These were the soldiers that defied the might of Persia at Marathon, Thermopylae and Plataea and, more often, fought each other in the countless battles of the Greek city-states. For around two centuries they were the dominant soldiers of the Classical world, in great demand as mercenaries throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East. Yet, despite the battle descriptions of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon etc, and copious evidence of Greek art and archaeology, there are still many aspects of hoplite warfare that are little understood or the subject of fierce academic debate.Christopher Matthew's groundbreaking reassessment combines rigorous analysis of the literary and archaeological evidence with the new disciplines of reconstructive archaeology, re-enactment and ballistic science. He focuses meticulously on the details of the equipment, tactics and capabilities of the individual hoplites. In so doing he challenges some long-established assumptions. For example, despite a couple of centuries of study of the hoplites portrayed in Greek vase paintings, Matthew manages to glean from them some startlingly fresh insights into how hoplites wielded their spears. These findings are supported by practical testing with his own replica hoplite panoply and the experiences of a group of dedicated re-enactors. He also tackles such questions as the protective properties of hoplite shields and armour and the much-vexed debate on the exact nature of the 'othismos' , the climax of phalanx-on-phalanx clashes.This is an innovative and refreshing reassessment of one of the most important kinds of troops in ancient warfare, sure to make a genuine contribution to the state of knowledge.

    Download issues at no extra cost from Archived Items. The Economist is the premier source for the analysis of world business and current affairs, providing authoritative insight and opinion on international news, world politics, business, finance, science and technology, as well as overviews of cultural trends and regular Special reports on industries and countries. Established in 1843 to campaign against the protectionist corn laws, The Economist remains, in the second half of its second century, true to the liberal principles of its founder. James Wilson, a hat maker from the small Scottish town of Hawick, believed in free trade, internationalism and minimum interference by government, especially in the affairs of the market. The Economist also takes a fiercely independent stance on social issues, from gay marriage to the legalisation of drugs, but its main service to its readers is as a global newspaper: To uncover new ideas from all around the world. The Kindle Edition of The Economist contains all of the articles and graphics found in the print edition, but will not include all photos. For your convenience, issues are auto-delivered wirelessly to your Kindle each Friday at the same time the print edition hits the newsstand.

    Author and historian Albert Buchanan recreates the engagements of the Pacific and Atlantic combat theaters with near clinical detail, from the Pearl Harbor Attack to the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri. Interwoven within these aerial combat narratives is background information on technological innovations, production methods, training programs, and the important players involved. This new edition of The Navy's Air War: A Mission Completed includes annotations and photographs from World War 2. *Annotations. *Images.

    Armed with spears or pikes, standing shoulder-to-shoulder and with overlapping shields, they presented an impenetrable wall of metal to the enemy until the Roman legion eclipsed the phalanx as the masters of infantry battle.Covering the period in which the legion and phalanx clashed (280-168 BC), this book looks at each formation in detail - delving into their tactics, arms and equipment, organization and deployment. It then examines six documented battles in which the legion fought the phalanx: Heraclea (280 BC), Asculum (279 BC), Beneventum (275 BC), Cynoscephalae (197 BC), Magnesia (190 BC), and Pydna (168 BC).

    But it is Stella’s voice, the amazing way that she tells her story, that makes this Holocaust story so unique, powerful and endearing. The reader listens to Stella’s stunning simplicity of expression, her use of Polish and Yiddish phrases, her humor, her all-so-frequent grammatical errors – and is charmed. It is a story that only Stella Yollin can tell, and it can only be told in Stella’s sweet and incomparable way.

    The chafing restrictions of a typical upbringing in upper-class, small town Alabama simply did not apply to Zelda, who was described as an unusual child and permitted to roam the streets with little supervision. Zelda refused to blossom into a typical 'Southern belle' on anyone's terms but her own and while still in high school enjoyed the status of a local celebrity for her shocking behavior. Everybody in town knew the name Zelda Sayre. Queen of the Montgomery social scene, Zelda had a different beau ready and willing to show her a good time for every day of the week. Before meeting F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda's life was a constant pursuit of pleasure. With little thought for the future and no responsibilities to speak of, Zelda committed herself fully to the mantra that accompanied her photo in her high school graduation book: "Why should all life be work, when we all can borrow. Let's think only of today, and not worry about tomorrow." But for now Zelda was still in rehearsal for her real life to begin, a life she was sure would be absolutely extraordinary. Zelda Sayre married F. Scott Fitzgerald on the 3rd of April 1920 and left sleepy Montgomery behind in order to dive headfirst into the shimmering, glamourous life of a New York socialite. With the publication of Scott's first novel, This Side of Paradise, Zelda found herself thrust into the limelight as the very epitome of the Flapper lifestyle. Concerned chiefly with fashion, wild parties and flouting social expectations, Zelda and Scott became icons of the Jazz Age, the personification of beauty and success. What Zelda and Scott shared was a romantic sense of self-importance that assured them that their life of carefree leisure and excess was the only life really worth living. Deeply in love, the Fitzgeralds were like to sides of the same coin, each reflecting the very best and worst of each other. While the world fell in love with the image of the Fitzgeralds they saw on the cover of magazines, behind the scenes the Fitzgerald's marriage could not withstand the tension of their creative arrangement. Zelda was Scott's muse and he mercilessly mined the events of their life for material for his books. Scott claimed Zelda's memories, things she said, experiences she had and even passages from her diary as his possessions and used them to form the basis of his fictional works. Zelda had a child but the domestic sphere offered no comfort or purpose for her. The Flapper lifestyle was not simply a phase she lived through, it formed the very basis of her character and once the parties grew dull, the Fitzgeralds' drinking became destructive and Zelda's beauty began to fade, the world held little allure for her. Zelda sought reprieve in work and tried to build a career as a ballet dancer. When that didn't work out she turned to writing but was forbidden by Scott from using her own life as material. Convinced that she would never leave her mark on the world as deeply or expressively as Scott had, Zelda retreated into herself and withdrew from the people she knew in happier times. The later years of Zelda's life were marred by her detachment from reality as, diagnosed with schizophrenia, Zelda spent the last eighteen years of her life living in and out of psychiatric hospitals. As Scott's life unraveled due to alcohol abuse, Zelda looked back on the years they had spent together, young and wild and beautiful, as the best of her life. She may have been right but she was wrong about one thing, Zelda did leave her mark on the world and it was a deep and expressive mark that no one could have left but her. Zelda Fitzgerald: The Biography

    After several failed attempts he got out over the wire and journeyed for weeks as a fugitive from northern France to Marseilles, then across the Pyrenees to Spain and Gibraltar and freedom. He was guided along the way by French civilians, resistance fighters and the organizers of the famous Pat escape line. His straightforward, honest and vivid memoir of his work as a surgeon at Dunkirk, life in the prison camps and his escape attempts gives a fascinating insight into his wartime experience. It records the ingenuity and courage of the individuals, the ordinary men and women, who risked their lives to help him on his way. It is also one of the best accounts we have of what it was like to be on the run in occupied Europe.

    B-36 crews trained for the one flight when they would be ordered to drop combat nuclear bombs on the USSR. Flights of fifteen hours over continental United States to grueling thirty-hour nonstop flights overseas were routine, all without the benefit of in-flight refueling—not yet invented. The experiences of this crew, as they flew their assigned missions, are part of the history of our nation’s defense. They were part of our Cold War Shield.

    Included in this selection are the biographies of Themistocles, a brilliant but heavy-handed naval commander, Aristides 'the Just' and Pericles, who was responsible for the buildings on the Acropolis. Plutarch's real interest in these men is not in the greatness of their victories or achievements but in their moral strengths, and for him responsibility for the eventual fall of Athens lay with the weakness and ambition of its great men.Varying in historical accuracy, these accounts are nevertheless rich in anecdote, and Plutarch's skill as a social historian and his fascination with personal idiosyncracies make them of timeless interest.

    But what if these beings were more than merely fictions? What if monstrous creatures once roamed the earth in the very places where their legends first arose? This is the arresting and original thesis that Adrienne Mayor explores in The First Fossil Hunters. Through careful research and meticulous documentation, she convincingly shows that many of the giants and monsters of myth did have a basis in fact--in the enormous bones of long-extinct species that were once abundant in the lands of the Greeks and Romans.As Mayor shows, the Greeks and Romans were well aware that a different breed of creatures once inhabited their lands. They frequently encountered the fossilized bones of these primeval beings, and they developed sophisticated concepts to explain the fossil evidence, concepts that were expressed in mythological stories. The legend of the gold-guarding griffin, for example, sprang from tales first told by Scythian gold-miners, who, passing through the Gobi Desert at the foot of the Altai Mountains, encountered the skeletons of Protoceratops and other dinosaurs that littered the ground.Like their modern counterparts, the ancient fossil hunters collected and measured impressive petrified remains and displayed them in temples and museums; they attempted to reconstruct the appearance of these prehistoric creatures and to explain their extinction. Long thought to be fantasy, the remarkably detailed and perceptive Greek and Roman accounts of giant bone finds were actually based on solid paleontological facts. By reading these neglected narratives for the first time in the light of modern scientific discoveries, Adrienne Mayor illuminates a lost world of ancient paleontology. As Peter Dodson writes in his Foreword, "Paleontologists, classicists, and historians as well as natural history buffs will read this book with the greatest of delight--surprises abound."

     Deneys Reitz was an unusual soldier. Having fought against the British in the Boer War, in 1917 he decided to go to London, in order to join the British Army. Presenting himself at a recruiting office in Chelsea, he enlisted as a private soldier. Shortly afterwards he was commissioned, and was sent to the Western Front in September 1917. Whilst on the Western Front, he witnessed the German spring offensive in 1918, and the allied counter-attack which followed. He was wounded twice as well as being gassed. Reitz experienced more than his fair share of the difficulties of trench warfare, from finding himself living in a trench whose sides were built out of sandbag-covered corpses, to being stretchered into a Casualty Clearing Station with serious wounds.

    Their consuming passions for food, wine and sex drove their society, as well as generating the rich web of privilege, transgression, guilt and taboo for which they are remembered today. Using pamphlets, comic satires, forensic speeches - from authors as illustrious as Plato and as ignored as Philaenis - as source material - this study combines a traditional classicist's rigour with an appreciation of the new analytical techniques pioneered in gender and cultural studies to provide an alternative view of ancient Athenian culture and to bring its reality into a focus easier on the modern eye.

    Martin brings alive Greek civilization from its Stone Age roots to the fourth century B.C. Focusing on the development of the Greek city-state and the society, culture, and architecture of Athens in its Golden Age, Martin integrates political, military, social, and cultural history in a book that will appeal to students and general readers alike. This edition has been updated with new suggested readings and illustrations. "[A] highly accessible, and comprehensive history of Greece and its civilization from prehistory through the collapse of Alexander the Great's empire. ...A highly readable account of ancient Greece, particularly useful as an introductory or review text for the student of the general reader." --Kirkus Reviews "Photographs and maps enhance this solid first lesson about the ancients." --Booklist

    Its success should have been a formality. For seventy years, victory—rapid, spectacular victory—had seemed the birthright of the Persian Empire. In the space of a single generation, they had swept across the Near East, shattering ancient kingdoms, storming famous cities, putting together an empire which stretched from India to the shores of the Aegean. As a result of those conquests, Xerxes ruled as the most powerful man on the planet. Yet somehow, astonishingly, against the largest expeditionary force ever assembled, the Greeks of the mainland managed to hold out. The Persians were turned back. Greece remained free. Had the Greeks been defeated in the epochal naval battle at Salamis, not only would the West have lost its first struggle for independence and survival, but it is unlikely that there would ever have been such an entity as the West at all.Tom Holland’s brilliant new book describes the very first “clash of Empires” between East and West. As he did in the critically praised Rubicon, he has found extraordinary parallels between the ancient world and our own. There is no other popular history that takes in the entire sweep of the Persian Wars, and no other classical historian, academic or popular, who combines scholarly rigor with novelistic depth with a worldly irony in quite the fashion that Tom Holland does.

    A small people inhabiting a country poor in resources and divided into hundreds of quarreling states created one of the most remarkable civilizations. Comprehensive and balanced, A Brief History of Ancient Greece: Politics, Society, and Culture is a new and shorter version of the authors' highly successful Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History (OUP, 1998). Four leading authorities on the classical world offer a lively and up-to-date account of Greek civilization and history in all its complexity and variety, covering the entire period from the Bronze Age through the Hellenistic Era, and integrating the most recent research in archaeology, comparative anthropology, and social history. They show how the early Greeks borrowed from their neighbors but eventually developed a distinctive culture all their own, one that was marked by astonishing creativity, versatility, and resilience. The authors go on to trace the complex and surprising evolution of Greek civilization to its eventual dissolution as it merged with a variety of other cultures. Using physical evidence from archaeology, the written testimony of literary texts and inscriptions, and anthropological models based on comparative studies, this compact volume provides an account of the Greek world that is thoughtful and sophisticated yet accessible to students and general readers with little or no knowledge of Greece.Ideal for courses in Greek Civilization and Ancient Greece, A Brief History of Ancient Greece offers:- A more streamlined treatment of political and military history than Ancient Greece- Emphasis on social and domestic life, art and architecture, literature, and philosophy- Expanded coverage of women and family life, religion, and athletics- A new section on male homosexuality in ancient Greece- A revised art program featuring more than 100 illustrations and 17 original maps- Numerous document boxes that include primary source material