Category: History

The Diggers of Kapyong: The story of the Aussies who changed the course of the Korean War by Tom Gilling
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 5.71 MB
Overview: The gripping account of Australia in the Korean War and how 3RAR battalion held back an entire Chinese army division to prevent Seoul being overrun.

We charged and we began to get shot down… there were so many bullets coming that it was like walking, running into a very stiff breeze. Most of the section had been knocked out and I’m within ten foot of the Chinese trench when bang, something hit me. It just blew the legs out from underneath me.

April 1951. After ten months of fighting, the Korean War hangs in the balance. A single Australian battalion, backed by Kiwi gunners and American tanks, is dug in on a barren hilltop overlooking the Kapyong Valley, north of Seoul. Together with a Canadian battalion on a nearby hill, they are all that stands between Mao’s army and the South Korean capital.

Since pouring across the North Korean border to support Kim Il Sung’s communist fighters, the Chinese have launched offensive after offensive in an attempt to drive General MacArthur’s UN forces off the peninsular. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers from both sides have been killed and many more have frozen to death in the cruel Korean winter. On the barren hills above the Kapyong Valley, the heavily outnumbered Diggers of 3RAR wait in darkness for a battle that could decide the war’s outcome.

Told through the eyes of the soldiers, The Diggers of Kapyong is the compelling account of the mateship, sacrifice and heroism that defined Australia’s role in a bloody war whose bitter legacy still resonates today.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History



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Phoenician Language and Writing: The History and Legacy of the Ancient World’s Most Influential Script by Charles River Editors
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 4.40 Mb
Overview: Of all the peoples of the ancient Near East, the Phoenicians are among the most recognizable but also perhaps the least understood. The Phoenicians never built an empire like the Egyptians and Assyrians; in fact, the Phoenicians never created a unified Phoenician state but instead existed as independent city-state kingdoms scattered throughout the Mediterranean region. However, despite the fact there was never a “Phoenician Empire,” the Phoenicians proved to be more prolific in their exploration and colonization than any other peoples in world history until the Spanish during the Age of Discovery. The Phoenicians built colonies on the African and European sides of the Mediterranean, and likely led trade expeditions to the British Isles and some unidentified parts of Africa, becoming the first people in the ancient Mediterranean to sail beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. Some ancient sources even claimed they went far beyond that – according to the 5th century BCE Greek historian Herodotus, contemporary Phoenicians claimed to have circumnavigated Africa about 1,500 years before Vasco da Gamma did it for the Portuguese at the end of the 15th century. Later, when the Achaemenid Persians conquered most of the Near East in the 6th century BCE, the Persians used the Phoenicians to lead their navy as they conquered kingdom after kingdom, eventually engaging the Greek city-states in the Greco-Persian Wars.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History



There is no doubt that the alphabets and forms of writing employed by most European languages comes directly from the Phoenicians, but the process by which that took place is still a mystery. Some of the ancient historians provided theories concerning how the Phoenicians gave their alphabet and system of writing to the Greeks, and Herodotus offered an account that is probably more accurate than most. He claimed, “The Phoenicians who came with Cadmus – amongst whom were the Gephyraei – introduced into Greece, after their settlement in the country, a number of accomplishments, of which the most important was writing, an art till then, I think, unknown to the Greeks. At first, they used the same characters as all the other Phoenicians, but as time went on, and they changed their language, they also changed the shape of their letters. At that period most of the Greeks in the neighborhood were Ionians; they were also taught these letters by the Phoenicians and adopted them, with a few alterations, for their own use, continuing to refer to them as Phoenician characters – as was only right, as the Phoenicians had introduced them.” (Herodotus Histories, V, 58).

Like many of Herodotus’ other passages in Histories, there is truth wrapped with some errors. The Greeks certainly knew of the concept of writing before the Phoenicians, as the Mycenaeans used the Linear B script, but that knowledge had vanished at the end of the Bronze Age (Morkot 1996, 18). Perhaps what makes Herodotus’ account accurate and most interesting is his description of how the writing evolved. He mentions how the Greeks “changed the shape of their letters”, which is the normal course when any group of people adopts a script to write their native language. For example, there are slight variations in the Latin script employed by most modern Western European languages, such as the umlauts in German or the various accents in French and Spanish. The Eastern European Cyrillic script is another example of how a group of people (the Slavs) took the Greek script and altered it to fit their own languages. Herodotus’ account clearly demonstrates that the source he consulted was knowledgeable concerning the transfer of writing and scripts, and there is no reason to reject the assertion that it was the Phoenicians who first brought writing to Europe.

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Niels Bohr and J. Robert Oppenheimer: The Lives and Careers of the Physicists Who Pioneered Atomic Energy by Charles River Editors
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 10 Mb
Overview: Sticky, flaky pastries injected with generous dollops of custard or fruit fillings. The iconic, brightly colored building blocks better known as Lego bricks. The scenic Nyhavn, a picturesque waterfront and entertainment district featuring a variety of traditional vessels and multicolored houses that color the reflections of the canal’s glass-like surface. These are only a few of the plentiful fruits that have blossomed on Danish soil, and they demonstrate some of the many reasons why Denmark has been crowned among the top three happiest countries in the world (out of 155 nations surveyed) for seven consecutive years and counting.

The Danes have incorporated a system that prizes a balance between work and play, the concept of “hygge,” solid investments made towards the treatment of mental illness, and a stellar welfare model. That has helped ensure that an endless stream of intellectuals, inventors, creative legends, and pioneers have hailed from Denmark over many centuries, from classical scholar Ada Adler to fabled 16th century astronomer Tycho Brahe. One of the most famous, and important, is Niels Bohr, a world-famous physicist and one of the patriarchs of quantum theory. Given the vibrant, peaceful haven that is Denmark today, it’s somewhat ironic that Bohr played an instrumental role in the development of the atomic bomb. Even so, the truth and depth of the matter, much like the self-professed pacifist himself, is far more complex.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History



The Manhattan Project would ultimately yield the “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” bombs that released more than 100 Terajoules of energy at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but as it turned out, the Axis were not far behind with their own nuclear weapons program. When the Nazis’ quest for a nuclear weapon began in earnest in 1939, no one really had a handle on how important nuclear weapons would prove to war and geopolitics. The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, along with the Cold War-era tests and their accompanying mushroom clouds, would demonstrate the true power and terror of nuclear weapons, but in the late 1930s these bombs were only vaguely being thought through, particularly after the successful first experiment to split the atom by a German scientist. The nuclear age itself was in its infancy, barely 35 years old, but within a few short years the advent of nuclear war loomed over the world and the prospect of the enemy winning the nuclear race kept Allied leaders awake at night.

The pursuit of nuclear weapons moved the scientist nearer to the role of combatant, placing special responsibilities on the scientific community to make critical moral decisions. However, as they developed atomic weapons, they could at the same time only warn military powers of their use. Advocates for nuclear power as a civilian energy resource but expressing misgivings about nuclear war put them at odds with uninformed branches of the military. The American government and the population at large, who possessed little understanding of the perilous science behind the technology, brought about charges of unpatriotic behavior for such misgivings. Scientists, meanwhile, were caught between the excitement of creating a new paradigm, and the dread of their eventual use.

The American war effort against the Japanese and Germans also included denying either one the use of a practical nuclear weapon. Physics was in its highest stage of advancement in Europe during this time, while J. Robert Oppenheimer emerged as an extraordinary scientific mind in the United States. Despite requiring the work of thousands of scientists and assistants in fashioning the weapon that eventually came to pass, Oppenheimer alone has been become renowned as the “father of the atomic bomb” due to his leadership of the Manhattan Project.

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The Battle of Kapetron: The History and Legacy of the First Major Battle Between the byzantine Empire and Seljuk Turks by Charles River Editors
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 3.25 Mb
Overview: The Byzantine Empire existed for over a thousand years, with a history spanning from the division of the Roman Empire in 395 until the Ottomsn conquest of Constantinople in 1453. It was formed from the previous Eastern Roman Empire, and during its long existence, the Byzantine inhabitants were very proud to call themselves Romans.

However, many things changed during the long lifespan of the Byzantine Empire, starting with a Hellenization in the 6th century. The use of the Latin language diminished and Greek took its place, while the typical Roman culture gave way to a more Hellenistic one. The Hellenization of Byzantium was detrimental to the relationship with the Holy Roman Empire, and the Christian world from that point would be split in two. The subsequent strengthening of the Orthodox Church caused many civil wars and conflicts to arise during the centuries, which shattered and reshaped the territory time after time. By the end of the Byzantine Empire’s existence, the old age had weakened both the state and church, making it an easy target for invading forces.

The most notable invaders were the Turkish-speaking Seljuks, led through a series of battles by Kutalmishouglu Suleiman, who supported different usurpers against the Byzantine emperor. The expansion of the Seljuks was so successful that when Suleiman died, he had put all of Bithynia under his control as well as several important harbor towns along the shores on the Asian side of Bosphorus. With that accomplishment, he had managed to separate the Byzantines living in Anatolia from their emperor in Constantinople. This immediately weakened the unity of the Byzantine Empire.

When another invading Muslim army took control of what is now Syria, Israel, and Northern Africa, the dismembered Byzantine Empire lost significant portions of land, but that allowed it to grow into a smaller and stronger unity. It took a lot of power struggles and battles on many fronts for the empire to recapture some of the lands, but gradually the Byzantine Empire lost all influence in Anatolia. By the end of the 11th century, the Hellenic culture and Greek language were replaced by Islam and Turkish.

Of all the conflicts that brought this state of affairs into being, few were as instrumental as the Battle of Kapetron, the culmination of one of the first major Seljuk raids into Byzantine territory. It represented not just a clash of ethnicities, cultures, and religions, but also a harbinger of a changing of the guard, and one that would shape geopolitics in the region for the next several centuries.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History



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The Great Patriotic War: The History of the Fighting Between the Soviets and Germans during World War II by Charles River Editors
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 55 Mb
Overview: In the warm predawn darkness of June 22, 1941, 3 million men waited along a front hundreds of miles long, stretching from the Baltic coast of Poland to the Balkans. Ahead of them in the darkness lay the Soviet Union, its border guarded by millions of Red Army troops echeloned deep throughout the huge spaces of Russia. This massive gathering of Wehrmacht soldiers from Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich and his allied states – notably Hungary and Romania – stood poised to carry out Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s surprise attack against the country of his putative ally, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History



Though Germany was technically Russia’s ally, Stalin had no delusions that they were friends. Instead, he used this time to build up his forces for what he saw as an inevitable invasion. First, on the heels of the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Stalin had his troops invade and reclaim the land Russia had lost in World War I. Next he turned his attention to Finland, which was only 100 miles from the newly named Leningrad. He initially tried to negotiate with the Finnish government for some sort of treaty of mutual support. When this failed he simply invaded. While the giant Russian army ultimately won, the fact that little Finland held them off for three months demonstrated how poorly organized the bigger force was.

The Soviets were so caught by surprise at the start of the attack that the Germans were able to push several hundred miles into Russia across a front that stretched dozens of miles long, reaching the major cities of Leningrad and Sevastopol in just three months. The first major Russian city in their path was Minsk, which fell in only six days. In order to make clear his determination to win at all costs, Stalin had the three men in charge of the troops defending Minsk executed for their failure to hold their position. This move, along with unspeakable atrocities by the German soldiers against the people of Minsk, solidified the Soviet will. In the future, Russian soldiers would fight to the death rather than surrender, and in July, Stalin exhorted the nation, “It is time to finish retreating. Not one step back! Such should now be our main slogan. … Henceforth the solid law of discipline for each commander, Red Army soldier, and commissar should be the requirement — not a single step back without order from higher command.”

Entering 1943, the Allies looked to press their advantage in the Pacific and Western Europe. The United States was firmly pushing the Japanese back across the Pacific, while the Americans and British plotted a major invasion somewhere in Western Europe to relieve the pressure on the Soviets. By the time the Allies conducted that invasion, the Soviets had lifted the siege of Stalingrad. The Allies were now firmly winning the war.

Even before the British and Americans were able to make major strategic decisions in 1943, a massive German surrender at Stalingrad in February marked the beginning of the end for Hitler’s armies in Russia. From that point forward, the Red Army started to steadily push the Nazis backward toward Germany. Yet it would still take the Red Army almost an entire two years to push the Germans all the way out of Russia.

While the British, Canadians and Americans pushed east, the Red Army pushed west. During their nearly three year stay in Russia, the Germans had completely burned and destroyed thousands of Russian villages and murdered millions of Russian citizens. The Red Army was seeking revenge by the end of 1944.

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