In the early eighteenth century, the Pirate Republic was home to some of the great pirate captains, including Blackbeard, "Black Sam" Bellamy, and Charles Vane. Along with their fellow pirates—former sailors, indentured servants, and runaway slaves—this "Flying Gang" established a crude but distinctive democracy in the Bahamas, carving out their own zone of freedom in which servants were free, blacks could be equal citizens, and leaders were chosen or deposed by a vote. They cut off trade routes, sacked slave ships, and severed Europe from its New World empires, and for a brief, glorious period the Republic was a success.

    Hailed as "unsinkable, " the "Kursk" was on maneuvers when mysterious explosions rocked the sub, causing it to sink to the bottom of the sea with its 118-man crew. This in-depth look at the disaster reveals previously unreleased information from family members of the deceased as well as from government officials.

    Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the “Bomber Mafia,” asked: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal? In contrast, the bombing of Tokyo on the deadliest night of the war was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose brutal pragmatism and scorched-earth tactics in Japan cost thousands of civilian lives, but may have spared even more by averting a planned US invasion. In The Bomber Mafia, Gladwell asks, “Was it worth it?” Things might have gone differently had LeMay’s predecessor, General Haywood Hansell, remained in charge. Hansell believed in precision bombing, but when he and Curtis LeMay squared off for a leadership handover in the jungles of Guam, LeMay emerged victorious, leading to the darkest night of World War II. The Bomber Mafia is a riveting tale of persistence, innovation, and the incalculable wages of war.

    During the early nineteenth century, Britons and Americans renewed their struggle over the legacy of the American Revolution. Soldiers, immigrants, settlers, and Indians fought in a northern borderland to determine the fate of a continent. Would revolutionary republicanism sweep the British from Canada? Or would the British empire contain, divide, and ruin the shaky American republic?In a world of double identities, slippery allegiances, and porous boundaries, the leaders of the republic and of the empire struggled to control their own diverse peoples. The border divided Americans—former Loyalists and Patriots—who fought on both sides in the new war, as did native peoples defending their homelands. Serving in both armies, Irish immigrants battled one another, reaping charges of rebellion and treason. And dissident Americans flirted with secession while aiding the British as smugglers and spies.During the war, both sides struggled to sustain armies in a northern land of immense forests, vast lakes, and stark seasonal swings in the weather. In that environment, many soldiers panicked as they fought their own vivid imaginations, which cast Indians as bloodthirsty savages. After fighting each other to a standstill, the Americans and the British concluded that they could safely share the continent along a border that favored the United States at the expense of Canadians and Indians. Both sides then celebrated victory by forgetting their losses and by betraying the native peoples.A vivid narrative of an often brutal (and sometimes comic) war that reveals much about the tangled origins of the United States and Canada.

    Mahan's classic The Influence of Sea Power on History, published in 1890. In analyzing the reasons for the rise and fall of Great Britain as a predominant maritime nation in the period from the Tudors to the present day, Professor Kennedy sets the Royal Navy within a framework of national, international, economic, political and strategical considerations.To this new paperback edition the author has added a new introduction that brings the discussion of naval power up to date, with special emphasis on today’s enormous U.S. Navy as the prime contemporary example of the use of naval forces to wield global influence.

    Examines the history and legacy of the warrior monks, discussing their successful capture of the city of Jerusalem during the Crusades, and their eventual demise.

    Miraculously, thirty-three crew members still survived. While their loved ones waited in unbearable tension on shore, their ultimate fate would depend upon one man, U.S. Navy officer Charles "Swede" Momsen -- an extraordinary combination of visionary, scientist, and man of action. In this thrilling true narrative, prize-winning author Peter Maas brings us in the vivid detail a moment-by-moment account of the disaster and the man at its center. Could he actually pluck those men from a watery grave? Or had all his pioneering work been in vain?

    Guelzo shows us the face, the sights and sounds of nineteenth-century combat: the stone walls and gunpowder clouds of Pickett's Charge; the reason that the Army of Northern Virginia could be smelled before it could be seen; the march of thousands of men from the banks of the Rappahannock in Virginia to the Pennsylvania hills. What emerges is a previously untold story: from the personal politics roiling the Union and Confederate officer ranks, to the peculiar character of artillery units. Through such scrutiny the cornerstone battle of the Civil War is given extraordinarily vivid new life.

    How to Lose a War chronicles some of the most remarkable strategic catastrophes and doomed military adventures of overreaching invaders and clueless defenders—whether the failure was a result of poor planning, miscalculations, monumental ego, or failed intelligence . . . or just a really stupid idea to begin with.Alexander invades India—and ends up in deep vindaloo.Sacre bleu! The French are humiliated by Prussia in 1870.spain's "invincible navy" breaks up off the coast of britain while attempting an invasion.the mau mau rebellion against the british in kenya shows us how not to run an insurgency.Chiang Kai-Shek's pathetic army fails to keep Mao's Communists from grabbing China.

    Opening new avenues of inquiry into the lives and careers of three men widely profiled by scholars and popular historians alike, Brighton definitively answers numerous lingering and controversial questions: Was Patton really as vainglorious in real life as he was portrayed to be on the silver screen?—and how did his tireless advocacy of "mechanized cavalry" forever change the face of war? Was Monty's dogged publicity-seeking driven by his own need for recognition or by his desire to claim for Britain a leadership role in postwar global order?—and how did this prickly "commoner" manage to earn affection and esteem from enlisted men and nobility alike? How might the war have ended if Rommel had had more tanks?—and what fundamental philosophical difference between him and Hitler made such an outcome virtually impossible? Abetted by new primary source material and animated by Terry Brighton's incomparable storytelling gifts, Patton, Montgomery, Rommel offers critical new interpretations of the Second World War as it was experienced by its three most flamboyant, controversial, and influential commanders—and augments our understanding of each of their perceptions of war and leadership.

    The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that raged for the next twenty-two years saw European powers manoeuvering for mercantile and political advantage in a complex and ever-changing web of alliances and coalitions. By 1815, the world was a different place; age-old certainties were shattered, established dynasties and kingdoms overthrown, the United States emerged as a world power, and a new age was dawning.This was to be the longest, hardest and cruelest war ever fought at sea, on a scale comparable only with the Second World War. Methods of battle under sail, little changed for centuries, would be forced to adapt at an unprecedented pace that brought with it the fearsome power of rockets, torpedoes and submarines. The Line Upon a Wind is also the story of the daily lives of the sailors on board the fighting ships, the blood and guts ferocity of engagement in an age of gentility, the struggle of ships’ surgeons to repair broken bodies and the daily struggle to keep the men fed and free of disease. It is a story of ordinary men and extraordinary bravery. The Great War, as it was known to contemporaries, spanned generations and continents. Noel Mostert has achieved a work of unparalleled research, rousing descriptions and illuminating analysis — maritime history at its very best.

    Navy's top-secret, four-hundred-ton submarine, an expensive, dangerous vessel with a custom-built miniature nuclear reactor designed as a secret weapon during the Cold War. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

    For six years thereafter, England was rent by civil war.Families and friends were bitterly divided as men left home to fight for King or Parliament. Castles and towns, which a year before had been "scenes of happiness and plenty," were besieged and attacked. Houses were plundered, churches and cathedrals desecrated. Savage battles were fought--the passive voice was much abused. Some 200,000 lives were lost, many from plague in strife-torn towns--and the king himself was beheaded on January 30, 1649.A social as well as a military history that vividly re-creates these scenes of war in England over 350 years ago, Cavaliers and Roundheads is enlivened by astute and revealing character sketches, not only of the leading participants (the slight, sad, obstinate King; his dashing, ruthless nephew, Prince Rupert; the toweringly forceful and slovenly Oliver Cromwell), but also such half-forgotten characters as Sir Arthur Aston, the brutal, detested governor of Oxford whose brains were beaten out of his skull with his own wooden leg, or Abigail Penington, the Lady Mayoress, marching out with other City ladies and the fishwives of Billingsgate to work on London's fortifications.Making skillful use of numerous contemporary accounts as well as the fruits of modern scholarship, Christopher Hibbert once again demonstrates his mastery of narrative history.

    As obvious as the Presidential motorcade, most people assume the squadron is a travel perk for VIPs. They’re only half right: while the helicopters do provide transport, the unit exists to evacuate high-ranking officials in the event of a terrorist or nuclear attack on the capital. In the event of an attack, select officials would be whisked by helicopters to a ring of secret bunkers around Washington, even as ordinary citizens were left to fend for themselves.For sixty years, the US government has been developing secret Doomsday plans to protect itself, and the multibillion-dollar Continuity of Government (COG) program takes numerous forms—from its plans to evacuate the Liberty Bell from Philadelphia to the plans to launch nuclear missiles from a Boeing-747 jet flying high over Nebraska. In Raven Rock, Garrett M. Graff sheds light on the inner workings of the 650-acre compound (called Raven Rock) just miles from Camp David, as well as dozens of other bunkers the government built its top leaders during the Cold War, from the White House lawn to Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado to Palm Beach, Florida, and the secret plans that would have kicked in after a Cold War nuclear attack to round up foreigners and dissidents and nationalize industries. Equal parts a presidential, military, and cultural history, Raven Rock tracks the evolution of the government plan and the threats of global war from the dawn of the nuclear era through the War on Terror.

     Almost all accounts of D Day are told from the Allied perspective, with the emphasis on how German resistance was overcome on June 6th 1944. But what was it like to be a German soldier in the bunkers and gun emplacements of the Normandy coast, facing the onslaught of the mightiest seaborne invasion in history? What motivated the German defenders, what were their thought processes - and how did they fight from one strong point to another, among the dunes and fields, on that first cataclysmic day? What were their experiences on facing the tanks, the flamethrowers and the devastating air superiority of the Allies? This book sheds fascinating light on these questions, bringing together statements made by German survivors after the war, when time had allowed them to reflect on their state of mind, their actions and their choices of June 6th. We see a perspective of D Day which deserves to be added to the historical record, in which ordinary German troops struggled to make sense of the onslaught that was facing them, and emerged stunned at the weaponry and sheer determination of the Allied soldiers. We see, too, how the Germans fought in the great coastal bunkers, perceived as impregnable fortresses, but in reality often becoming tombs for their crews. Above all, we now have the unheard human voices of the individual German soldiers - the men who are so often portrayed as a faceless mass. Book 2 in this unique series is also now available in e-book form.