World War Ii Social History

Feature films have created the stereotype of the Second World War prisoner of war. But the reality was much more extraordinary. POWs staged shows, concerts and sporting fixtures and took up crafts and pastimes using materials they found around them. Men studied, attended lectures, learned languages, sat for qualifications and exams, on such a scale that one camp was nicknamed 'The Barbed-Wire University'. And often the years in captivity proved a turning-point in their lives.

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.

In the summer of 1940, Adolf Hitler and his henchman, Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief Hermann Göring, began their attempt to clear the skies over England to invade Great Britain. Despite very long odds, the Royal Air Force stood its ground, prevented the German invasion, and helped turn the tide of WWII.

La Segunda Guerra Mundial fue uno de los eventos más traumáticos en la historia de la humanidad. En todo el mundo, los conflictos existentes se fusionaron, enzarzando a las naciones en una vasta red de violencia. Se libró a través de tierra, mar y aire, afectando a todos los continentes habitados. Más de 55 millones de personas murieron, algunos de ellos combatientes, otros civiles atrapados en medio de la violencia o asesinados por sus propios gobiernos.

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.

An intriguing look behind the congenial facade of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, this work reveals how each leader jealously guarded knowledge from the other in pursuit of separate national interests.

German tanks rolled unimpeded across the Russian steppes at the start of Hitler’s campaign against the Soviet Union. But in 1943, the so-called Slavic "untermensch" (subhumans) gain the initiative and transform the country into a hell for Hitler’s invasion forces. Nearly 100,000 Germans are captured after the Battle of Stalingrad at the beginning of the year. Ahead lies cold, hunger and ill-treatment, and only five percent of prisoners will return to Germany after the war.

While Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first hundred days may be the most celebrated period of his presidency, the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor proved the most critical. Beginning as early as 1939, when Germany first attacked Poland, Roosevelt skillfully navigated a host of challenges: a reluctant population, an unprepared military, and disagreements within his cabinet to prepare the country for its inevitable confrontation with the Axis.

Throughout World War II, when Saturday nights came around, servicemen and hostesses happily forgot the war for a little while as they danced together in USO clubs, which served as havens of stability in a time of social, moral, and geographic upheaval. Meghan Winchell demonstrates that in addition to boosting soldier morale, the USO acted as an architect of the gender roles and sexual codes that shaped the "greatest generation".

¿De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de fascismo y populismo? ¿Qué los asemeja y qué los diferencia? ¿Cuáles son sus conexiones en términos teóricos y cuáles en su decurso histórico? ¿Cómo y por qué el fascismo se transformó en el populismo en la historia?

Decisive Moments in History: The Manhattan Project covers the beginning of atomic research prior to the Manhattan Project, the exodus of talented scientists fleeing Nazi Germany throughout Europe, and the history and results of the grand project that ushered in the Atomic Age.

In this biography, young listeners will learn all about Elizebeth Friedman (1892-1980), a brilliant American code breaker who smashed Nazi spy rings, took down gangsters, and created the CIA's first cryptology unit. Her story came to light when her secret papers were finally declassified in 2015. From thwarting notorious rumrunners with only paper and pencil to “counter-spying into the minds and activities of” Nazis, she held a pivotal role in the early days of US cryptology. No code was too challenging for her to crack, and her work undoubtedly saved thousands of lives.

A stirring true story of the journalists who dared to oppose Hitler - and the campaign waged against them. After serving in the First World War, Adolf Hitler encountered a serious obstacle to his plotting for power when the Munich Post, drawing on sources within the Nazi Party, began tracking the corruption and dark dreams of his inner circle. With leaked documents from Hitler's political rivals, who were shocked by his violent rhetoric and fearing the worst, the Post battled Hitler for ownership of the truth.

This young readers’ edition from New York Times best-selling author and Fox News anchor Bret Baier dives into the first of the secret World War II meetings between President Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, which would shape the world for decades to come.

Lily Nakai and her family lived in Southern California, where sometimes she and a friend dreamt of climbing the Hollywood sign that lit the night. At age 10, after believing that her family was simply going on a “camping trip”, she found herself living in a tar-papered barrack, nightly gazing out instead at a searchlight. She wondered if anything would ever be normal again. In this creative memoir, Lily Havey uses storytelling to recount her youth in two Japanese American internment camps during World War II.

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.

In 1929, Raymond Geist went to Berlin as a consul, and he handled visas for emigrants to the US. Geist expedited the exit of Albert Einstein just before Hitler came to power. Once the Nazis began to oppress Jews and others, Geist's role became vitally important. It was Geist who extricated Sigmund Freud from Vienna and Geist who understood the scale and urgency of the humanitarian crisis. Even while hiding his homosexual relationship with a German, Geist fearlessly challenged the Nazi police state whenever it abused Americans in Germany or threatened US interests.

Adolf Hitler is one of the most studied men in history, and yet the most important things we think we know about him are wrong. As Brendan Simms' major new biography shows, Hitler's main preoccupation was not, as widely believed, the threat of Bolshevism but that of international capitalism and Anglo-America. These two fears drove both his anti-Semitism and his determination to secure the 'living space' necessary to survive in a world dominated by the British Empire and the United States.

In 1942, in its rush to assemble a force of seven million to take on the Axis powers, the Army discovered it had inducted some iffy patriots. Unsure of what to do with them, the Army put them all into a misfit company: the 620th Engineer General Service Company. Seething, they considered disobedience, desertion, and, ultimately, a plan to sabotage the war effort. That’s when Dale Maple and two German POWs deserted. Their plans: get to Germany and persuade the government to supply money and materials for guerilla war on US soil. That’s when their fates took an only-in-America turn.

Target Tirpitz is gripping WW2 storytelling at its best and a return to the RAF territory of Patrick Bishop’s bestselling Bomber Boys and Fighter Boys. The Tirpitz, Hitler’s greatest weapon, was reputed to be unsinkable and the battleship inflamed an Allied obsession: to destroy her at any cost. More than thirty daring operations were launched against the 52,000 ton monster.