Showing results by narrator "Chris Abell" in All Categories

The second biggest battle of the entire war mostly gets overlooked among casual listeners, despite the fact it represented the last great chance for the Confederates to salvage the Western theater.

The Second Battle of Bull Run (August 28-30, 1862) was one of the most decisive battles fought during the Civil War, and it was also one of the most unlikely. Less than three months before the battle, Joseph E. Johnston's Army of Northern Virginia had been pushed back nearly all the way to Richmond by George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac, so close that Union soldiers could see the church steeples of the Confederate capital.

After Union General Ulysses S. Grant captured Fort Henry and Fort Donelson in early 1862, Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston, widely considered the Confederacy's best general, concentrated his forces in northern Georgia and prepared for a major offensive that culminated with the biggest battle of the war to that point, the Battle of Shiloh. On the morning of April 6, Johnston directed an all-out attack on Grant's army around Shiloh Church, and though Grant's men had been encamped there, they had failed to create defensive fortifications or earthworks.

Before the night of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth was one of the most famous actors of his time; President Abraham Lincoln had even watched him perform. But his most significant performance at a theater did not take place on the stage. That night Booth became one of history's most infamous assassins when he shot President Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC.

Since Wilde's condemnation of modern biography, the genre would appear to have accelerated its descent into bad taste. As Carl Rollyson points out, writers as various as Rebecca West, Ted Hughes, and Joyce Carol Oates have deplored biographers' tendency to cut up lives and render the bloody data so as to make their subjects seem unhealthy, unwholesome, and unsound. Janet Malcolm has compared biographers to burglars; modern novels feature the biographer as grave robber and victimizer.

Thurgood Marshall was one of the original forces behind the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of the organizations that advocated the rights of African Americans in the 20th century. His pursuit of civil rights reached a highpoint when, as a lawyer, he helped the NAACP win Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that ended segregation in education in American public schools.

The inside story of the rise, fall, and rise of FanDuel and DraftKings - two companies that began as obscure startups and, seemingly overnight, became billion dollar companies, and just as quickly found themselves the target of the FBI and Department of Justice and the center of a national scandal.

India is a country divided, torn by religious strife and hounded by potential invaders on all sides. The world’s most powerful governments believe that whoever controls India holds the strategic advantage for global domination. As the chaos spins out of control, a name resurfaces after centuries of obscurity: Akbar.

They were the most elite team of interservice fighters America’s government had ever formed. As war raged in Vietnam, the Black Berets took on the most secret—and most heinous—of covert operations. Now they’re back, and they have a new mission. Eight years after their bloody exploits across the battlefields of Asia, the five-man team is reunited at the behest of their scheming CIA handler, a man none of them trusts after a dirty war of lies and betrayals. However, word has it one of their own, thought long-dead, is alive and being held prisoner in Laos.

Key Isabella might be small, but it has become a hub for the drug trade into the United States. For the Black Berets—the world’s fiercest mercenaries—the issue of a billion-dollar heroin smuggling operation hits a sore spot they can’t ignore. Arriving in the West Indies, the five-man team of American heroes is tasked with overthrowing Key Isabella’s evil dictator without anyone finding out they’re involved. To make matters more difficult, they soon bump into the additional problem of a police force just as violent and corrupt as the nation’s tyrannical leader.

The Black Palm called themselves a nation, though their own people had cast them out. They called themselves an army, but made war on unarmed men, women and children. And in their fanatical crusade, they might strike anywhere. Even in the tiny Caribbean republic of New Neuzen. The only thing that stood between New Neuzen and a terrorist bloodbath were five American tourists.

When a bloody raid in Libya turns up nothing but a camp of terrorists who know nothing about any bombs, the elite American fighters find themselves ordered to Portugal to follow up a new lead. Once there, they learn every undercover agent from every country working in Portugal has been taken out of play, leaving the door wide open for staging an apocalyptic attack. If the Black Berets fail to locate the bombs and take out the merciless cabal that stole them, it could mean the end of the world as they know it. For these five warriors, the stakes have never been higher.

To the average citizen, the Lion of Salvador was a national hero, a military general of such renown that his accolades spanned two continents. To those in the know, however, the man was the cruelest of drug lords, a savage despot building an unstoppable empire that ranged from the Central American jungle to the bustling streets of New York.

In the arms race against Russia, the United States has eked ahead with their superior advancements in computer technology. All that changes when Russia recruits some of Japan’s finest scientific minds to build their greatest weapon yet: a supercomputer capable of annihilating the US’s formidable Star Wars defense system. Destined for the land of the Samurai, the Black Berets know just how much is riding on this latest mission. If Russia succeeds in its quest for world domination, the future of the warriors’ countrymen—and their loved ones—is bleak indeed.

In Mesa County, Nevada, the tide of history was about to change. A tiny tribe of Indigenous Americans had just beaten the white man in his own court—and won title to some of the richest land in America. But some people were poor losers. And if they couldn’t hold on to the land … they’d simply eliminate its rightful owners. With a handful of poorly armed Native Americans facing a lynch mob led by the county sheriff and backed by corporate millions, Mesa County might be the setting for another Wounded Knee. Until the Black Berets get in on the action and show how professionals handle a massacre.

The Black Berets had to hand it to Parkes, their former CIA case officer. First he’d sent them on a suicide mission to Vietnam. Then he’d sent some CIA hitmen to finish them off when the enemy couldn’t. And the moment they set foot stateside, the world’s meanest mercenaries found that Parkes had arranged another lethal welcome. Well, they’d never liked Parkes much. But how were they going to tell him? First they had to find him, and that would take Beeker, Rosie, Cowboy, Harry, and Marty, from the bayous of Louisiana to an academy of terror in the Libyan desert.

The Mentoring Project’s flagship mentoring resource is its field guides. These long-form pieces provide practical guidance on various aspects of life as a Christian, like finances, purity, technology, work, and more.

The Mentoring Project’s flagship mentoring resource is its field guides. These long-form pieces provide practical guidance on various aspects of life as a Christian, like finances, purity, technology, work, and more.

The Mentoring Project’s flagship mentoring resource is its field guides. These long-form pieces provide practical guidance on various aspects of life as a Christian, like finances, purity, technology, work, and more.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). This declarative phrase introduces fundamental questions circling the minds of skeptics and believers of Christianity alike. What was God’s mission when he chose to create? And why, through the Savior’s death on the cross and the witness of his church, does he continue to redeem the very creation that rebels against him?