Weaving national narratives from stories of the daily lives and familiar places of local residents, Francoise Hamlin chronicles the slow struggle for black freedom through the history of Clarksdale, Mississippi. Hamlin paints a full picture of the town ov

From a leading expert comes the gripping tale of the largest single atrocity committed against American POWs on the Western Front in World War II.

Abstract: There is a vacancy in history, a vacancy that contains a crucial understanding and hinders us from comprehending history as a whole. The emptiness that we feel does not come from dissipated events or hollow periods. It comes from a lack of perspective, or an absence of empathetic dispositions. To elucidate this disconcerting question, I developed a project called Crossroads, which is an interactive narrative piece that can be used as a tool to let people view World War II history from numerous lives. This is a collective project that follows different characters that lived during World War II. Just by observing the content, the viewer can see how the war impacted their lives. Some characters in my project may have crossed paths with each other during the World War II period, but may have dramatically different impression afterwards.

Most international historians present the outbreak of World War II as the result of an irreconcilable conflict between Great Britain and Germany. This ubiquitous Anglo-German perspective fails to recognize complex causes and repercussions of international events, misappropriates historical responsibilities, and overlooks many global and imperial factors of the war's origins. Reynolds M. Salerno shows that the situation in the Mediterranean played a decisive role in the European drama of the late 1930s and profoundly influenced the manner in which the Second World War unfolded. Vital Crossroads is the result of the author's remarkable access to and extensive research in twenty-eight archives in five different countries. Concentrating on the period from the Mediterranean crisis of 1935 to Italy's declaration of war in June 1940, Salerno demonstrates that the international politics of pre-World War II Europe--particularly in the Mediterranean--can only be understood as the multilateral interaction of British, French, German, and Italian foreign and defense policies. Control of the Mediterranean, he asserts, was a central concern for the European powers in 1935-40, and a fundamental reason why Europe went to war and why the conflict unfolded as it did. As a result, France and Italy influenced and often determined the nature and direction of Allied and Axis policy to an extent disproportionate to their nations' military and economic strength.Salerno contends that the Allies' reluctance to take decisive action against Fascist Italy in 1939-40 contributed to the fall of France in 1940, Britain's desperate situation in 1940-41, and the post-war collapse of Britain as a world power. At a time when the Allied powers dreaded the ability of the German military to march across the European continent, they also feared that the Italian armed forces would strive to fulfill Mussolini's grand imperial ambitions in the Mediterranean.

"Seymour Topping, reaching deep into his long reportorial career in Asia, has given us a masterful treatment of history as novel in this gripping story of the leaders and their people who lived the Vietnam tragedy." Walter Cronkite

“Christopher Sykes has written the authoritative work on the Palestine Mandate... His account is almost unbearably fair to all concerned, even to Britain... a very excellent book. Mr. Sykes steers his way through the reigns of successive High Commissioners and through the maze of White Papers and Royal Commissions with amazing virtuosity. We see the whole picture of the Mandate in a way which was impossible to those at the time.” — International Affairs “Mr. Sykes (son of Mark Sykes, co-author of the Sykes-Picot Agreement) has written an illuminating, highly-informed and balanced study of the development of the Zionist movement into the State of Israel. By virtue of his acquaintance with many of the leading persons involved, Mr. Sykes has had access to a considerable amount of unpublished material upon which he has drawn heavily to clarify much that was previously obscure about events in the unhappy Holy Land. He also writes with an easy, lucid style so that apart from the book’s intrinsic merit it is immensely readable.” — International Journal “One of the many merits of Mr Sykes’s wholly meritorious book is that he is not anchored in time or prejudice.” — Middle Eastern Studies