With Barely TWO NICKELS To Rub Together is a straight-forward American story, both interesting and instructive, that is neither simple nor complex. It puts a face to the success of a small company that built commercial fishing vessels that were the pride of the fleet during the 1970s. It is a story about how a person’s word once given is a contract, and much more.
“It shouldn’t be surprising that I became fascinated by a new book that recently crossed my path. In With Barely Two Nickels to Rub Together, author Bo Shindler tells the remarkable story of Ed Freeman and his son Dugie, who in the 1970s in Gold Beach, Oregon, would build the largest aluminum commercial fishing boat constructed in the United States. It is a colorful story that blends all that was and is iconic about life on the Oregon coast — timber, fishing, boats, the call of the Pacific, creativity, persistence, colorful personalities, and hard work. At 350 pages with 280 photographs and illustrations, it is a true coffee table book that will provide many hours of enjoyment.”—Kerry Tymchuk, Executive Director, Oregon Historical Society
More than nine million soldiers died in World War I. At the same time, a US-led effort saved nearly ten million civilians from starvation behind the lines during the German occupation, yet one of America’s greatest humanitarian efforts is virtually unknown today. In this gripping book, Jeffrey B. Miller tells the remarkable history of two American and Belgian citizen-created organizations that led a massive food relief program for civilians trapped in German-occupied Belgium and northern France.
Herbert Hoover, then a successful international businessman, was the driving force behind the effort, coercing and bullying the governments of Germany, Great Britain, France, and the United States to allow a group of idealistic young volunteers to organize in occupied Belgium and coordinate the distribution of tons of food and clothing to desperate Belgians. These crusaders, known as CRB delegates, had to maintain strict neutrality as they watched the Belgians suffer under the harsh German regime. Miller tells compelling stories of German brutality, Belgian relief efforts, and the idealistic Americans who went into German-occupied Belgium from October 1914 up to May 1917, when they were forced to leave after the April entry into the war of the United States.
Winner History: United States 2021 Best Book Awards
Finalist History: General 2021 Best Book Awards
Finalist History: Military 2021 Best Book Awards
The small things that had great historical consequences…
“Heart-stopping, compelling, and fun!”—Win Blevins, New York Times Bestselling Author
How often does it happen that a single tiny mistake causes an entire civilization to collapse? More often than you think! Readers of Jared Knott's book, Tiny Blunders/Big Disasters, will be amazed at the little things that changed history in a big way. Here are a few examples:
A single document poorly designed by one single clerk in one single county changed the outcome of a presidential election and led directly to a major war.
A soldier accidentally kicks a helmet off of the top of a wall and causes an empire to collapse.
A small mechanical device several inches long fails to function, which changes the outcome of WWII and leads to the death of millions of people.
A man fails to gather his army in time to defend against an attack because of the temptation of opium and a young slave woman.
The Moroccan city of Fez, founded in the ninth century CE, is one of the most precious urban jewels of Islamic civilization. For more than 40 years Titus Burckhardt worked to document and preserve the artistic and architectural heritage of Fez in particular and Morocco in general. These newly translated lectures, delivered while Burckhardt was living and working in Fez, explore how the historic city can be preserved without turning it from a living organism into a dead museum-city, and how it can be adapted and updated using the values that gave birth to the city and its way of life. Aided by photographs and sketches made during the course of his lifetime, Burckhardt conveys what it means to be a living Islamic city.
Born in Lebanon, Marlene Zaedyan is a descendant of the Armenian people who fled Turkey during the Armenian Genocide. Zaedyan lived through the Lebanese Civil War and suffered through many hardships over the course of her formative years. In her autobiography, Nine Lives, Endless Dreams, Zaedyan narrates the violence and trauma of a childhood interrupted and displaced by war. "I want to educate readers on the horrors of the war and the genocide that took place in Lebanon as well as illuminate present day struggles," says Mrs. Zaedyan. "I want to bring awareness to the Armenian Genocide that took place from 1914 to 1923.
Despite the ugliness of the war, Zaedyan still believes life is full of beauty and mystery. "Life is really good in spite of its challenges," says Mrs. Zaedyan. "The key is knowing how to react to adversity." Zaedyan hopes to inspire readers to overcome adversity through grit and resilience.
March 1, 2021, Peace Corps turns sixty. Its mission—to teach a skill and to spread the Peace Corps brand of goodwill around the world—still resonates. In No Greater Service, author Alvin J. Hower highlights its relevance yesterday, today, and the years to come.
This memoir offers a stirring, personal, vivid, and action-packed account of a Peace Corps volunteer’s remarkable life in the underserved areas of the southern Philippines. With curiosity, empathy, and wry humor, Hower creates a distinct Peace Corps photo memoir. An avid photographer, he produced more than 5,000 images of everyday people and the awe-inspiring beauty of a nation of 7,641 islands. He was a teacher and social worker in General Santos City, and a management consultant for a mission school in the remote mountains of Lake Sebu, Surallah, working and living with the indigenous T’boli people featured in the August 1971 National Geographic Magazine.
Finalist History: United States 2021 Best Book Awards
Do Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms? Or is this power vested solely in government? Recent years have seen a sea change in scholarship on the Second Amendment. Beginning in the 1960s, a view emerged that individuals had a “right” to bear arms only in militia service—a limited, "collective" right. But in the late 1980s Dr. Stephen Halbrook and a handful of other scholars began producing an altogether persuasive analysis that changed thinking on the matter, so that today, even in canonical textbooks, bearing arms is acknowledged as an individual right.
Stephen Halbrook’s The Founders’ Second Amendment is the first book-length account of the origins of the Second Amendment, based on the Founders’ own statements as found in newspapers, correspondence, debates, and resolutions. Dr. Halbrook investigates the period from 1768 to 1826, from the last years of British rule and the American Revolution through to the adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the passing of the Founders’ generation. His book offers the most comprehensive analysis of the arguments behind the drafting and adoption of the Second Amendment, and the intentions of the men who created it.
Under the orders of French Emperor Napoleon III, French troops arrive in Mexico in 1861 with a dual purpose: to help the Confederacy win the war against the United States and to conquer Mexico. As President Benito Juárez suspends payment of Mexico's foreign debts, the French drop their façade of debt negotiations and head for Puebla, where they are soundly defeated in their attempt to capture the city.
The French withdraw from their stunning setback and spend the summer of 1862 nursing their wounds and awaiting reinforcements in Orizaba. This gives the Mexicans ample time to highly fortify Puebla against a future attack. During spring of 1863 French troops head for Puebla and Mexico City in what they hope will be a pair of easy victories.
It is August 1990, and Iraq has just invaded Kuwait, setting off a chain reaction of events leading up to the first Gulf War. Vicki Cody’s husband, the commander of an elite Apache helicopter battalion, is deployed to Saudi Arabia—and for the next nine months they have to rely on written letters in order to stay connected.
From Vicki’s narrative and journal entries, the reader gets a very realistic glimpse of what it is like for the spouses and families back home during a war, in particular what it was like at a time when most people did not own a personal computer and there was no Internet—no iPhones, no texting, no tweeting, no Facetime. Her writing also illuminates the roller coaster of stress, loneliness, sleepless nights, humor, joys, and, eventually, resilience, that make up her life while her husband is away. Meanwhile, Dick’s letters to her give the reader a front row seat to the unfolding of history, the adrenaline rush of flying helicopters in combat, his commitment to his country, and his devotion to his family back home. Together, these three components weave a clear, insightful, and intimate story of love and its power to sustain us.
This is the story of an American C-47 ‘Dakota’ pilot who earned three Air Medals, seven Battle Stars and flew twenty-seven combat missions during the Second World War. As a young U.S. pilot, Harry Watson, arrived in Britain as the Battle of Normandy was reaching its crescendo. Thrown immediately into the fray, Harry, along with more than 200 aircraft, set off to carry supplies to the troops fighting in France. But with visibility reduced to zero, the aircraft were ordered to turn back – all did except Harry, who successfully delivered his life-saving cargo of blood and US Army nurses.
Harry continued to take risks, which resulted in many hair-raising episodes. This included almost being caught on the ground, while on an urgent fuel resupply mission for a platoon of General Patton’s tanks, by a German Mk.IV panzer and a battalion of supporting infantry.
Van Slayden trained on the PT-3 kilte-like biplane in 1937, but he learned fighter pilot operations flying “by the seat of his pants,” walking away from five crashes. Shortly after the invasion of Normandy, he landed on Utah Beach to help establish a US Army Air Forces’ (AAF’s) presence in Europe. He flew the P-47 Thunderbolt, a fighter-bomber, in combat over Northern France and commanded the 36th Fighter Group—the “Fightin’ 36th— at Batogne, St. Vith, the Bridgehead at Remagen, Operations Grenade, Clarion, Varsity and other missions. His 22nd Fighter Squadron was the first in the AAF to land voluntarily on German soil. Unfortunately, one of his pilots attacked a friendly aircraft, killing the pilot.
He was deep into Germany when the Nazis surrendered on May 8, 1945, which was remarkably anticlimactic. Van Slayden, a country boy from rural Tennessee, like so many of his contemporaries, stepped up to the challenge as part of the Greatest Generation.
Operation Market Garden: Airborne Invasion of the Netherlands guides visitors to the battlefields of a daring plan for the largest airborne drop in the Second World War. Three Airborne Divisions (American 82nd and 101st and British 1st) parachuted behind enemy lines to capture and hold key river and canal bridges. An armored column raced across the Netherlands on a single narrow highway to secure the crossings. The effort was defeated at the critical bridge in Arnhem resulting in the destruction of the British 1st Airborne Division. The guide provides battle summaries, descriptions of museums, relics, battlefield locations, driving and in-city walking tour routes complete with GPS co-ordinates, and individual stories of men engaged in combat.
Finalist History: United States 2021 Best Book Awards
A Second Reckoning tells the story of John Snowden, a Black man accused of the murder of a pregnant white woman in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1917. He refused to confess despite undergoing torture, was tried—through legal shenanigans—by an all-white jury, and was found guilty on circumstantial evidence and sentenced to death. Despite hair-raising, last-minute appeals to spare his life, Snowden was hanged for the crime. But decades after his death, thanks to tireless efforts by interested citizens and family members who believed him a victim of a “legal lynching,” Snowden was pardoned posthumously by the governor of Maryland in 2001.
Finalist History: United States 2021 Best Book Awards
The truth is, if you don't know your history, you lose your civilization and your culture. If the primary history that African-American children are taught boils down to “we came from slaves,” we not only lose the rich complexity that is African-American history, but we start children off with a “less than equal” subtlety that disengages them from wanting to learn their history or to be a part of system which stands for principals of justice and equality but yet lives according to a much different system, one of corruption and profits at all cost. This needs to change.
Finalist History: United States 2021 Best Book Awards
For more than four decades beginning in 1944, the Hanford nuclear weapons facility in southeastern Washington State secretly blanketed much of the Pacific Northwest with low-dose ionizing radiation, the byproduct of plutonium production. For those who lived in the vicinity, many of them families of Hanford workers, the consequences soon became apparent as rates of illness and death steadily climbed—despite repeated assurances from the Atomic Energy Commission that the facility posed no threat. Trisha T. Pritikin, who has battled a lifetime of debilitating illness to become a lawyer and advocate for her fellow “downwinders,” tells the devastating story of those who were harmed in Hanford’s wake and, seeking answers and justice, were subjected to yet more suffering.
At the center of The Hanford Plaintiffs are the oral histories of twenty-four people who joined In re Hanford Nuclear Reservation Litigation, the class-action suit that sought recognition of, and recompense for, the grievous injury knowingly caused by Hanford. Radioactive contamination of American communities was not uncommon during the wartime Manhattan Project, nor during the Cold War nuclear buildup that followed. Pritikin interweaves the stories of people poisoned by Hanford with a parallel account of civilians downwind of the Nevada atomic test site, who suffer from identical radiogenic diseases.
Finalist History: United States 2021 Best Book Awards
This book is about Billy the Kid's trial for murder, and the events leading to that trial. The result of Billy's trial sealed his fate. And yet Billy's trial is the least written about, and until this book, the least known event of Billy's adult life.
Prior biographies have provided extensive - and fascinating - details on Billy's life, but they supply only a few paragraphs on Billy's trial. Just the bare facts: time, place, names, result.
The information presented here has been unknown until now.
Finalist History: United States 2021 Best Book Awards
This book has been awarded a Certificate of Merit by the Illinois State Historical Society.
Moral treatment, the vogue of early American psychology, freed the mentally ill of their chains. They were, however, still relegated to separate institutions, commonly called asylums, for at least a brief respite from the stressors that were thought to cause their madness. Did it work? Were the patients actually treated more humanely? The Untold History of the First Illinois State Hospital for the Insane tells the stories of the people who were subjected to this new treatment on the American Frontier. As author Dr. Joe Squillace shows, the institution first had great difficulty in getting established, but the town of Jacksonville, Illinois, where the Hospital was built, rallied to make it a more humane and person-centered institution. The Hospital’s leaders, too, attempted, within the constraints of their time, to treat their patients with respect. But, at a time when mental illness was still not well understood some patients were tortured and imprisoned, even though they were not insane, even by 19th century standards. What is revealed in Untold History is an institution that struggled, much like today’s institutions do, to address the needs of those living with mental illness, in a culture that did not understand it fully.
A man hunted by the Nazis long after the fall of the Third Reich. In this stranger than fiction true story, Carl Katz contends for survival against a relentless enemy.
In this much anticipated sequel to the bestselling, Roses in a Forbidden Garden: A Holocaust Love Story, Never Enough follows the defiant, German-born, Katz as he navigates Hitler’s Germany. We shadow his harrowing life and death journey—from his years of incarceration, starvation, and torture, to his desperate plays to keep his family safe from the deadly grasp of Hitler’s Final Solution. Forced to make vital decisions at every turn, his unwillingness to succumb sparks outrage and vengeance from his would-be executioners.
With the perpetrators of his past continuously pursuing him, Katz learns that old habits certainly die hard in the Fatherland.
Award-winning historian Stephen G. Yanoff illuminates William McKinley's remarkable life and tragic death in this highly acclaimed work, as the small-town lawyer and Civil War officer rises from obscurity to reach the highest office in the land. GONE BEFORE GLORY brilliantly charts the turbulent beginning of the twentieth century, and the anarchist activity which led to President McKinley's assassination. Though the story of the McKinley administration has been told many times, this is the rare version that conveys the true motivations of the participants and reveals the interconnected paths that led to the tragic death of the 25th President of the United States. A spellbinding tale of immense importance for those who enjoy American history. Thoroughly researched and brilliantly written by a born storyteller. -- Renegade Reviews
The mission seemed simple enough. Completely restore a 75-year-old historic DC-3 and fly her from Montana to France for the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. Starting with no volunteers and no money. In under a year. With a crew that had only a few hours of experience flying one. Ride along with author and pilot Bryan Douglass, the rest of the flight crew, the volunteers, paratroopers, World War II veterans, and others on this inspirational story of an impossible dream that almost didn't come true. The underdog of the D-Day Squadron faced insurmountable odds, constant delays and a shortage of nearly everything except determination. The idea of crossing the north Atlantic in a 75-year-old, newly restored airplane only a few hours after her first flight would terrify most, but you'll meet the people who believed it could be done. The transatlantic journey of the D-Day Squadron's "Mighty Fifteen" was an incredible feat, but the story of Miss Montana is the best of them all. Laugh, cry, and be amazed as you get the entire inside story from a pilot who was there.
My area of scholarly interest is European Jewish history from the late 18th through early 19th centuries when my ancestors lived in Russia’s Pale of Settlement and from where some migrated to New York’s Lower East Side. But one cannot isolate those decades in a vacuum; they need to be placed within the socio-political and historical context both prior to and, in the case of the Holocaust, after those dates. To that end, I cover the history of Polish Jewry through the Holocaust.
"PLAYING FOR KEEPS” in business is a self-help memoir that provides a “cheat sheet” for your career success.
Best-Selling and Award-Winning Author, Mom and Mentor Therese Allison is recognized as a groundbreaking pioneer and female executive, who broke the glass ceiling in a mostly male business niche (insurance brokerage). Her goal now is to empower women (and men) to “WIN” in business and life by landing a dream job, building business allies, achieving financial success and creating a work/life balance.
Based on 35 years of years of success in business and life, Allison uncovers how she became financially independent at age 38 when her company (McKenna & Associates) was sold to AON, and then retired early at age 43 to spend quality time with her children.
The US Government has known about the existence of ET races on the planet since the 1940’s, but chose to keep this information from the American public. Why all the secrecy? Who would gain from disclosure, and who would lose?
In a universe of two trillion galaxies, the likelihood that not even one other planet anywhere could develop intelligent life is preposterous! For those who have the courage to look at the evidence, this book introduces the reader to two dozen different Star Civilizations, with very different agendas for their interaction with our species.
Reptilians have dominated religion and politics in human culture since ancient times, pulling strings behind the scenes. They interbred into royal bloodlines and have controlled the wealth on the planet. The Nordics, tall, beautiful, Scandinavian-looking people, have been at war with the Reptilians for thousands of years and are working to help us get free of Reptilian interference in our lives.
