war or diplomatic contest for over a thousand years; and a very great proportion of all the religious, intellectual, social, and economic movements which have affected the world either began in France or were speedily caught up and acted upon by Frenchmen soon after they had commenced their working elsewhere.Contents: The Land of the Gauls and the French – The Roman Province and the Frankish Kingdom – From Franks to Frenchmen – The Golden Age of Feudalism: 996-1270 – Life in the Feudal Ages – The Dawn of the Modern Era: 1270-1483. The Hundred Years' War – The Turbulent Sixteenth Century: 1483-1610 – The Great Cardinal and His Successor – Louis XIV, the Sun King–His Work in France – Louis XIV Dominator of Europe – The Wane of the Old Monarchy – France the Homeland of New Ideas – Old France on the Eve of the Revolution – The Fiery Coming of the New Régime: 1789-92 – The Years of Blood and Wrath: 1792-95 – Napoleon Bonaparte, as Master of Europe – The Napoleonic Régime in France. The Consulate and the Empire – "Glory and Madness"–Moscow, Leipzig, and Waterloo – The Restored Bourbons and their Exit – The "Citizen-King" and the Rule of the Bourgeois – Radical Outbreaks and the Reaction to Cæsarism. The Second Republic: 1848-51 – Napoleon the Little: His Prosperity and Decadence – The Crucifixion by Prussia: 1870-71 – The Painful Birth of the Third Republic – The Years of Peace: 1879-1914 – France Herself AgainThis book was originally intended for members of the American army who naturally would desire to know something of the past of the great French nation on whose soil they expected to do battle for Liberty. The happy but abrupt close of the war vitiated this purpose, but the volume was continued and was extended on a somewhat more ambitious scale to assist in making intelligent Americans in general acquainted with the history of a country with which we have established an ever-deepening friendship...

    They died singly and by the hundreds over several days in a carefully planned ambush led by Arminius-a Roman-trained German warrior determined to stop Rome's advance east beyond the Rhine River. By the time it was over, some 25,000 men, women, and children were dead and the course of European history had been forever altered. "Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!" Emperor Augustus agonized aloud when he learned of the devastating loss. As the decades slipped past, the location of one of the western world's most important battlefields was lost to history for two millenia.Fueled by an unshakeable curiosity and burning interest in the story, a British major named Tony Clunn delved into the nooks and crannies of times past. By sheer persistence and good luck, he turned the foundation of German national history on its ear. Convinced the running battle took place north of Osnabruck, Germany, Clunn set out to prove his point. His discovery of a handful of Roman coins in the late 1980s, followed by a flood of thousands of other artifacts (including weapons and human remains) ended the mystery once and for all. Today, a multi-million dollar state-of-the-art museum houses and interprets these priceless historical treasures on the very site Varus's legions were lost.In Quest of the Lost Roman Legions is a masterful retelling of Clunn's search to discover the Varus battlefield. His well-placed, carefully conceived, and vivid writing style makes for a compelling read from the first page to the last, as he alternates between his incredible modern quest and the ancient tale of the Roman occupation of Germany that ultimately ended so tragically in the peat bogs of Kalkriese.Tony Clunn joined the army at age 15 and served with the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment. He retired in the late 1990s after twenty-two years with the rank of major, an is currently employed by the British Army in Osnaburck and Kalkriese. He was presented with the Member of the Royal Order of the British Empire in 1996 by Queen Elizabeth II.