February 2017

The American Heritage History of World War II was first published in 1966. At the time, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist C.L.
Sulzberger received widespread praise for his authoritative account of the six-year war that involved more than fifty-six nations, resulted
in the death of some 22 million people, and shaped the course of history. His work became a standard reference on the war.
Stephen E. Ambrose, one of the most highly regarded historians of our time, oversaw a major revision of this classic work. Seamlessly
incorporating new material and insights, Ambrose produced a comprehensive and riveting account of the war’s key characters and events.
In planes and foxholes, in deserts and jungles, on ships and beaches, Ambrose shines a light on the people involved - the leaders, the
fighters, the victims. He also added new chapters on the atrocities of the Holocaust and revelations about the secret war of espionage.
Ambrose’s analysis also offers insight into the events that precipitated the Cold War.

“In the Bosnian town of Sarajevo on the morning of June 28, 1914, a chauffeur misunderstood his instructions, made the wrong turn, tried
too late to correct his blunder, and in so doing, delivered his passengers to a point where a waiting assassin did not have to take aim to
gun them down. Two rounds from one pistol and the world rocked. The crime was the small stone that loosened brings the avalanche.”
So begins Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall’s compelling narrative of the American Heritage History of World War I, a book that tells the
story of the Great War from Sarajevo to Versailles. Ten million men died; another 20 million were wounded. But it was not the numbers
alone that made this the Great War. The flame thrower, the tank, and poison gas were introduced. Cavalry became obsolete; air combat
and submarine warfare came of age. Old dynasties disintegrated; new nations appeared.
In this book, renowned military historian Marshall, a World War I veteran, describes and analyzes the origins, course, and immediate

“In the Bosnian town of Sarajevo on the morning of June 28, 1914, a chauffeur misunderstood his instructions, made the wrong turn, tried
too late to correct his blunder, and in so doing, delivered his passengers to a point where a waiting assassin did not have to take aim to
gun them down. Two rounds from one pistol and the world rocked. The crime was the small stone that loosened brings the avalanche.”
So begins Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall’s compelling narrative of the American Heritage History of World War I, a book that tells the
story of the Great War from Sarajevo to Versailles. Ten million men died; another 20 million were wounded. But it was not the numbers
alone that made this the Great War. The flame thrower, the tank, and poison gas were introduced. Cavalry became obsolete; air combat
and submarine warfare came of age. Old dynasties disintegrated; new nations appeared.
In this book, renowned military historian Marshall, a World War I veteran, describes and analyzes the origins, course, and immediate

Drawing on a lifetime of military experience, Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall, one of our most distinguished military writers (New York
Times), delivers this unflinching history of the war that was supposed to end all wars. From the perspective of more than half a century,
Marshall examines the blunders and complacency that turned what everyone thought would be a brief campaign and an easy victory into
a relentless four-year slaughter that left ten million dead and twenty million wounded. As the war raged on, more efficient methods of
war-making were devised: the flamethrower and poison gas were added to the world's arsenals, tanks replaced cavalry, air combat and
submarine warfare came into their own. And at the end, the exhausted combatants signed the Treaty of Versailles, which laid the
groundwork for the dictatorships that would plunge the next generation into another world war.

One-third of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were not of English stock. Eight were first-generation immigrants. It
was in recognition of the mixed European background of so many Americans that John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson
proposed that the seal of the United States bear the national emblems of France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Scotland, and England, thus
"pointing out the countries from which these States have been peopled."
Many came, as Thomas Paine stated, in search of asylum. But they also came with an intent to preserve and refresh aspects of life in their
homelands.
In 1776, Europe boasted a rich civilization, alive with dynamic ideas, flourishing arts, and promising concepts in science. The foundations
of industry and business were established, and social reforms were being undertaken, which Europeans took with them as they colonized
and traded. They had come in contact with Eastern civilizations, above all, China. Here, from award-winning historian Marshall B.
Davidson, is the story of the world of 1776.

In the twelfth year of Emperor Tiberius's reign, a new Roman procurator was sent to the eastern Mediterranean to govern the subject land
of Judaea. Some ten years later, he was removed from office for a misdeed and exiled to Gaul, where he may have committed suicide. The
man, Pontius Pilate, could never have imagined that his name would be forever fixed in history through a minor event of those years in
Palestine - his sentencing to death of an accused rebel, a Jew named Jesus.
Palestine was the scene of great political, social, and religious upheaval in the two centuries surrounding the life of Jesus. The Romans
under Pompey arrived as conquerors in 63 BCE. Not until CE 135, two centuries later, was Roman mastery of the troublesome Jewish
homeland made complete. The Jews, inheritors and guardians of an ancient belief in a single, all-powerful God, were dispersed to many
lands.
The followers of Jesus, originally a minor sect within Judaism, eventually forged a powerful religion out of the belief that he was the

No other enterprise in America's history ever approached whaling for adventure. Here, award-winning historian Edouard A. Stackpole describes the early Colonial days, when boat crews attacked whales near shore, through the development of deep-sea whaling by the hardy Quaker whalemen of Nantucket, and on into the adventure-packed century when Yankee whalemen made the world their domain.

At the height of their power in the ninth and tenth centuries, the Vikings seemed invincible – conquering, well-armed warriors whose ships
were the ultimate in seafaring technology. From island bases near the deltas of major rivers, they used the waterways to scour the
countryside, looting and burning towns, plundering merchant shipments, and stripping churches and monasteries of their gold, silver, and
jeweled treasures.
The Norsemen eventually penetrated all of England and Scotland, founded cities in Ireland, gained a powerful province in France,
controlled Frisia and the modern Netherlands, and raided lands around Spain, passing into the Mediterranean to attack Italy and North
Africa. They established the first Russian kingdom, challenged Constantinople, and provided a personal guard for the Byzantine emperor.
They settled Iceland, where they developed Europe's first republic, founded two colonies on Greenland, and explored parts of North
America five centuries before Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas. Then, like the abrupt end of a summer thunderstorm, their
adventures ceased.

Here, the eminent historian Christopher Hibbert explores life in Victorian England, a time when the British Empire was at its height, when
the prosperous English basked in the Pax Britannica and thought their progress and stability would go on forever.