Showing results by author "A. Rivers" in All Categories

Nicolae Ceaușescu, one of the 20th century’s most notorious dictators, was both typical and unusual. Outwardly, he resembled a standard leader of a communist country in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, yet he was even more repressive and opulent than his contemporaries. Nicolae Ceaușescu: The Life and Legacy of Romania’s Notorious Dictator During the Cold War examines the rise and reign of the Romanian leader.

Although the armies of the ancient Greek, or “Hellenic”, city-states (poleis, singular polis) included both cavalry (hippeis) and light infantry (psiloi, peltastes, gymnetes), their mainstay was undoubtedly the heavy infantry known today as hoplites. Armed to the teeth with their distinctive round shield (aspis or hoplon), high-crested helmet (corys) and long spear (dory), the hoplites were some of the most efficient soldiers of their time. Most historians believe that the hoplite became the dominant infantry soldier in nearly all the Greek city-states around the 8th century BCE.

Camile is tired of being overlooked because she's shy and plus-size. She's ready to reclaim her life, and she intends to start with a kiss from a legendary MMA playboy. Unfortunately, his grumpy teammate, Leo, has other plans.

As this all suggests, the story of the Young Turks and the last years of the Ottoman Sultanate is a complex and interesting one. It is the history of a state struggling to survive against seemingly impossible odds, featuring a long battle for the minds and souls of the inhabitants of a declining empire. An empire caught between nationalism and liberal imperialism.

The case of Alger Hiss and the rise of McCarthyism were undoubtedly instrumental in the way that one of the most notorious cases in American history unfolded in the early 1950s. After years of keeping tabs on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the two Communist sympathizers were indicted on charges of treason and conspiracy to commit espionage for passing off secrets about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.

From his earliest years, Prince William has been a photographer's dream come true in the same way his mother had been. While he is not necessarily known for his mother's media savvy, he is well liked by the media, and he is able, consciously or incidentally, to capitalize on this advantage. At the same time, from polo to charities, William is thoroughly his father Charles' son as a Windsor prince.

"The golden age of piracy" generally refers to the era when history's most famous pirates roamed the seas of the West Indies from 1670-1720.

Darcy Fletcher has been struggling to find her purpose in life. She’s run out of general classes and still doesn’t know what her major should be. Perhaps taking a job as a nanny this fall will be a better use of her time than college. At least she’ll be making money instead of wasting it. The new high school coach, Evan Porter, has decided that small-town Sugar Creek is where he wants to raise his five-year-old daughter. Unfortunately, he needs extra help during the football season. One of the Sugar Mamas sets him up with a nanny.

After a few hiccups and mix-ups, she is seated on an aisle seat. The window seat that should have been hers is taken by a beautiful young woman with red hair. After making a note of her surroundings, Ava decides to get some shut-eye. A few hours into the flight, Ava is abruptly woken up from a nightmare. As she takes notes of her surroundings once more, she notices something off about the woman in the window seat.

On a beautiful sunny day in March 1979, as thousands of Egyptians awaited in anticipation, a plane landed in Cairo. Moments later, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat stepped out, welcomed by thunderous cheers from an overjoyed crowd. He had just returned to his country from Washington D.C., where five days earlier he had signed a historic treaty with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and U.S. President Jimmy Carter, bringing an end to three decades of war and hostilities between Israelis and Egyptians.

The modern history of Africa was, until very recently, written on behalf of the indigenous races by the white man, who had forcefully entered the continent during a particularly hubristic and dynamic phase of European history. In 1884, Prince Otto von Bismark, the German chancellor, brought the plenipotentiaries of all major powers of Europe together, to deal with Africa's colonization in such a manner as to avoid provocation of war.

The Congress of Vienna, which took place over several months during 1814 and 1815, was an attempt to resolve the numerous challenges presented by Napoleon’s expansion and his subsequent defeat. The talks have been seen as a critical moment in European history, and depending on the point-of-view, the results were either a diplomatic breakthrough or the last gasps of the continent’s conservative elites. It was also a crucial step toward German unification, although this was not clear at the time.

To most observers, it seemed clear that Japan and Russia were destined to come into conflict in Korea and Manchuria. However, Russia’s vastly larger population, army, and navy seemed to make it inevitable that Japan would lose if the conflict escalated into war. Few could have foreseen that when war came, it would reveal that Russian power was largely an illusion. That would be underscored by one of the war’s most famous events, a bizarre battle that involved a makeshift Russian fleet under the command of an irascible and unstable admiral sailing around the world to meet its fate.

Mount Athos: The History of the Greek Mountain and the Center of Eastern Orthodox Monasticism looks at the unique region and what life has been like there since medieval times. You will learn about Mount Athos like never before.

At the close of World War I, Hitler was an impoverished young artist who scrapped by through selling souvenir paintings, but within a few years, his powerful oratory brought him to the forefront of the Nazi party in Munich and helped make the party much more popular. A smattering of followers in the hundreds quickly became a party of thousands. At the head of it all was a man whose fiery orations denounced Jews, communists, and other "traitors" for bringing upon the German nation the Treaty of Versailles, which had led to hyperinflation and a wrecked economy.

Agent Ava James has settled in the town of Harlan just outside of Washington, DC in her new field office. Amid this big change, her mother goes missing somewhere in South Africa, leaving her and her father distraught.

The Korean War is often labeled “the forgotten war”, and though it has received renewed attention in recent years, it still pales compared to others in recent history like the Vietnam War or even the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What’s mostly overlooked is that the Korean War was one of the most intense conflicts the United States fought, and the soldiers who served in it were arguably in greater peril than in any other war over the last 75 years.

The KGB is one of the most famous abbreviations of the 20th century, and it has become synonymous with the shadowy and often violent actions of the Soviet Union’s secret police and internal security agencies. In fact, it is often used to refer to the Soviet state security agencies throughout its history, from the inception of the inception of the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission) in 1917 to the official elimination of the KGB in 1992.

One of his biographers called him "a complex man: a born leader, a brilliant soldier, a devoted husband, a proud father; intelligent, instinctive, brave, compassionate, vain, egotistical, and arrogant." As that description suggests, every account of Erwin Rommel's life must address what appears to be its inherent contradictions.

Among America's presidents, Harry Truman's presidency produced some of the nation's most crucial decisions and left one of the nation's most unique legacies. When President Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945, Vice President Truman, somewhat unprepared for the Presidency, now had to fill some of the biggest shoes in American history.