Normans History

In 1832, 17-year-old Otto von Bismarck had just entered university and was already rejecting the republican indoctrination of his grade school years. Unlike so many of his day who had championed representative government, Bismarck longed for the glory of a nation he believed would only be found under a single, strong leader. Though his early university days showed him he would be isolated by this thinking, he strongly believed not only in the ideal of a national German state, but in its possibility.

Who invented supply-side economics - the idea that cutting tax rates can result in more growth, more prosperity at all income levels, and even more tax revenue flowing into the IRS? Most people would credit the economic team that advised Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But in fact supply-side economics came of age two decades earlier. And the first president who embraced it was one of the biggest icons of the Democratic Party - John F. Kennedy.

In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prize-winning author Günter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood through the late 1950s, when his book The Tin Drum was published. During the Second World War, Grass was drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces, he spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous.

On April 18, 1775, a riot over the price of flour broke out in the French city of Dijon. That night, across the Atlantic, Paul Revere mounted the fastest horse he could find and kicked it into a gallop. So began what have been called the "sister revolutions" of France and America. In a single, thrilling narrative, this audiobook tells the story of those revolutions and shows just how deeply intertwined they actually were.

The importance of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus (or as he was known from birth, Gaius Octavius “Octavian” Thurinus) to the course of Western history is hard to overstate. His life, his rise to power, his political, social, and military achievements, all laid the foundations for the creation of an empire which would endure for almost five centuries, and whose traditions, laws, architecture, and art continue to influence much of Europe and the world today.

To coincide with the bicentennial of Thoreau's birth in 2017, this thrilling, meticulous biography by naturalist and historian Kevin Dann fills a gap in our understanding of one modern history's most important spiritual visionaries by capturing the full arc of Thoreau's life as a mystic, spiritual seeker, and explorer in transcendental realms.

On August 1, 1945, a month before the formal end of World War II, the British War Office announced the disbanding of a small, eclectic unit, the Long Range Desert Group. Since its founding five years earlier, in June 1940, the LRDG had pioneered and refined the concept and tactics of deep penetration, covert reconnaissance in the North African desert, and later as a more varied special forces operations unit in the Aegean, Italy, and the Balkans.

How often can you peek behind the curtains of one of the most secretive governments in the world? Prisoner of the State is the first book to give listeners a front row seat to the secret inner workings of China's government. It is the story of Premier Zhao Ziyang, the man who brought liberal change to that nation and who, at the height of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, tried to stop the massacre and was dethroned for his efforts.

In 1969, in Capitol Records' Hollywood studio, a blonde-haired troubadour named Larry Norman laid track for an album that would launch a new genre of music and one of the strangest, most interesting careers in modern rock. Having spent the bulk of the 1960s playing on bills with acts like The Who, Janis Joplin, and The Doors, Norman decided that he wanted to sing about the most countercultural subject of all: Jesus.

Fighting for justice, for freedom of speech, and sometimes even for their own lives, some of history's most significant figures demonstrate the finest resources of language in the service of the most dramatic issues of their day.

Judenjagd, hunt for the Jews, was the German term for the organized searches for Jews who, having survived ghetto liquidations and deportations to death camps in Poland in 1942, attempted to hide "on the Aryan side." Jan Grabowski's penetrating microhistory tells the story of the Judenjagd in Dabrowa Tarnowska, a rural county in southeastern Poland, where the majority of the Jews in hiding perished as a consequence of betrayal by their Polish neighbors.

In 1940, America’s favorite illustrator Norman Rockwell, his wife Mary, and their three sons moved to the picturesque rural village of West Arlington, Vermont. The artist discovered a treasure trove of models. Norman Rockwell’s Models: In and out of the Studio is the first to detail these models’ lives, friendships with the artist, and experiences in his studio.

Exploring the successful Norman invasion of England in 1066, this concise and listenable book focuses especially on the often dramatic and enduring changes wrought by William the Conqueror and his followers. Hugh M. Thomas considers the conquest's wide-ranging impact by taking a fresh look at such traditional themes as the influence of battles and great men on history and by assessing how far the shift in ruling dynasty and noble elites affected broader aspects of English history.

Our most revered president gets a unique and uniquely engaging biography fashioned from the answers to the most frequent, and most unusual and surprising, questions asked about Abraham Lincoln that Gerald J. Prokopowicz was asked during the nine years he served as scholar-in-residence at the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Prokopowicz's authoritative, often surprising responses illuminate facets of Abraham Lincoln's life, work, and legacy about which people remain endlessly curious.

For decades, James MacGregor Burns has been one of the great masters of the study of power and leadership in America. Now he turns his eye to an institution of government that he believes has become more powerful---and more partisan---than the Founding Fathers ever intended: the Supreme Court. Much as we would like to believe that the Court remains aloof from ideological politics, Packing the Court reveals how often justices behave like politicians in robes.

"We, conquered by William, have liberated the Conqueror’s land." So reads the memorial to the British war dead at Bayeaux, Normandy. Commemorating those who gave their lives to free France in 1944, it also serves to remind us of an earlier conflict. For the English, the Norman conquest remains deeply embedded in the national psyche. As the last contested military invasion to have succeeded in conquering this proud island nation, the date of 1066 is the one every citizen can remember.

The Wars of the Roses didn't start on the battlefield: Blood Roses traces it back to the beginning. Starting in 1245 with the founding of the House of Lancaster, Kathryn Warner follows a twisted path of political intrigue, bloody war, and fascinating characters over 200 years. From the Barons' Wars to the overthrowing of Edward II, Eleanor of Castile to Isabella of France, and true love to Loveday, Blood Roses reframes some of the biggest events of the medieval era—not as stand-alone conflicts, but as part of a long-running family feud that would have drastic consequences.

La gran novela de los torneos. La rivalidad entre sajones y normando es el telon de fondo de una de las novelas historicas mas populares de toda la literatura Ivanhoe. Ricardo, Corazon de Leon, a quien su cruel hermano Juan sin Tierra esta intentando desplazar, es la eminencia gris en esta gran novela de duelos, caballeria y torneos, en los cuales la lealtad y la caballerosidad guian una historia de amor.

Although many have heard of the Crusades and some of the more famous orders like the Templars, few know about the Livonian Crusade or the Livonian Brothers of the Sword. This organization was one of many Catholic military orders that sprung up during the Middle Ages in response to the papacy’s call for holy war, and the Livonian Crusade is the term used to group together dozens of military actions undertaken by German knights in Eastern Europe. The order was also significant for consolidating the power of the Holy Roman Empire in Eastern Europe.

Two years ago, Graham Robb moved to a lonely house on the very edge of England, near the banks of a river that once marked the southern boundary of the legendary Debatable Land. The oldest detectable territorial division in Great Britain, the Debatable Land served as a buffer between Scotland and England. It was once the bloodiest region in the country, fought over by Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and James V. After most of its population was slaughtered or deported, it became the last part of Great Britain to be brought under the control of the state.