Yet it is also one of the most complex and misunderstood, in a war only imperfectly grasped.Conventional wisdom holds that the battle began in February 1916 and lasted until December, when the victorious French wrested all the territory they had lost back from the Germans. In fact, says historian John Mosier, from the very beginning of the war until the armistice in 1918, no fewer than eight distinct battles were waged for the possession of Verdun. These conflicts are largely unknown, even in France, owing to the obsessive secrecy of the French high command and its energetic propaganda campaign to fool the world into thinking that the war on the Western Front was a steady series of German checks and defeats.Although British historians have always seen Verdun as a one-year battle designed by the German chief of staff to bleed France white, Mosier’s careful analysis of the German plans reveals a much more abstract and theoretical approach.Our understanding of Verdun has long been mired in myths, false assumptions, propaganda, and distortions. Now, using numerous accounts of military analysts, serving officers, and eyewitnesses, including French sources that have never been translated, Mosier offers a compelling reassessment of the Great War’s most important battle.

    There, quietly, peacefully, and in full view of the Vichy government and a nearby division of the Nazi SS, Le Chambon's villagers and their clergy organized to save thousands of Jewish children and adults from certain death.Author Biography: Philip Hallie was Griffin Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University, where he taught for thirty-two years. He died in 1994, leaving this manuscript. That it can now be published is do to the devotion of his wife, Doris Ann Hallie, who contributed an afterword. The foreword by John Compton, fellow philosopher and longtime friend of the author, will help the reader to understand this unusual document in the context of Hallie's life and thought.

    In that tradition, this handsome commemorative volume gives a unique perspective on one of the most pivotal and volatile events of modern history.   In World War I in 100 Objects, military historian Peter Doyle shares a fascinating collection of items, from patriotic badges worn by British citizens to field equipment developed by the United States. Beautifully photographed, each item is accompanied by the unique story it tells about the war, its strategy, its innovations, and the people who fought it.

    No human being who stood on her decks that fateful night was alive to commemorate the event on its 100th anniversary. Their stories are with us, however, and the lessons remain. From the moment the world learned the Titanic had sunk, we wanted to know, who had survived? Those answers didn’t come until the evening of Thursday, April 18, 1912―when the Cunard liner Carpathia finally reached New York with the 706 survivors who had been recovered from Titanic’s lifeboats. Harold Bride, “Titanic’s surviving wireless operator,” relayed the story of the ship’s band. “The way the band kept playing was a noble thing. I heard it first while still we were working wireless when there was a ragtime tune for us. The last I saw of the band, when I was floating out in the sea with my lifebelt on, it was still on deck playing ‘Autumn.’ How they ever did it I cannot imagine.” There were stories of heroism―such as that of Edith Evans, who was waiting to board collapsible Lifeboat D, the last boat to leave Titanic, when she turned to Caroline Brown and said, “You go first. You have children waiting at home.” The sacrifice cost Evans her life, but as Mrs. Brown said later, “It was a heroic sacrifice, and as long as I live I shall hold her memory dear as my preserver, who preferred to die so that I might live.” There was mystery. There was bravery. There was suspense. There was cowardice. Most men who survived found themselves trying to explain how they survived when women and children had died. But mostly, there was loss. On her return to New York after picking up Titanic’s survivors, Carpathia had become known as a ship of widows. Rene Harris, who lost her husband, Broadway producer Henry Harris, in the disaster, later spoke of her loss when she said, “It was not a night to remember. It was a night to forget.” Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished letters, memoirs, and diaries as well as interviews with survivors and family members, veteran author and writer Alan Rockwell brings to life the colorful voices and the harrowing experiences of many of those who lived to tell their story. More than 100 years after the RMS Titanic met its fatal end, the story of the tragic wreck continues to fascinate people worldwide. Though many survivors and their family members disappeared into obscurity or were hesitant to talk about what they went through, others were willing to share their experiences during the wreck and in its aftermath. This book recounts many of these first-hand accounts in graphic, compelling detail.

    The real-life protagonist of The Black Count, General Alex Dumas, is a man almost unknown today yet with a story that is strikingly familiar, because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used it to create some of the best loved heroes of literature.Yet, hidden behind these swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret: the real hero was the son of a black slave -- who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race would before our own time. Born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Alex Dumas was briefly sold into bondage but made his way to Paris where he was schooled as a sword-fighting member of the French aristocracy. Enlisting as a private, he rose to command armies at the height of the Revolution in an audacious campaign across Europe and the Middle East – until he met an implacable enemy he could not defeat.The Black Count is simultaneously a riveting adventure story, a lushly textured evocation of 18th-century France, and a window into the modern world’s first multi-racial society. But it is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son.

    These women held sway in the salons, in the councils of state, in the ballrooms, in the bedrooms; they enchanted (or intimidated) the most powerful of men and presided over an extraordinary cultural flowering of unprecedented luxury and sophistication. It is this captivating world that Olivier Bernier recreates. A world in which the shrewdness of Madame de Pompadour or the beauty of Madame du Barry could change the course of great nations. A world that could encompass the piquant frankness of Abigail Adams and the dark plotting of the queen of Naples. This world has been swept away, but its great ladies, the first modern women, still speak to us.Fourteen dashing and sometimes tragic women—empress and dressmaker, bluestocking and courtesan—come to life here in a series of lavishly illustrated essays. Delightfully informative, this timely book charts the beginnings of women's liberation, illuminates the century for those who are unfamiliar with it, and provides new insights for those who know it well.ForewordDiana VreelandPrefaceOlivier BernierChapter 1: The Emergence of PowerMadame des UrsinsThe Duchesse de BerryChapter 2: The Sway of IntelligenceMadame du DeffandMadame de PompadourChapter 3: Writer and PublicistBetie WolffMadame NeckerChapter 4: The Flesh TriumphantMademoiselle ClaironMadame du BarryChapter 5: In Search of FreedomAbigail AdamsGeorgiana, Duchess of DevonshireChapter 6: Working WomenMademoiselle BertinMadame Vigée-LebrunChapter 7: To Rule a WorldThe Margravine of BayreuthQueen Maria CarolinaSource NotesSelected Bibliography

    

    There, she unexpectedly meets up with an old acquaintance, famous model-turned-photographer Lee Miller. Neither has emerged from the war unscathed. Nora is racked with the fear that her efforts to survive under the Vichy regime may have cost her daughter’s life. Lee suffers from what she witnessed as a war correspondent photographing the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.Nora and Lee knew each other in the heady days of late 1920s Paris, when Nora was giddy with love for her childhood sweetheart, Lee became the celebrated mistress of the artist Man Ray, and Lee’s magnetic beauty drew them all into the glamorous lives of famous artists and their wealthy patrons. But Lee fails to realize that her friendship with Nora is even older, that it goes back to their days as children in Poughkeepsie, New York, when a devastating trauma marked Lee forever. Will Nora’s reunion with Lee give them a chance to forgive past betrayals…and break years of silence to forge a meaningful connection as women who have shared the best and the worst that life can offer?A novel of freedom and frailty, desire and daring, The Beautiful American portrays the extraordinary relationship between two passionate, unconventional women.

    One was a Prince, one was a Count, and the third was a commoner with an Italian name, who four years earlier had been the subject of one of John Singer Sargent’s greatest portraits. The commoner was Samuel Pozzi, society doctor, pioneer gynaecologist and free-thinker – a rational and scientific man with a famously complicated private life.Pozzi's life played out against the backdrop of the Parisian Belle Epoque. The beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side: hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, a time of rampant prejudice and blood-and-soil nativism, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine.The Man in the Red Coat is at once a fresh and original portrait of the Belle Epoque – its heroes and villains, its writers, artists and thinkers – and a life of a man ahead of his time. Witty, surprising and deeply researched, the new book from Julian Barnes illuminates the fruitful and longstanding exchange of ideas between Britain and France, and makes a compelling case for keeping that exchange alive.

    From Isabella of Castile, and her granddaughter Mary Tudor, to Catherine de Medici, Anne Boleyn, and Elizabeth Tudor, these women wielded enormous power over their territories, shaping the course of European history for over a century. Across boundaries and generations, these royal women were mothers and daughters, mentors and protégées, allies and enemies. For the first time, Europe saw a sisterhood of queens who would not be equaled until modern times. A fascinating group biography and a thrilling political epic, Game of Queens explores the lives of some of the most beloved (and reviled) queens in history.

    You'll spend a week on this for sure.A History of the Middle Ages is the amazing story of European man in transition. It is a dramatic chronicle of 1,000 years of political, social, and economic transformation beginning with the dissolution of the classical Mediterranean civilization and ending with the first flowering of the Renaissance. It is also the story of two new religions, Christianity and Islam, both of which were destined to dominate the mind of every person in those new civilizations arising in their wake. This was the great Age of Faith, a time of darkness and a time of enlightenment...a time of lords and vassals, popes and kings, and commerce and cathedrals.Size of Audible Audio Book: 1146 minutes in 3 partsPart 1: 6 hr 15 minPart 2: 6 hr 29 minPart 3: 6 hr 22 min

    The carnage had little impact on the course of the war, and Verdun ultimately came to symbolize the absurdity and horror of trench warfare.Ian Ousby offers a radical reevaluation of this cataclysmic battle, arguing that the French bear tremendous responsibility for the senseless slaughter. He shows how the battle’s roots lay in the Franco-Prussian war and how its legacy helped lay the groundwork for World War II. Merging intellectual substance with superb battle writing, The Road to Verdun is a moving and incisive account of one of the most important battles of the twentieth century.

    This biography by Brigitte Hamann reveals the truth of a complex and touching, curiously modern personality, her refusals to conform, escaping to a life of her own, filled with literature, ideas and the new political passions of the age.This edition is a translation into English from the original German by Ruth Hein.

    Petersburg in a heavy Russian carriage and set out on a difficult journey to meet her husband, John Quincy Adams, in Paris. She traveled through the snows of eastern Europe, down the Baltic coast to Prussia, across the battlefields of Germany, and into a France then experiencing the tumultuous events of Napoleon's return from Elba. Along the way, she learned what the long years of Napoleon's wars had done to Europe, what her old friends in the royal court in Berlin had experienced during the French occupation, how it felt to have her life threatened by reckless soldiers, and how to manage fear. The journey was a metaphor for a life spent crossing borders: born in London in 1775, she had grown up partly in France, and in 1797 had married into the most famous of American political dynasties and become the daughter-in-law of John and Abigail Adams. The prizewinning historian Michael O'Brien reconstructs for the first time Louisa Adams's extraordinary passage. An evocative history of the experience of travel in the days of carriages and kings, "Mrs. Adams in Winter "offers a moving portrait of a lady, her difficult marriage, and her conflicted sense of what it meant to be a woman caught between worlds.

    Particular attention is paid to the everyday lives of the working classes and their cultural development. Their exploits, challenges, and struggles are covered over a broad time frame that links as well as differentiates past and present circumstances.