The Giants of The Polo Grounds is the definitive work on baseball’s New York Giants and their tenure in New York City. An “Editor’s Choice” of The New York Times when it was first published more than 20 years ago, the book was also a Spitball Magazine nominee for the Best Baseball Book of the year. Author Noel Hynd, a former contributor to Sports Illustrated, has now created a new edition that maintains all the previous text, but expands the work to more than 600 pages from the original 375. Included this time are more stories about McGraw, Ott, Durocher and Mays and their opponents, plus more on the men and women from other sports and various fields of entertainment who also were ‘giants’ of the Polo Grounds: from boxers Jack Dempsey and Sugar Ray Robinson to entertainers Annie Oakley and Tallulah Bankhead to football’s Red Grange and soccer’s Béla Guttmann. The Giants of The Polo Grounds is the story of a famous team, a renowned ball park, an invincible spirit and America’s most vibrant city from the 1880’s to the 1950’s. The new edition is packed with remarkable anecdotes about Broadway, New York politics, good guys and bad guys who made the Giants' era in New York unique and memorable. The new edition, practically the equivalent of two volumes, also features more than 100 photos and illustrations, most of them new, some rarely seen. Critical Praise for The Giants of The Polo Grounds “A compelling and comprehensive history of an extraordinary ball club.” -New York Times “Grandly digressive! The owners, stars like Mathewson and Mays, various eccentric players are all here in this vivid history by Sports Illustrated contributor Hynd.” - Publishers’ Weekly “Fans of all ages will treasure the crazy quilt text for its stylish recall of the game’s summer roots.” -Kirkus Library Journal “Just plain enjoyable as baseball is supposed to be.” - The Pennsylvania Gazette Think of it as a grand slam into the center field bleachers in the bottom of the 9th!

    The major topics of the day: terrorism, globalization, immigration, consumerism, the collapse of moral values, and the rivalry of superpowers. The twentieth century was not born in the trenches of the Somme or Passchendaele—but rather in the fifteen vertiginous years preceding World War I.In this short span of time, a new world order was emerging in ultimately tragic contradiction to the old. These were the years in which the political and personal repercussions of the Industrial Revolution were felt worldwide: Cities grew like never before as people fled the countryside and their traditional identities; science created new possibilities as well as nightmares; education changed the outlook of millions of people; mass-produced items transformed daily life; industrial laborers demanded a share of political power; and women sought to change their place in society—as well as the very fabric of sexual relations.From the tremendous hope for a new century embodied in the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris to the shattering assassination of a Habsburg archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, historian Philipp Blom chronicles this extraordinary epoch year by year. Prime Ministers and peasants, anarchists and actresses, scientists and psychopaths intermingle on the stage of a new century in this portrait of an opulent, unstable age on the brink of disaster.Beautifully written and replete with deftly told anecdotes, The Vertigo Years brings the wonders, horrors, and fears of the early twentieth century vividly to life.

    A year later, they threatened to complete the city’s destruction by deporting its remaining residents. A sophisticated and cosmopolitan community a thousand years old was facing its final days—and then opportunity struck. As Soviet soldiers turned back the Nazi invasion of Russia and began pressing west, the underground Polish Home Army decided to act. Taking advantage of German disarray and seeking to forestall the absorption of their country into the Soviet empire, they chose to liberate the city of Warsaw for themselves.      Warsaw 1944 tells the story of this brave, and errant, calculation. For more than sixty days, the Polish fighters took over large parts of the city and held off the SS’s most brutal forces. But in the end, their efforts were doomed. Scorned by Stalin and unable to win significant support from the Western Allies, the Polish Home Army was left to face the full fury of Hitler, Himmler, and the SS. The crackdown that followed was among the most brutal episodes of history’s most brutal war, and the celebrated historian Alexandra Richie depicts this tragedy in riveting detail. Using a rich trove of primary sources, Richie relates the terrible experiences of individuals who fought in the uprising and perished in it. Her clear-eyed narrative reveals the fraught choices and complex legacy of some of World War II’s most unsung heroes.

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

    Netizel would later find another collection of transcriptions, twice as extensive, in the National Archive in Washington. These were discoveries that would provide a unique & profoundly important window into the true mentality of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the German navy & the military in general--almost all of whom had insisted on their own honorable behavior during the war. Collaborating with renowned social psychologist Harald Welzer, Neitzel examines these conversations--& the casual, pitiless brutality omnipresent in them--from a historical & psychological perspective. In reconstucting the frameworks & situations behind these conversations, they've created a powerful narrative of wartime experience.

    For millennia, China was the largest and richest nation on earth. Two centuries ago, however, its economy sank into a depression from which it had not fully recovered—until now. China's modern resurgence as the world's largest nation in terms of population and its second-largest economy—where 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty in the space of a few decades—is the greatest untold story of the 21st century.A Brief History of China tells of the development of a rich and complex civilization where the use of paper, writing, money and gunpowder were widespread in ancient times and where silk, ceramics, tea, metal implements and other products were produced and exported around the globe. It examines the special conditions that allowed a single culture to unify an entire continent spanning 10 billion square kilometers under the rule of a single man—and the unbelievably rich artistic, literary and architectural heritage that Chinese culture has bequeathed to the world. Equally fascinating is the story of China's decline in the 19th and early 20th century—as Europeans and Americans took center stage—and its modern resurgence as an economic powerhouse in recent years. In his retelling of a Chinese history stretching back 5,000 years, author and China-expert Jonathan Clements focuses on the human stories which led to the powerful transformations in Chinese society—from the unification of China under its first emperor, Qinshi Huangdi, and the writings of the great Chinese philosophers Confucius and Laozi, to the Mongol invasion under Genghis Khan and the consolidation of Communist rule under Mao Zedong. Clements even brings readers through to the present day, outlining China's economic renaissance under Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping. What really separates this book from its counterparts is the focus on women, and modern themes such as diversity and climate change. Chinese history is typically told through the stories of its most famous men, but Clements' telling gives women equal time and research—which introduces readers of this book to equally important, but less commonly-known facts and historical figures.Often seen in the West in black or white terms—as either a savage dystopia or a fantastical paradise—China is revealed in the book as an exceptional yet troubled nation that nevertheless warrants its self-description as the Middle Kingdom.

    It was an unexpected climax to the railway age.' A. J. P. Taylor was one of the most acclaimed historians of the twentieth century. His most provocative legacy was his insistence on the roles of accident and inadvertence in the outbreak of both world wars. First published in 1969, his book 'War by Timetable' still resonates and informs debates. 'War By Timetable' is a history of the mobilisation of the armies of the Great Powers in 1914. Taylor not only argues that the circumstances were already set for a general war, he also examines the flaws in the war plans of the Great Powers. All the plans depended on railways, which had been timed to the minute, months or even years in advance. As the train platforms grew longer (to accommodate prospective armies) the odds upon a great conflict grew shorter. The timetables and limited resources that were meant to serve as a deterrent to war instead relentlessly drove the powers into a conflict that engulfed the world. A.J.P. Taylor (1906-90) was one of the most controversial historians of the twentieth century. He served as a lecturer at the Universities of Manchester, Oxford, and London. Taylor was significant both for the controversy his work on Germany and the Second World War engendered and for his role in the development of history on television. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent publisher of digital books.

    The authors take us from Waterloo to Chirac’s slandering of British cooking, charting the cross-channel entanglement and its unparalleled breadth of cultural, economic and political influence. They illuminate the complexity of the relationship—rivalry, enmity, misapprehension and loathing mixed with envy, admiration and genuine affection—and the ways in which it has shaped the modern world, from North America to the Middle East to Southeast Asia, and is still shaping Europe today. They make clear that warfare between the two countries often went hand in hand with hardy, if hidden, strains of anglophilia and francophilia; conversely, though France and Britain were allies for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it has been an alliance almost as uneasy, as competitive and as ambivalent as the previous generations of warfare.Wonderfully written—acute, witty, consistently surprising—That Sweet Enemy is a triumph: an eye-opener for the experts, and a feast for the general reader.

    The esteemed historian Robert O. Paxton answers this question for the first time by focusing on the concrete: what the fascists did, rather than what they said. From the first violent uniformed bands beating up “enemies of the state,” through Mussolini’s rise to power, to Germany’s fascist radicalization in World War II, Paxton shows clearly why fascists came to power in some countries and not others, and explores whether fascism could exist outside the early-twentieth-century European setting in which it emerged. The Anatomy of Fascism will have a lasting impact on our understanding of modern European history, just as Paxton’s classic Vichy France redefined our vision of World War II. Based on a lifetime of research, this compelling and important book transforms our knowledge of fascism–“the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain.”

    The story of Russia’s transition from Imperial reign to eventual Communist dictatorship is a tale rooted in the ranks of the common people and the men who rose to lead them. Inside you will read about... ✓ Czarist Rule ✓ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ✓ Nicholas Romanov ✓ Rasputin ✓ World War ✓ Lenin ✓ October Revolution ✓ Stalin And much more! Dedication to the ideals of socialism remade Russian society. Worker’s Rights, human equality, world war, murder, mysticism, blood and tyranny collide in the heart of Russia to irrevocably alter the culture of this great nation and the world.

     Scattered across the landscape that was Nazi Germany, the Resistance looked puny: too little, too late. And yet it was made of many heroic men and women who were not afraid to risk their lives to stand up to a regime they knew was wrong. For those who have never known life under such a regime, it is hard to grasp the daily terror that makes an act of political graffiti a capital offense, that labels resistance “treason.” Now, drawing on archival materials and on interviews with those few resisters who survived, Anton Gill brings their story to light. Here are union leaders and businessmen, priests and communists, students and factory workers; above all, here are the only people who had any real chance at more than symbolic resistance: those in the Army, the Foreign Office, the Abwehr. For these, obeying the dictates of conscience meant betraying the demands of government, and every day brought the risk of denunciation and death. ‘A sober and useful analysis of the resistance to Hitler [that] reminds us of the astonishing moral courage human beings can display...The vast majority of Germans simply did not have the bravery to stand up to Hitler – but then who among us, confronted with the brutality of that regime, would have mustered the courage?’ – Robert Harris, author of Fatherland, in The Sunday Times ‘Mr. Gill fluidly conveys the attitudes and personalities of key figures in the resistance and the links among them.’ – The New York Times Book Review ‘Gill’s illuminating study cogently argues that Hitler was not an irresistible force and that he succeeded only because he was allowed to.’ – Publishers Weekly Anton Gill has been a freelance writer since 1984, specialising in European contemporary history but latterly branching out into historical fiction. He is the winner of the H H Wingate Award for non-fiction for his study of survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, ‘The Journey Back From Hell’. Endeavour Press is the UK’s leading independent publisher of digital books.

    Tuchman brings the era to vivid life: the decline of the Edwardian aristocracy; the Anarchists of Europe and America; Germany and its self-depicted hero, Richard Strauss; Diaghilev’s Russian ballet and Stravinsky’s music; the Dreyfus Affair; the Peace Conferences in The Hague; and the enthusiasm and tragedy of Socialism, epitomized by the assassination of Jean Jaurès on the night the Great War began and an epoch came to a close.

    "A rich and readable introduction to the whole sweep of Russian cultural and intellectual history from Kievan times to the post-Khruschev era." --Library Journal.Complete with Illustrations, references and 32 pages of index, this is an exhaustive history of Russia and its peoples.

    Britain, according to Ferguson, entered into war based on naïve assumptions of German aims—and England's entry into the war transformed a Continental conflict into a world war, which they then badly mishandled, necessitating American involvement. The war was not inevitable, Ferguson argues, but rather the result of the mistaken decisions of individuals who would later claim to have been in the grip of huge impersonal forces. That the war was wicked, horrific, inhuman,is memorialized in part by the poetry of men like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, but also by cold statistics. More British soldiers were killed in the first day of the Battle of the Somme than Americans in the Vietnam War; indeed, the total British fatalities in that single battle—some 420,000—exceeds the entire American fatalities for both World Wars. And yet, as Ferguson writes, while the war itself was a disastrous folly, the great majority of men who fought it did so with enthusiasm. Ferguson vividly brings back to life this terrifying period, not through dry citation of chronological chapter and verse but through a series of brilliant chapters focusing on key ways in which we now view the First World War.For anyone wanting to understand why wars are fought, why men are willing to fight them, and why the world is as it is today, there is no sharper nor more stimulating guide than Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War.

    Convinced that right was on their side and fearful of the enemies that encircled them, they threw themselves resolutely into battle. Yet, despite the initial halting of a brutal Russian invasion, the Central Powers' war plans soon unravelled. Germany's attack on France failed. Austria-Hungary's armies suffered catastrophic losses at Russian and Serbian hands. Hopes of a quick victory lay in ruins.For the Central Powers the war now became a siege on a monstrous scale. Britain's ruthless intervention cut sea routes to central Europe and mobilised the world against them. Germany and Austria-Hungary were to be strangled of war supplies and food, their soldiers overwhelmed by better armed enemies, and their civilians brought to the brink of starvation. Conquest and plunder, land offensives, and submarine warfare all proved powerless to counter or break the blockade. The Central Powers were trapped in the Allies' ever-tightening ring of steel. Alexander Watson's compelling new history retells the war from the perspectives of its instigators and losers, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. This is the story not just of their leaders in Berlin and Vienna, but above all of the people. Only through their unprecedented mobilisation could the conflict last so long and be so bitterly fought, and only with the waning of their commitment did it end. The war shattered their societies, destroyed their states and bequeathed to east-central Europe a poisonous legacy of unredeemed sacrifice, suffering, race hatred and violence. A major re-evaluation of the First World War, Ring of Steel is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the last century of European history.