From Tolstoy to Lenin, from Diaghilev to Stalin, The Empire Must Die is a tragedy of operatic proportions with a cast of characters that ranges from the exotic to utterly villainous, the glamorous to the depraved. In 1912, Russia experienced a flowering of liberalism and tolerance that placed it at the forefront of the modern world: women were fighting for the right to vote in the elections for the newly empowered parliament, Russian art and culture...

For the captains of industry-men like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Henry Ford-the Gilded Age is a time of big money. Technology boomed with the invention of trains, telephones, electric lights, harvesters, vacuum cleaners, and more. But for millions of immigrant workers, it is a time of big struggles, with adults and children alike working 12 to 14 hour a day under extreme, dangerous conditions. The disparity between the...

"It is now seven weeks since the dispatches from Paris reported that Stuart Walcott was attacked by three German airplanes and brought down behind the German lines, after he himself had brought down a German plane in his first combat on December 12, 1917, and that it was feared he had been killed; but even now, after the lapse of nearly two months, it is not definitely known whether his fall proved fatal, or whether the earnest hope of his friends...

In the third year of the First World War, The Russian Empire experienced a year of revolutionary turmoil that saw the fall of the emperor, Tsar Nicholas II. This was followed by the creation of an interim government which in turn was overthrown by an extreme revolutionary socialist regime in October that year. By the end of 1917 a government that would rule Russia as a dictatorship for most of the rest of the 20th Century was firmly in power and its...

On a chilly day in September, the patriotic, pro-Protestant preaching of an Italian immigrant pastor, August Giuliani, ignited a riot in Milwaukee's small Italian enclave of Bay View that injured two policemen and killed two rioters. Two months later, someone placed a bomb in Giuliani's Third Ward church in an apparent act of retaliation, and a parishioner carried the explosive to Central Police Station, where it detonated, killing nine policemen...

Reading in the Great War 1917–1919 looks at life in an important industrial and agricultural town in the south of England. The book charts the changes that occurred in ordinary people's lives, some caused by the war, some of their own doing.On the surface, Reading was a calm town that got on with its business: beer, biscuits, metalwork, seeds and armaments, but its poverty impacted on industrial relations leading to strikes. It was also a God-fearing,...

After the Italian defeat at Caporetto, a Bri tish Expeditionary Force under General Plumer was despatched from France. This account describes the campaign which ende d after the victory at Vittorio Veneto over the Austrians. '

Experience the epic survival adventure of Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, brought to life with photos from the journey as well as modern color photography of the fauna, seascapes, and landscapes! In 1914, the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton announced an ambitious plan to lead the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition - the first trek across Antarctica from the Atlantic to the Pacific via the South Pole. Shackleton's third expedition...

To help celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Charge of the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba on October 31 1917, this book offers nearly 100 unpublished photographs taken in the field by brothers Guy and Barney Hayden, of the 12th Light Horse. Both Lieutenants, the Haydons were at the forefront of the skirmish and the attack itself, and like all the Walers, their great horses Midnight and Polo play their essential part, right to the Charge itself....