Takes a snapshot view of history from 2700 B.C. to 2000 A.D. and offers a collection of eyewitness accounts of the most memorable historical and social events taken from memoirs, diaries, letters and journals. Original.

Shares dramatic eyewitness accounts from more than 2,500 years of naval history, from the Battle of Salamis as recorded by Thucydides in 378 B.C., to the endeavors of Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson, to the carrier operations of the 1991 Gulf War. Original.

The Great War haunts the world still. It slaughtered a generation of young men; claimed limbs, wounded souls; drenched battlefields in blood; made sad legends of the Western Front, Gallipoli, and Jutland, and made heroes of poets; farmers, and factory workers. Clerks it made into Tommies, doughboys, or the Hun. And in this new Mammoth volume the voices of such eyewitnesses to history as these are heard again. So are the words of generals, statesmen, and kings. From the trenches in Flanders to the staff rooms of the Imperial German Army, with the Land Girls in England and U-boat crews in the Atlantic, alongside T. E. Lawrence in Arabia's desert and the Red Baron in the air—with a variety of extracts from letters, speeches, memoirs, diaries, and dispatches, this gripping collection covers each year and every facet of World War I. Among its wide range of witnesses are King George V, Robert Graves, Leon Trotsky, Erwin Rommel, Ernst Junger, Ernest Hemingway, American aviator Eddie Rickenbacker; and Winston S. Churchill. The pieces in this volume compose a stirring human drama of the conflict that redrew the map of the modern world and determined the political course of the twentieth century.

The spectre of the Great War still haunts us. No other conflict so dramatically illustrates the waste of life, and the slaughter of innocents, as that of 1914-18. And none has so dramatically shaped the modern world: the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, the break-up of Empire, the supremacy of America and World War II all stem from the four years of the 'war to end all wars'. Here is the eye-witness chronicle of that war, from the trenches of Flanders to the staff rooms of the Imperial Germany Army, from T. E. Lawrence in the desert to the 'Red Baron' in the air, from Land Girls in England to German U-boat crews in the Atlantic, it leaves nothing out. And if all the horror of the war fought by the Tommies in the trenches is captured, so too are the machinations of the 'top brass' and politicians.

By 1969, following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, over 500,000 US troops were ‘in country’ in Vietnam. Before America’s longest war had ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975, 450,000 Vietnamese had died, along with 36,000 Americans. The Vietnam War was the first rock ’n’ roll war, the first helicopter war with its doctrine of ‘airmobility’, and the first television war; it made napalm and the defoliant Agent Orange infamous, and gave us the New Journalism of Michael Herr and others. It also saw the establishment of the Navy SEALs and Delta Force. At home, America fractured, with the peace movement protesting against the war; at Kent State University, Ohio National Guardsmen fired on unarmed students, killing four and injuring nine. Lewis’s compelling selection of the best writing to come out of a war covered by some truly outstanding writers, both journalists and combatants, includes an eyewitness account of the first major battle between the US Army and the People’s Army of Vietnam at Ia Drang; a selection of letters home; Nicholas Tomalin’s famous ‘The General Goes Zapping Charlie Cong’; Robert Mason’s ‘R&R’, Studs Terkel’s account of the police breaking up an anti-war protest; John Kifner on the shootings at Kent State; Ron Kovic’s ‘Born on the Fourth of July’; John T. Wheeler’s ‘Khe Sanh: Live in the V Ring’; Pulitzer Prize-winner Seymour Hersh on the massacre at My Lai; Michael Herr’s ‘It Made You Feel Omni’; Viet Cong Truong Nhu Tang’s memoir; naval nurse Maureen Walsh’s memoir, ‘Burning Flesh’; John Pilger on the fall of Saigon; and Tim O’Brien’s ‘If I Die in a Combat Zone’.