On June 28, 1914, in the dusty Balkan town of Sarajevo, an assassin fired two shots. In the next five minutes, as the stout middle-aged Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Habsburg, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife bled to death, a dynasty-and with it, a whole way of life-began to topple. In the ages before World War I, four dynasties-the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Ottoman, and Romanov-dominated much of civilization. Outwardly different, they...

Tensions during the Yalta Conference in February 1945 threatened to tear apart the wartime alliance among Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin just as victory was close at hand. Katz uncovers the dramatic story of the three young women who were chosen by their fathers to travel with them to Yalta. Anna Roosevelt, Sarah Churchill, and Kathleen Harriman were each bound by fierce family loyalty, political savvy, and intertwined romances...

Time magazine called her "the Mata Hari of Minnesota"; OSS Chief general "Wild Bill" Donovan called her "the greatest unsung heroine of the war." But for decades, the extent of Betty Pack's achievements as an agent during World War II, first for Britain's MI6 and then for America's OSS, remained classified. Now, the truth about this femme fatale--her dangerous liaisons and death-defying missions, the heartaches that haunted her life, her vital contributions...

The epic career of Napoleon was brought to a shattering end on the evening of June 18, 1815, when his hastily formed legions faced the Anglo-Allied armies under the command of the Duke of Wellington. It was the only time these men -- the two greatest captains of their age -- fought against each other. Waterloo, once it was over, put an end to twenty-two years of French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and led to a century of relative peace and progress...

"The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. But as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping new history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs. On the eve of World War II, Germany was a pharmaceutical powerhouse, and companies such as Merck and Bayer cooked up cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, to be consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to millions of German soldiers. In fact,...

On June 22, 1941, Hitler began what would be the most important campaign of the European theater. The war against the Soviet Union would leave tens of millions of Soviet citizens dead and large parts of the country in ruins. The death and destruction would result not just from military operations but also from the systematic killing and abuse that the German army, police, and SS directed against Jews, Communists, and ordinary citizens. In “War...

Author's memories of the last stages of the war in the Pacific area.

"Winner of the 1996 Paul Birdsall Prize, American Historical Association" David G. Herrmann is Assistant Professor of History at Tulane University. David Herrmann's work is the most complete study to date of how land-based military power influenced international affairs during the series of diplomatic crises that led up to the First World War. Instead of emphasizing the naval arms race, which has been extensively studied before, Herrmann draws on...

Vikings at War presents a sumptuous depiction of how the Vikings waged war; their weapons technology, offensive and defensive warfare, military traditions and tactics, their fortifications, ships and command structure. It also portrays the Viking raids and conquest campaigns that brought the Vikings to virtually every corner of Europe and even to America. Viking ships landed on almost every shore in the Western world during the 350 years that followed...

This is the story of the specialized U.S. armored force designed specifically to kill enemy tanks in direct combat. It follows the men who fought in the TDs from the formation of the force in 1941 through the victory over the Third Reich in 1945, through North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany, describing a story of American flexibility and pragmatism in military affairs. It draws heavily on the records of the tank destroyer battalions and the units...