New World History

On the 14th of August 1941, a Polish monk named Maximilian Maria Kolbe was murdered in Auschwitz. Kolbe's life had been remarkable. Fiercely intelligent and driven, he founded a movement of Catholicism and spent several years in Nagasaki, ministering to the 'hidden Christians' who had emerged after centuries of oppression. A Polish nationalist as well as a monk, he gave sanctuary to fleeing refugees and his death was no less remarkable: he volunteered to die, saving the life of a fellow prisoner. It was an act that profoundly transformed the lives of two Japanese men.

La espléndida biografía de Alexander von Humboldt, el héroe perdido de la ciencia y padre de la ecología.

Artists are expert lookers: they have learned to pay attention. The rest of us spend most of our time on autopilot, rushing from place to place, our overfamiliarity blinding us to the marvelous, life-affirming phenomena of our world. But that doesn't have to be the case. In his inimitable engaging style, Will Gompertz takes us into the minds of artists—from contemporary stars to old masters, the well-known to the lesser-so, and from around the world—to show us how to look and experience the world with their heightened awareness.

In 1808, an American merchant ship happened upon an uncharted island in the South Pacific and unwittingly solved the biggest nautical mystery of the era: the whereabouts of a band of fugitives who, after seizing their vessel, had disappeared into the night with their Tahitian companions. Pitcairn Island was the perfect hideaway from British authorities, but after nearly two decades of isolation, its secret society had devolved into a tribalistic hellscape; a real-life Lord of the Flies, rife with depravity and deception.

For those with eyes to see, it is painfully apparent. Society everywhere teeters over an abyss, on the edge of the most explosive revolutionary and apocalyptic upheaval. We experience the upheaval everyday, in our minds, as we experience our subjection to ever more audacious forms of menticide - the full-spectrum, systematic campaign that seeks to undermine and destroy our individual and collective values and beliefs. The twenty-first century war over our minds has been waged through the use of prolonged methods of techno-interrogation and torture, through an endless array of drugs, ...

An alphabetical exploration of the people, geography, animals, plants, history, and culture of New Zealand.

Africa has long been considered the cradle of life - where life and humans evolved - but somewhere west of Munich, Germany, paleoclimatologist and paleontologist Madelaine Böhme and her team make a discovery that is beyond anything they ever imagined: the 12-million-year-old bones of an ancient ape - Danuvius guggenmos - which makes headlines around the world and defies prevailing theories of human history and where human life began.

A new world is emerging before our eyes, while the unsustainable world of the past struggles to continue. Both worlds reflect the beliefs of our past. Both exist - but only for now. Which world do you choose? Best-selling author and visionary scientist Gregg Braden suggests that the hottest issues that divide us as families, nations, and civilizations-seemingly separate concerns such as war, terror, abortion, suicide, genocide, the death penalty, poverty, economic collapse, and nuclear war - are actually related.

New Guinea became the site of one of the World War II's most savage campaigns. Despite their lack of jungle training, the 32nd Division's Ghost Mountain Boys were assigned the most grueling mission of the entire Pacific campaign: to march 130 miles over rugged mountains and to protect the right flank of the Australian army as they fought to push the Japanese back to the village of Buna.

Natural Selection: The Battle of Britain and the Blitz is the third installment in The Protocols series, a series chronicling the rise and impact of authoritarianism in the modern era. Natural Selection focuses on the second half of 1941 and the first half of 1942 -- the period known as the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. Like all the books in the series, Natural Selection is the continuing story of people caught in events. It is composed of carefully annotated excerpts taken from letters, memoirs, diaries, situation reports, radio transcripts, and other historical documents selected not ...

The number of soldiers wounded in World War I is, in itself, devastating: over 21 million military wounded, and nearly 10 million killed. On the battlefield, the injuries were shocking, unlike anything those in the medical field had ever witnessed. The bullets hit fast and hard, went deep, and took bits of dirty uniform and airborne soil particles in with them. Soldier after soldier came in with the most dreaded kinds of casualty: awful, deep, ragged wounds to their heads, faces, and abdomens.

In November 1943, while on war patrol in the Makassar Strait, the USS Billfish submarine was spotted by the Japanese, who launched a vicious depth-charge attack. Explosions wracked the sub for 15 straight hours. With his senior officers incapacitated, diving officer Charlie Rush boldly assumed command and led key members of the crew in a heroic effort to keep their ship intact as they tried to escape.

In The Long Hangover, Shaun Walker provides new insight into contemporary Russia and its search for a new identity, telling the story through the country's troubled relationship with its Soviet past. Walker not only explains Vladimir Putin's goals and the government's official manipulations of history, but also focuses on ordinary Russians and their motivations. He charts how Putin raised victory in World War II to the status of a national founding myth in the search for a unifying force to heal a divided country, and shows how dangerous the ramifications of this have been.

The epic World War II story of Australia's 75 Squadron - and the 44 days when these brave and barely-trained pilots fought alone against the Japanese. In March and April 1942, RAAF 75 Squadron bravely defended Port Moresby for 44 days when Australia truly stood alone against the Japanese. This group of raw young recruits scrambled ceaselessly in their Kittyhawk fighters to an extraordinary and heroic battle, the story of which has been left largely untold.

Spanning several centuries of history in the Pacific, The Legends and Myths of Hawaiʻi: Fables and Folk-Lore of a Strange People is a collection of Hawaiian stories that were preserved through the ages by oral tradition and documented for posterity by King David Kalākaua in 1887. This massive tome recalls the tales of chiefs and kings, explorers and pirates, prophets, sorceresses, and renegades. This is the first in a series of 22 parts.

In this book, Greg Oliver elucidates the practical workings of a new groundbreaking global economic and political system. Amongst other topics, this volume includes: A new global economic model Competent democracy model Anti-corruption structures An ethically fair society model Global garden city design proposal Greg’s work is an essential guidebook for open-minded political activists and thought leaders. Everyone who seriously seeks workable and ethically fair answers to our current global political, economic, environmental, as well as many other equally important questions, should read ...

According to the Australian government’s website, at the time of first contact with Europeans, there were some 500 distinct Indigenous nations, speaking different languages and following their own religious and cultural practices. As with all human societies, that of the Indigenous Australians is abounding in stories. Stories of how the world came to be the way it is, stories of heroism and perfidy, stories about animals and birds, and stories about love and hate all have parts to play in the wide array of myths, legends, and tales created by Indigenous Australians.

Swedish naturalist Peter Kalm traveled from 1748 to 1750 through the colonies of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Quebec. As one of the students of Carl Linnaeus, inventor of the binomial nomenclature system, Kalm spent considerable time with the members of an international network of natural philosophers including Peter Collinson in London, Benjamin Franklin and John Bartram in Philadelphia, and the Jesuits in Quebec. Kalm identified plant life, and recorded how the colonists changed the landscape. He speculated on the geological forces that created the Hudson River Valley, may have ...

The moving and inspiring story of a young Creole/Black woman born in 1936 in New Orleans. Stung by the ugly hatred of racism, young Iris Duplantier Rideau learned from her grandmother to pass for white, affording her better opportunities than her darker-skinned friends and family. Moving to California with her mother, Iris experienced horrors that no child should endure, leaving her a single teenage mother without a future at 17. What would have stopped most people, only made Iris more determined. She took a grueling job in a sweatshop to support herself and her baby. Needing more education...

While Vladimir Putin has been president and prime minister of Russia, the Kremlin has deployed the security services to intimidate the political opposition, reassert the power of the state, and carry out assassinations overseas. At the same time, its agents and spies were put beyond public accountability and blessed with the prestige, benefits, and legitimacy lost since the Soviet collapse.