Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios for Bloomsbury" in Americas

Executive Order 9981, issued by President Harry Truman on July 26, 1948, desegregated all branches of the United States military by decree. EO 9981 is often portrayed as a heroic and unexpected move by Truman. But in reality, Truman's history-making order was the culmination of more than 150 years of legal, political, and moral struggle.

On the fortieth anniversary of revolution and rebellion in Chile, a searching history of the rise and fall of the world’s first and only democratically elected Marxist president. On September 11, 1973, President Salvador Allende of Chile was deposed in a violent coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. The coup had been in the works for months, even years. Shortly after giving a farewell speech to his people, Allende died of gunshot wounds - whether inflicted by his own hand or an assassin’s remains uncertain.

From celebrated historian of knowledge Jonathan Lyons comes The Society for Useful Knowledge, telling the story of America's coming-of-age through its historic love affair with practical invention, applied science, and self-reliance. Lyons illustrates how a social movement in support of useful knowledge is key to understanding the flow of American history and the development of our society and culture from colonial times to our digital present.

From the American Revolution to the end of World War II, the United States spent 19 years at war against other nations. But since1950, the total is 22 years and counting. On four occasions, U.S. presidents elected as "peace candidates" have gone on to lead the nation into ferocious armed conflicts. Repeatedly, wars deemed necessary when they began have been seen in retrospect as avoidable, and ill-advised. Americans profess to be a peace-loving people and one wary of "foreign entanglements". Yet we have been drawn into wars in distant lands from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

What if Latin America Ruled the World? deftly braids together the histories of North and South America from the exploits of Hernán Cortés to the political showmanship of Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales. Scholar Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is an ideal guide for a searching portrait of the Latin America that we rarely hear about.

Covering the development of the atomic bomb during the Second World War, the origins and early course of the Cold War and the advent of the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s, Churchill and the Bomb in War and Cold War explores a still neglected aspect of Winston Churchill's career: his relationship with and thinking on nuclear weapons.

Cogently, thoughtfully, powerfully, Pfaff lays out the historical roots behind the American exceptionalism that animates our politics and foreign relations - and makes clear why it is flawed and must ultimately fail. Those roots lie in the secularization of western society brought about by the Enlightenment, and in America's effective separation from the common history of the west during the 19th and early parts of the 20th century, during which it failed to gain "the indispensable experience Europeans have acquired of modern ideological folly and national tragedy."

Yankee Come Home explores one family's history in Cuba, and through it, the intense, complex, smoldering relationship between the island nation and its leviathan neighbor. In Cuba's most entrancing, storied landscape, William Craig is searching for a history that his family has lost - and now needs to recover. He's looking for the truth about his mysterious great-grandfather, Thomas O'Brien, a self-proclaimed hero of the "splendid little war" who left a legacy of glorious, painful lies.

In October of 1910, only four years before the outbreak of World War I, nobody knew whether planes, dirigibles, or balloons would prevail. Within a period of 17 days, this question was on prime display, as the dirigible America tried to cross the Atlantic; huge crowds gathered at horse-racing tracks to watch airplanes race around overhead; and ballooning teams from around the world took off from St. Louis in pursuit of the Bennett International Balloon Cup, given to the balloon that traveled the farthest.

"We do not take a trip; a trip takes us," John Steinbeck noted in his 1962 classic, Travels with Charley. In the summer of 2008, Bill Barich stumbled upon a used copy of Travels in Ireland, where he has lived for the past eight years, and it inspired him to explore the mood of the United States as Steinbeck had done almost a half century before. With a hotly contested election looming, and in the shadow of an economic meltdown, Barich set off on a 5,943-mile cross-country drive from New York to his old hometown in San Francisco via Route 50....

Central Park is perhaps the most well-trod and familiar green space in the country. It is both a refuge from the city and Manhattan's very heart; a respite from the urban grind and a hive of activity all its own. Eight hundred forty-three carefully planned acres allow some 37 million visitors each year to come and get lost in a sense of nature. Unsurprisingly, the park also inspires a wealth of great writing, and here Andrew Blauner collects some of the finest fiction and nonfiction - 20 pieces in all.

A fresh and fascinating reappraisal of the first half of the 20th century from one of our foremost historians. 'War, comrades,' declared Trotsky, 'is a great locomotive of history.' He was thought to be acknowledging the opportunity the First World War had offered the Bolsheviks to seize power in Russia in 1917. Peter Clarke explores the crucial ways in which war can be seen as a prime mover of history in the 20th century through the eyes of five major figures.

After an elderly man jumped from New York's Pulitzer Building, in 1911, his death made the front page of the New York Times: "WorldDome Suicide a Famous War Spy". By then Pryce Lewis had slipped entirely offstage; but, as Gavin Mortimer reveals, the headline did him justice, speaking to the dramatic, vitally important, and until now untold role he had played in the Civil War.

In May 2003, President George W. Bush declared victory in Iraq. But while we won the war, we catastrophically lost the peace. Our failure prompted a fundamental change in our foreign policy. Confronted with theshortcomings of "shock and awe", the U.S. military shifted its focus to"stability operations": counterinsurgency and the rebuilding of failed states. In less than a decade, foreign assistance has become militarized; humanitarianism has been armed.

The Civil War is seen anew, and a great American family is brought to life, in Robert Roper’s brilliant evocation of the family Whitman. Walt Whitman’s work as a nurse to the wounded soldiers of the Civil War had a profound effect on the way he saw the world. Much less well known is the extraordinary record of his younger brother George Washington Whitman, who led his men in 21 major battles almost to die in a Confederate prison camp as the fighting ended.

The Upper Midwest and Great Lakes region became the "arsenal of democracy" - the greatest manufacturing center in the world-in the years during and after World War II, thanks to natural advantages and a welcoming culture. Decades of unprecedented prosperity followed, memorably punctuated by riots, strikes, burning rivers, and oil embargoes. A vibrant, quintessentially American character bloomed in the region's cities, suburbs, and backwaters.

To most of us "mainlanders," the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket are resort destinations, summer homes for the Kennedys, the Obamas, and Patriots coach Bill Belichick. But after the tourists and jetsetters leave, the cold weather descends, and the local shop owners, carpenters, and fishermen ready themselves for the main event: high school football. For over 50 years, the local teams have been locking horns every November. They play for pride, a coveted trophy, and, very often, a shot at the league championship.

On a hot summer afternoon in 1944, SS troops wiped out an entire French village. 644 men, women and children died that day. Just one child survived. This book tells the story of what happened in Oradour, and imagines what drove both the SS officer who ordered the massacre, and the seven-year-old boy who escaped it. Powerful, moving and almost unbearably tense, this book weaves the truth about what happened to the people in Oradour into a powerful fictional story centred on two characters: the plucky, inspirational seven-year-old Alfred Fournier, refugee and resident of Oradour, and the hot-headed, power-hungry SS commander who shattered his world and changed his life for ever, Major Gustav Dietrich. As their two worlds collide, we gain a fascinating insight into the extremes and contradictions of human behaviour and emotion. With a twist in the tale, this is a story which leaves the reader surprised, inspired and profoundly moved.