Vividly written and well researched by a noted historian of the period, this succinct history credits the Union Navy as an essential element in the northern victory. Neither ponderous nor hagiographic, the work presents characters and events that have been previously neglected and offers candid assessments of officers, men, and material. Originally published in 1990, when it was a Military History Book Club selection, the work is considered a must for Civil War buffs. It is an authoritative and gripping story of the battles waged. The author provides a rare look at the war fought by primitive northern gunboats drifting through Louisiana's muddy bayous, Yankee merchantmen captured by rebel privateers at sea, and Union ironclads subduing hotly defended Southern forts. Nor does William Fowler neglect the subtler sparrings behind the scenes: War Secretary Stanton and Navy Secretary Welles competing for Lincoln's favor and Welles's fierce duel of strategies with his Confederate counterpart, Stephen Mallory. Finally, the author describes the astonishing transformation of the Navy itself from a ragtag fleet of aging steamers and paddleboats to one of the most powerful waterborne forces in the world.

A biography of one of the greatest churchillians, a crucial lynch-pin between Britain and France

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1913 Edition.

In this sparkling new work, Benedict Anderson provides a radical recasting of themes from Imagined Communities, his classic book on nationalism, through an exploration of fin-de-siecle politics and culture that spans the Caribbean, Imperial Europe and the South China Sea. A jewelled pomegranate packed with nitroglycerine is primed to blow away Manila's 19th-century colonial elite at the climax of El Filibusterismo, whose author, the great political novelist Jose Rizal, was executed in 1896 by the Spanish authorities in the Philippines at the age of 35. Anderson explores the impact of avant-garde European literature and politics on Rizal and his contemporary, the pioneering folklorist Isabelo de los Reyes, who was imprisoned in Manila after the violent uprisings of 1896 and later incarcerated, together with Catalan anarchists, in the prison fortress of Montjuich in Barcelona. On his return to the Philippines, by now under American occupation, Isabelo formed the first militant trade unions under the influence of Malatesta and Bakunin. Anderson considers the complex intellectual interactions of these young Filipinos with the new "science" of anthropology in Germany and Austro-Hungary, and with post-Communard experimentalists in Paris, against a background of militant anarchism in Spain, France, Italy and the Americas, Jose Marti's armed uprising in Cuba and anti-imperialist protests in China and Japan. In doing so, he depicts the dense intertwining of anarchist internationalism and radical anti-colonialism. Under Three Flags is a brilliantly original work on the explosive history of national independence and global politics.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This is the true story behind the immortal photograph that has come to symbolize the courage and indomitable will of America In this unforgettable chronicle of perhaps the most famous moment in American military history, James Bradley has captured the glory, the triumph, the heartbreak, and the legacy of the six men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima. Here is the true story behind the immortal photograph that has come to symbolize the courage and indomitable will of America. In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima—and into history. Through a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire that left the beaches strewn with comrades, they battled to the island's highest peak. And after climbing through a landscape of hell itself, they raised a flag. Now the son of one of the flagraisers has written a powerful account of six very different young men who came together in a moment that will live forever. To his family, John Bradley never spoke of the photograph or the war. But after his death at age seventy, his family discovered closed boxes of letters and photos. In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley draws on those documents to retrace the lives of his father and the men of Easy Company. Following these men's paths to Iwo Jima, James Bradley has written a classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific's most crucial island—an island riddled with Japanese tunnels and 22,000 fanatic defenders who would fight to the last man. But perhaps the most interesting part of the story is what happened after the victory. The men in the photo—three were killed during the battle—were proclaimed heroes and flown home, to become reluctant symbols. For two of them, the adulation was shattering. Only James Bradley's father truly survived, displaying no copy of the famous photograph in his home, telling his son only: “The real heroes of Iwo Jima were the guys who didn't come back. ” Few books ever have captured the complexity and furor of war and its aftermath as well as Flags of Our Fathers. A penetrating, epic look at a generation at war, this is history told with keen insight, enormous honesty, and the passion of a son paying homage to his father. It is the story of the difference between truth and myth, the meaning of being a hero, and the essence of the human experience of war.