We were halfway in when the Japanese machine guns got their range. Bullets slapped the water and whined as they ricocheted off the barge. Some of us ducked; some of us fell to the floor; and all of us prayed.” Here, in heart-stopping human detail, are twenty-one personal accounts told by the men themselves. They are the stories of men who lived in hell and lived to tell of it. There is the story of Sgt. Albert Schmid who was awarded the Navy Cross for his single-handed destruction of a flanking attack while on Guadalcanal. The account of Private Nicolli who was literally blown into the air like a matchstick and then, with a piece of shrapnel in his chest, managed to help a wounded comrade to the rear. “The luckiest man in the Solomons,” Sgt. Koziar, tells of how he had his tonsils removed with the assistance of a Japanese sniper’s bullet. These are just three of the twenty-one fascinating stories that were told to Gerold Frank and James Horan just months after these marines had returned from active duty to recover from the conflict in the Pacific. The valor of these marines is astounding, as twenty-one-year-old Corporal Conroy states in the book, “I don’t suppose I shall ever be able to sum up all the bravery, the guts, the genuine, honest courage displayed by the boys out in Guadalcanal. They were afraid, and yet they took it. They had what it takes . . .” The battles of Gavutu-Tanambogo, Tulagi, Tenaru, Matanikau and Guadalcanal are all covered through these accounts which take the reader right to the epicenter of the Pacific conflict. “telling of living conditions on the beaches and in the jungles where they fought, offering an insider’s view of foxholes, food, snipers, mosquitos, boondocks, shrapnel, their injuries, and their pain.” Great Stories of World War II Gerold Frank and James Horan were professional authors who wrote down the stories of these marines shortly after they had returned from active duty. The War in the South Pacific was first published in 1943 as Out in the Boondocks. Frank went on to become a prominent ghostwriter and passed away in 1998. Horan, author of more than forty books, died in 1981.

    It vividly documents the Pilgrims' adventures: their first stop in Holland, the harrowing transatlantic crossing aboard the Mayflower, the first harsh winter in the new colony, and the help from friendly Native Americans that saved their lives.No one was better equipped to report on the affairs of the Plymouth community than William Bradford. Revered for his patience, wisdom, and courage, Bradford was elected to the office of governor in 1621, and he continued to serve in that position for more than three decades. His memoirs of the colony remained virtually unknown until the nineteenth century. Lost during the American Revolution, they were discovered years later in London and published after a protracted legal battle. The current edition rendered into modern English and with an introduction by Harold Paget, remains among the most readable books from seventeenth-century America.

    President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger began their diplomacy with China in an attempt to find a way out of Vietnam. The remaining Cold War presidents saw China as an ally against the Soviet Union and looked askance at its violations of international principles. With the end of communism and China's continued human rights abuses, the U.S has failed to forge a genuinely new relationship with China. This is the essential story of contemporary U.S./China policy.

    The Gold Rush had begun.300,000 gold-seekers left their homes, grabbed what they could and headed West to find their fortune.This is the diary of one of those intrepid men, and the trials and tribulations that he faces in his search for riches. From May 1850 through to June 1852 the life of Alfred T. Jackson, one of the forty-niners, was compiled by Chauncey Canfield. Jackson’s dream was that “I would like to have enough capital so that I would not have to slave from sunrise till dark as I did on dad's farm.” But like many others who moved out west to find gold it was not easy … He lived a truly wild existence during his time in the west, sleeping rough, panning for gold and fleeing from gunfights with his dog and his best friend. First-hand accounts of early settlements like Nevada City and Rock Creek are given as well as descriptions of Grass Valley, the Sierra Mountains and the North and South Yuba Valleys. It is a rich and vivid depiction of gold mining with accounts of pioneer travelling overland, the infiltration of foreign workers, particularly Chinese miners, and contains many details of how forty-niners like Jackson entertained themselves with the nuggets that they found and spent. First published in 1906, this classic work provides a thorough insight into the real wild west and the life of the forty-niners. Chauncey Canfield (1843-1909) first published The diary of a forty-niner in 1906. Albion Press is an imprint of Endeavour Press, 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.

    An autobiography written by a Union mapmaker who witnessed the worst of the Civil War firsthand, including an account of his experiences during a two-year stay at the notorious Andersonville prison.

    A concise, chronological history of Latin America spans six centuries and encompasses twenty countries as it discusses the people, events, and factors that shaped Latin America--including colonization, revolution, ethnic diversity, and the struggle for economic growth and political and social equality.

    In Children of the City, David Nasaw re-creates this period in our social history from the vantage point of the children who grew up then. Drawing on hundreds of memoirs, autobiographies, oral histories and unpublished--and until now unexamined--primary source materials from cities across the country, he provides us with a warm and eloquent portrait of these children, their families, their daily lives, their fears, and their dreams. Illustrated with 68 photographs from the period, many never before published, Children of the City offers a vibrant protrait of a time when our cities and our grandparents were young

    Specially adapted for middle-grade readers, this nonfiction book includes new maps and photographs, a time line, and a list of characters for added comprehension and accessibility.

    Indeed, Pocahontas's life is a testament to the subtle intelligence that Native Americans, always aware of their material disadvantages, brought against the military power of the colonizing English. Resistance, espionage, collaboration, deception: Pocahontas's life is here shown as a road map to Native American strategies of defiance exercised in the face of overwhelming odds and in the hope for a semblance of independence worth the name.Townsend's Pocahontas emerges--as a young child on the banks of the Chesapeake, an influential noblewoman visiting a struggling Jamestown, an English gentlewoman in London--for the first time in three-dimensions; allowing us to see and sympathize with her people as never before.

    From unexpected verdicts, like the acquittal won by John Adams when he defended British soldiers charged with the Boston Massacre in 1770 to stirred passions when abolitionist John Brown was convicted of murder - a precedent to the Civil War - to the breakthrough in racial relations when Clarence Darrow won a stunning "not guilty" verdict for black physician Ossian Sweet - at a time when black Americans could hardly expect a fair trial. Fleming also includes the trials of Aaron Burr for treason and a well-known congressman for murder. In courtrooms throughout the nation's history, vivid emotion and heated rhetoric have established consequential precedents and enlarged average men and women to historical dimensions.

    Webster as he explores the fascinating and complex history of the Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry.The Quaker City and its hospitals were pioneers in the field of mental health. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, its institutions were crowded and patients lived in shocking conditions. The mentally ill were quartered with the dangerously criminal. By 1906, the city had purchased a vast acreage of farmland incorporated into the city, and the Philadelphia Hospital dubbed its new venture Byberry City Farms. From the start, its history was riddled with corruption and committees, investigations and inquests, appropriations and abuse. Yet it is also a story of reform and redemption, of heroes and human dignity--many dedicated staff members did their best to help patients whose mental illnesses were little understood and were stigmatized by society.

    A lively, compact history of the game, including commentary on baseball in the 1990s.

    National Book Award-winning author Jonathan Kozol presents his shocking account of the American educational system in this stunning "New York Times" bestseller, which has sold more than 250,000 hardcover copies."An impassioned book, laced with anger and indignation, about how our public education system scorns so many of our children." -- New York Times Book Review

    If you buy only one book on the Vietnam War, this is the one you want. -Chicago TribuneChristian G. Appy's monumental oral history of the Vietnam War is the first work to probe the war's path through both the United States and Vietnam. These vivid testimonies of 135 men and women span the entire history of the Vietnam conflict, from its murky origins in the 1940s to the chaotic fall of Saigon in 1975. Sometimes detached and reflective, often raw and emotional, they allow us to see and feel what this war meant to people literally on all sides: Americans and Vietnamese, generals and grunts, policymakers and protesters, guerrillas and CIA operatives, pilots and doctors, artists and journalists, and a variety of ordinary citizens whose lives were swept up in a cataclysm that killed three million people. By turns harrowing, inspiring, and revelatory, Patriots is not a chronicle of facts and figures but a vivid human history of the war.A gem of a book, as informative and compulsively readable as it is timely. -The Washington Post Book World

    Few know that he was also one of its greatest war heroes. This accessible biography introduces young readers to the real Arnold: reckless, heroic, and driven. Packed with first-person accounts, astonishing battle scenes, and surprising twists, this is a gripping and true adventure tale.The Notorious Benedict Arnold is the winner of the 2011 Boston Globe - Horn Book Award for Nonfiction.