World War Ii Social History

When the Second World War began, there were 10 million children living in Britain. Many were evacuated to the countryside, but others stayed behind and witnessed the Blitz close-up in cities around the UK. Blitz Kids tells the remarkable true stories of children who spent their nights in cold, cramped air-raid shelters, hearing the rumble of planes and the crash of bombs overhead.

Alan Riding introduces a pageant of 20th-century artists who lived and worked under the Nazis and explores the decisions each made about whether to stay or flee, collaborate or resist. We see Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf singing before French and German audiences; Picasso painting and occasionally selling his work from his Left Bank apartment; and Marcel Carné and Henri-Georges Clouzot, among others, directing movies....

In The Gifted Generation, historian David Goldfield examines the generation immediately after World War II and argues that the federal government was instrumental in the great economic, social, and environmental progress of the era. Following the sacrifices of the Greatest Generation, the returning vets and their children took the unprecedented economic growth and federal activism to new heights. This generation was led by presidents who believed that federal legislation, by encouraging individual opportunity, would help the entire nation.

Carve Her Name with Pride is the inspiring story of the half-French Violette Szabo who was born in Paris in 1921 to an English motorcar dealer, and a French Mother. She met and married Etienne Szabo, a Captain in the French Foreign Legion in 1940. Shortly after the birth of her daughter, Tania, her husband died at El Alamein. She became a FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) and was recruited into the SOE and underwent secret agent training. Her first trip to France was completed successfully even though she was arrested and then released by the French Police.

From 1941 to 1944, Bignor Manor, a farmhouse in Sussex, provided board and lodging for men and women of the French Resistance before they were flown by moonlight into occupied France. Barbara Bertram, whose husband was a conducting officer for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), became hostess for these daring agents and their pilots during their brief stopovers in their house.

Continuously in demand since its first, prize-winning edition was published in 1975, this is the classic history of Hiroshima and the origins of the arms race, from the development of the American atomic bomb to the decision to use it against Japan and the beginnings of U.S. atomic diplomacy toward the Soviet Union.

In 1967, a retired army major and self-made millionaire named Paddy Roy Bates cemented his family’s place in history when he inaugurated himself ruler of the Principality of Sealand, a tiny dominion of the high seas. And so began the peculiar story of the world’s most stubborn micronation on a World War II anti-aircraft-gun platform off the British coast. Incorporating original interviews with surviving Sealand royals, Dylan Taylor-Lehman recounts the battles and schemes as Roy and his crew engaged with diplomats and even thwarted an attempted coup.

As the horror of Nazism tightened its grip on Germany, Jews found themselves trapped and desperate. For many, their only hope of salvation came in the form of a small, bespectacled British man: Frank Foley. Working as a Berlin Passport Control Officer, Foley helped thousands of Jews to flee the country with visas and false passports, personally entering the camps to get Jews out, and sheltering those on the run from the Gestapo in his own apartment. Described by a Jewish leader as "the Pimpernel of the Jews," Foley was an unsung hero of the Holocaust.

The World War II codebreaking station at Bletchley is well known and its activities documented in detail. Its decryption capabilities were vital to the war effort, significantly aiding the Allied victory. But where did the messages being deciphered come from in the first place? This is the extraordinary untold story of the Y service, a secret even more closely guarded than Bletchley Park. 'Y service' was the code for the chain of wireless intercept stations around Britain and all over the world.

Cairo, 1942: If you had asked a British officer who Colonel Clarke was, they would have been able to point him out: always ready with a drink and a story, he was a well-known figure in the local bars. If you then asked what he did, you would have less success. Clarke thought of himself as developing a new kind of weapon. Its components? Rumour, stagecraft, a sense of fun. Its target? The mind of Erwin Rommel, Hitler's greatest general. Throughout history, military commanders have sought to mislead their opponents. Dudley Clarke set out to do it on a scale no one had imagined before.

Si la historia tiene una utilidad por antonomasia es la de impedir que los episodios más oscuros de esta se repitan. Un conocimiento de los distintos movimientos fascistas que surgieron tras la Primera Guerra Mundial y que detentaron el poder en numerosos países europeos en el período de entreguerras, es necesario para impedir que, en épocas de crisis económicas y de valores, vuelvan a seducir a los pueblos con su mensaje de regeneración expeditiva.

There are few adjectives, which have not been applied to the combined amphibious and airborne assault operation that took place on June the 6th 1944. Two and a half years in the planning, Operation Overlord, the invasion of German occupied France would require every tool in the allied arsenal. In this concise history authors, William R. Bradle and Robert Child examine the invasion from multiple angles from what planning was required to what tough decisions had to be made.

Les mémoires d'Albert Speer sont un document exceptionnel à plus d'un titre : témoignage d'un des plus hauts dignitaires nazis, il relate en détail le fonctionnement de l'appareil d'État vu de l'intérieur, avec le mélange de rationalité bureaucratique et de soumission à l'arbitraire du chef qui le caractérise. Mais c'est aussi l'itinéraire d'un homme brillant, architecte de talent, qui est rapidement séduit par Hitler et qui va progressivement mettre son intelligence et ses compétences au service de la machine de guerre nazie et d'une idéologie totalitaire.

Best-selling author and award-winning former BBC Chief News Correspondent Kate Adie reveals the ways in which women's lives changed during World War One and what the impact has been for women in its centenary year. In 1914 the world changed forever. When World War One broke out and a generation of men went off to fight, best-selling author and From Our Own Correspondent presenter Kate Adie shows how women emerged from the shadows of their domestic lives. Now a visible force in public life, they began to take up essential roles - from transport to policing, munitions to sport, entertainment, even politics.

Oberstdorf is a beautiful village high up in the Bavarian Alps, a place where for hundreds of years ordinary people lived simple lives while history was made elsewhere. Yet even here, in the farthest corner of Germany, National Socialism sought to control not only people’s lives but also their minds. Drawing on archive material, letters, interviews and memoirs, A Village in the Third Reich is an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Germany under Hitler, of the descent into totalitarianism and of the tragedies that befell all of those touched by Nazism.

On the morning of Sunday 7th December, 1941, 183 Japanese aircraft fly across the quiet American naval base of Pearl Harbor. After a few minutes, oil stocks and airfields are in flames, and several of the United States’ largest battleships are heading towards the bottom of the harbour. The aim of the Japanese surprise attack is to hobble the United States once and for all, giving the empire a free hand to continue its conquests in Asia. But the assault has the opposite effect.

Operation Chastise was one of the most extraordinary episodes of the Second World War, yet it has also become one of the most misunderstood. Max Hastings tells the gripping story of the Dambusters raid, from the invention of the bouncing bomb to the moonlit cockpits of young pilots flying at treetop height through lethal enemy fire. But Hastings also challenges what we think we know about the Dambusters, bringing to light the difficult truths that have often been left out of the legend.

Labor's War at Home examines a critical period in American politics and labor history, beginning with the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 through the wave of major industrial strikes that followed the war and accompanied the reconversion to a peacetime economy. Nelson Lichtenstein is concerned both with the internal organizations and social dynamics of the labor movement - especially the Congress of Industrial Organizations - and with the relationship between the CIO, as well as other bodies of organized labor, and the Roosevelt administration.

In her latest investigative tour-de-force, New York Times best-selling author Michelle Malkin sets the historical record straight - and debunks radical ethnic alarmists who distort history to undermine common-sense, national security profiling. The need for this myth-shattering book is vital. President Bush's opponents have attacked every homeland defense policy as tantamount to the "racist" and "unjustified" World War II internment.

In the World War II era, Geoffrey Pyke was described as one of the world's great minds - to rank alongside Einstein. Pyke was an inventor, adventurer, polymath, and unlikely hero of both world wars. He earned a fortune on the stock market, founded an influential pre-school, wrote a bestseller, and came up with the idea for the US and Canadian Special Forces. Henry Hemming is the first reporter to sift through this extraordinary new information and finally tell Pyke's astonishing story in full: his brilliance, his flaws, and his life of adventures, ideas, and secrets.