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History Reference Center
Full-text articles to support research in history and genealogy and lesson plans to support student learning.
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On the basis of 1,400 oral histories from the men who were there, Eisenhower biographer and World War II historian Stephen E. Ambrose reveals for the first time anywhere that the intricate plan for the invasion of France in June 1944, had to be abandoned before the first shot was fired. The true story of D-Day, as Ambrose relates it, is about the citizen soldiers - junior officers and enlisted men - taking the initiative to act on their own to break...
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"Autumn 1944. World War II is nearly over in Europe but is escalating in the Pacific, where American soldiers face an opponent who will go to any length to avoid defeat. The Japanese army follows the samurai code of Bushido, stipulating that surrender is a form of dishonor. Killing the Rising Sun takes readers to the bloody tropical-island battlefields of Peleliu and Iwo Jima and to the embattled Philippines, where General Douglas MacArthur has made...
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The liberation of Europe and defeat of the Third Reich is an epic story of courage and calamity, of miscalculation and enduring triumph. Sixty years after America joined the struggle, Atkinson shows why no modern reader can understand the Allied victory without a grasp of what unfolded in North Africa in 1942 and 1943, where American officers learned how to lead, soldiers learned how to hate, and an army learned what it takes to vanquish a formidable...
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"Ten years in the making, Presidents of War is a fresh, intimate, irresistibly readable narrative of how a procession of Chief Executives took the nation into major conflicts, mobilized Americans for victory and seized greater power for themselves. Beschloss's findings in original letters, diaries, and declassified documents, and his interviews with surviving participants in the drama, allow him to bring us into the room and into the minds of these...
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In September 1776, the vulnerable Continental Army under an unsure George Washington (who had never commanded a large force in battle) evacuates New York after a devastating defeat by the British Army. Three weeks later, near the Canadian border, one of his favorite generals, Benedict Arnold, miraculously succeeds in postponing the British naval advance down Lake Champlain that might have ended the war. Four years later, as the book ends, Washington...
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The real-life protagonist of The Black Count, General Alex Dumas, is a man almost unknown today yet with a story that is strikingly familiar, because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used it to create some of the best loved heroes of literature. Yet, hidden behind these swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret: the real hero was the son of a black slave -- who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race would before...
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"Robert Harris returns to the thrilling historical fiction he has so brilliantly made his own. This is the story of the infamous Dreyfus affair told as a chillingly dark, hard-edged novel of conspiracy and espionage. Paris in 1895. Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish officer, has just been convicted of treason, sentenced to life imprisonment at Devil's Island, and stripped of his rank in front of a baying crowd of twenty-thousand. Among the witnesses to...
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In "American Gun", the deadliest sniper in U.S. history tracks down and shoots the most important American firearms, from a flintlock rifle to a Colt revolver to the latest high-tech weapon he used as a SEAL. Chris Kyle uses these guns as a window on United States history, making the sweeping argument that the American story has been tied to and shaped by the gun.
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A sweeping epic of Israel from its founding to the Six-Day War, from the #1 NewYork Times-bestselling author: “Full of excitement.”—Entertainment Weekly
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Winds of War and The Caine Mutiny, this saga spans from 1948 to 1967, the early decades of the state of Israel as it fights for its life, outmatched and surrounded by enemies—the first...
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Winds of War and The Caine Mutiny, this saga spans from 1948 to 1967, the early decades of the state of Israel as it fights for its life, outmatched and surrounded by enemies—the first...
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"The Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Gandhi & Churchill goes beyond the mythologies of the World War II general to illuminate his strengths and weaknesses, placing his career against a backdrop of history while discussing how he shaped his character to meet national needs,"--NoveList.
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What causes people to forsake their country and take arms against it? George Washington in the 1770s stood at the apex of Virginia society. Benjamin Franklin was more successful still, having risen from humble origins to world fame. John Adams revered the law. Yet all three men became rebels against the British Empire that fostered their success. Others in the same circle of family and friends chose differently-- and soon heard themselves denounced...
14) Battle ready
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Marine general Tony Zinni was known as the "Warrior Diplomat" during his nearly forty years of service. His credentials as a soldier were impeccable, whether he was leading troops in Vietnam, commanding hair-raising rescue operations in Somalia, or - as Commander in Chief of CENTCOM - directing strikes against Iraq and Al Qaeda. But it was as a peacemaker that he made just as great a mark - conducting dangerous troubleshooting missions all over Africa,...
16) American veteran
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Today, America has nearly eighteen million living military veterans, from the Greatest Generation to men and women coming home from recent tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. They join the now-silent ranks of American veterans reaching back to our earliest conflict, the Revolutionary War.
17) The aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the epic Age of Flight
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Explores "the saga of three extraordinary aviators-- Charles Lindbergh, Eddie Rickenbacker, and Jimmy Doolittle-- and how they redefine heroism through their genius, daring, and uncommon courage"--
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"On July 10, 1943, the largest amphibious invasion ever mounted took place, larger even than the Normandy invasion eleven months later: 160,000 American, British, and Canadian troops came ashore or were parachuted onto Sicily, signaling the start of the campaign to defeat Nazi Germany on European soil. Operation HUSKY, as it was known, was enormously complex, involving dramatic battles on land, in the air, and at sea. Yet, despite its drama and its...
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Based on interviews of military veterans by the authors, this book explains why so many of our American military heroes—those willing to put their lives on the line to protect the United States—now question if our nation is still the country they fought for. What is happening to our country? This question is heard more and more frequently these days as Americans worry about the unrelenting attacks by so-called progressives on the foundation, core...