Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks.
Audiobooks Narrated by David Stifel
Browse audiobooks narrated by David Stifel, listen to samples and when you're ready head over to Audiobooks.com where you can get 3 FREE audiobooks on us
Uncertain Allies looks at the United States military's experience in the China-Burma-India (CBI) theater during World War II through the eyes of Joseph Stilwell, the commanding general of American forces in those three countries. Historian Eric Setzekorn focuses on two themes: uncertain allies and ambiguous missions.
Despite being allies, relationships between the Americans and Chinese, as well as Americans and the British, were marked by a lack of trust in the CBI theater. This was problematic because most combat personnel under Stilwell's command were Chinese. The lack of trust impacted tactical and operational planning. The second reoccurring theme, ambiguous missions, refers to the poorly defined goals for the theater. The CBI's mission was vague, and Stilwell lacked clear objectives.
Underlying both themes is the key flaw in Stilwell's conduct: a failure to understand the American political context. Stilwell advocated for a transactional military and political relationship despite indications that President Roosevelt, other leaders, and the American public desired a long-term cooperative relationship. Stilwell's proposals to make military aid and American support on a quid pro quo basis inevitably ran into staunch opposition. The result was a dangerous disconnect between American military operations and national policy.
The memory of the Battle of Antietam was so haunting that when, nine months later, Major Rufus Dawes learned another Antietam battle might be on the horizon, he wrote, 'I hope not, I dread the thought of the place.' In this definitive account, historian D. Scott Hartwig chronicles the single bloodiest day in American history, which resulted in 23,000 casualties.
The Battle of Antietam marked a vital turning point in the war: afterward, the conflict could no longer be understood as a limited war to preserve the Union, but was now clearly a conflict over slavery. Though the battle was tactically inconclusive, Robert E. Lee withdrew first from the battlefield, thus handing President Lincoln the political ammunition necessary to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
Based on decades of research, this in-depth narrative sheds particular light on the visceral experience of battle, an often misunderstood aspect of the American Civil War, and the emotional aftermath for those who survived. Hartwig provides an hour-by-hour tactical history of the battle, beginning before dawn on September 17 and concluding with the immediate aftermath, including General McClellan's fateful decision not to pursue Lee's retreating forces back across the Potomac to Virginia.
Six weeks after the United States entered World War II, Imperial Japan is annihilating American forces across the Far East while the Nazis stand triumphant over much of Europe. Adolf Hitler's forces are about to commence an assault along the East Coast of the United States, but this 'Atlantic Pearl Harbor' would prove far more devastating than Japan's attack on Hawaii.
The Western Hemisphere holds the key to victory, but only if the vast economic and military resources of North and South America can be carried across the Atlantic by Allied merchant ships. Germany's dreaded submarines are going to the United States.
The fiery months that followed would pit American servicemen against German U-boat sailors in a desperate struggle that stained East Coast waters with oil and blood. In the crosshairs was a stalwart contingent of civilian mariners who crewed the tankers and freighters supplying the war against the Axis Powers.
Every American coastal state became a battlefront in 1942, and the events that transpired off New Jersey illustrate the perils and brutality of this forgotten campaign. Though these seafarers' lives were forfeit, the battle they fought would decide the fates of millions.
The Gods have fallen.
The Three Nations are in chaos.
Archon is coming.
Enala is surrounded, trapped on the blood-soaked sands of Malevolent Cove. Desperate and alone, she watches the sky, and the Gold Dragons soaring above. Yet it is not the beasts she fears – but the men and woman encircling her. They promise their protection, but they are only words, and she has already lost everything to betrayal. Swamped by grief, she teeters on the edge of madness.
Meanwhile, Eric is close to mastering the curse of his magic. The perilous force writhes within him, desperate for freedom, but he refuses to bend to its will. Instead, he is determined to wield it for good, and right the wrongs of his past.
The Three Nations are crumbling.
Darkness is gathering.
Only one remains to stand against it.
Eric stumbles through the wilderness, searching, hunting – desperate for sign of his sister. But the girl is gone, stolen away by the power of the Soul Blade. With each passing hour its hold on her tightens, her spirit fading before the onslaught of its magic. If he cannot save her soon, it will claim her soul. And he will have to kill her.
Meanwhile, Gabriel is trapped, imprisoned in the black cells beneath Ardath. The darkness presses in around him, absolute, suffocating. Time, hope, sanity, all have long since slipped beneath the waves of his despair. Only it remains – the unrelenting voice of the demon. It haunts the darkness, tempting him with the promises of freedom. How long can he resist its call?
For five hundred years the Gods have united the Three Nations in harmony. Now that balance has been shattered, and chaos threatens.
A town burns and flames light the night sky. Hunted and alone, seventeen year old Eric flees through the wreckage. The mob grows closer, baying for the blood of their tormentor. Guilt weighs on his soul, but he cannot stop, cannot turn back. If he stops, they die.
For two years he has carried this curse, bringing death and destruction wherever he goes. But now there is another searching for him – one who offers salvation. His name is Alastair, and he knows the true nature of the curse. Magic.
One of the most notorious yet least understood body of troops that fought for the Third Reich during World War II was the infamous Sondereinheit Dirlewanger, or the 'Dirlewanger Special Unit.' Formed initially as a company-sized formation in June 1940 from convicted poachers, it served under the command of SS-Obersturmführer Oskar Dirlewanger, one of the most infamous criminals in military history. After assisting in putting down the Warsaw Uprising during 1944, by November of that year it had been enlarged and retitled as the 2. SS-Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger. One month later, it fought one of its most controversial actions near the town of Ipolysag, Hungary. As a result of its overly hasty and haphazard deployment, lack of heavy armament, and a confusing chain of command, it was virtually destroyed by two Soviet mechanized corps.
Consequently, the Wehrmacht leadership blamed Dirlewanger and the performance of his troops for the encirclement of the Hungarian capital of Budapest that led to the annihilation of its garrison two months later. The brigade's defeat at Ipolysag also led to its compulsory removal from the front lines and its eventual shipment to a rest area where it would be completely rebuilt. Despite its lackluster performance, the brigade was rebuilt again but never recovered from the thrashing it received at the hands of the 6th Guards Army.
The Luzon campaign of 1945 was the longest island campaign of the Pacific War, lasting from January 1945 to September 1945, and only ended with the surrender of Imperial Japan. It is often overlooked or mentioned in passing by most histories of that war, yet hundreds of thousands of Americans and Japanese fought in some of the worst conditions imaginable for eight months to clear Luzon of the invaders.
This full account of the Luzon campaign stretches from planning stages to the end of the war and the surrender of over 50,000 Japanese troops under the noted Japanese general Yamashita. The landings at Lingayen Gulf, the Battle for Manila, and the recapture of Corregidor are all included, as well as lesser-known battles for the summer capital of Baguio, the battle for Manila's water supply, constant jungle fighting, the raids to rescue Allied POWs, the recapture of Bataan, destruction of the only Japanese armored division to fight in the Pacific, American parachute drops on Corregidor and Aparri, and much more. Individual acts of heroism are highlighted as are the interactions among the senior commanders involved, including General MacArthur, General Krueger (6th Army) and General Eichelberger (8th Army). The book ends with the surrender of Imperial Japan and the end of the Luzon Campaign in September 1945.
Simmering racial tensions inflamed by discriminatory punitive measures sparked a violent confrontation aboard the USS Kitty Hawk while it was engaged in air strikes off the coast of North Vietnam.
The US Navy charged Black sailors with rioting and assaults on White sailors in an incident referred to as a race riot, while totally ignoring violent unprovoked assaults committed by White sailors and Marines.
Author Marv Truhe was a Navy JAG defense lawyer seeking justice for the accused Black sailors. Truhe possesses one of the most complete collections of original source documents of the Kitty Hawk incident and its legal aftermath-trial transcripts, investigation reports, hundreds of sworn statements and medical reports, federal court pleadings, and case files and witness interviews.
How could virtually all official and unofficial accounts of the incident have placed blame for the incident solely on twenty-three Black sailors? How could they have been subjected to blatant racial injustices without their story being told until now?
It is time to reveal the uncomfortable answers to these questions and expose the injustices perpetrated against these twenty-three young men.
The Scofield Reference Bible was the product of Dispensationalism, which offered a new way of reading the Bible, one that focused attention squarely on the end-times. That scripture would later become a core text of America's white Christian nationalism.
In The Americanization of the Apocalypse Donald Harman Akenson examines the creation and spread of Dispensationalism. The story is a transnational one: created in southern Ireland by evangelical Anglicans, who were terrified by the rise of Catholicism, then transferred to England, where it was expanded upon and next carried to British North America by 'Brethren' missionaries, and then subsequently embraced by American evangelicals.
Akenson combines a respect for individual human agency with an equal recognition of the complex and persuasive ideational system that apocalyptic Dispensationalism presented. For believers, the system explained the world and its future. For the wider culture, the product of this rich evolution was a series of concepts that became part of the everyday vocabulary of American life: end-times, apocalypse, Second Coming, Rapture, and millennium. The Americanization of the Apocalypse is the first book to document, using direct archival evidence, the invention of the epochal Scofield Reference Bible, and thus the provenance of modern American evangelicalism.
John Potts Slough, the Union commander at the Battle of Glorieta Pass, lived a life of relentless pursuit for success that entangled him in the turbulent events of mid-nineteenth-century America. As a politician, Slough fought abolitionists in the Ohio legislature and during Kansas Territory's fourth and final constitutional convention. He organized the 1st Colorado Volunteer Infantry after the Civil War broke out, eventually leading his men against Confederate forces at the pivotal engagement at Glorieta Pass. After the war, as chief justice of the New Mexico Territorial Supreme Court, he struggled to reform corrupt courts amid the territory's corrosive Reconstruction politics.
Slough was known to possess a volcanic temper and an easily wounded pride. These traits not only undermined a promising career but ultimately led to his death at the hands of an aggrieved political enemy who gunned him down in a Santa Fe saloon. Recounting Slough's timeless story of rise and fall during America's most tumultuous decades, historian Richard L. Miller brings to life this extraordinary figure.
At the start of 1932, the nation's worst economic crisis has left one-in-four workers without a job, countless families facing eviction, banks shutting down as desperate depositors withdraw their savings, and growing social and political unrest. Amid this turmoil, a political decision looms that will determine the course of the nation. It's a choice between two men with very different visions of America: Incumbent Republican Herbert Hoover and New York's Democratic Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Veteran journalist Scott Martelle provides a gripping narrative retelling of that vitally significant year as social and political systems struggled under the weight of the devastating Dust Bowl, economic woes, rising political protests, and growing demand for the repeal of Prohibition. That November, voters overwhelmingly rejected decades of Republican rule and backed Roosevelt and his promise to redefine the role of the federal government while putting the needs of the people ahead of the wishes of the wealthy.
Deftly told, this illuminating work spotlights parallel events from that pivotal year and brings to life figures who made headlines in their time but have been largely forgotten today. Ultimately, it is the story of a nation that, with the help of a leader determined to unite and inspire, took giant steps toward a new America.
