Category: History

A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (American Empire Project) by Alfred W. McCoy
Requirements: .ePUB Reader | 1.2 MB
Overview: In this revelatory account of the CIA’s fifty-year effort to develop new forms of torture, historian Alfred W. McCoy locates the deep roots of recent scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo in a long-standing, covert program of interrogation. A Question of Torture investigates the CIA’s practice of "sensory deprivation" and "self-inflicted pain," in which techniques including isolation, hooding, hours of standing, and manipulation of time assault the victim’s senses and destroy the basis of personal identity. McCoy traces the spread of these practices across the globe, from Vietnam to Iran to Central America, and argues that after 9/11, psychological torture became the weapon of choice in the CIA’s global prisons, reinforced by "rendition" of detainees to "torture-friendly" countries. Finally, McCoy shows that information extracted by coercion is worthless, making a strong case for the FBI’s legal methods of interrogation.

Scrupulously documented and grippingly told, A Question of Torture is a devastating indictment of inhumane practices that have damaged America’s laws, military, and international standing.
Genre: Non Fiction History

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The Age of Chivalry: The Story of Medieval Europe, 950 to 1450 by Hywel Williams
Requirements: ePUB reader, 14 MB
Overview: The five hundred years that separate the mid-tenth century from the mid-15th century constitute a critical and formative period in the history of Europe. This was the age of the system of legal and military obligation known as ‘feudalism’, and of the birth and consolidation of powerful kingdoms in England, France and Spain; it was an era of urbanization and the expansion of trade, of the building of the great Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals, of courtly romance and the art of the troubadour, and of the founding of celebrated seats of learning in Paris, Oxford and Bologna. But it was also an epoch characterised by brutal military adventure in the launching of armed pilgrimages to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim control, of the brutal dynastic conflict of the Hundred Years’ War and of the devastating pandemic of the Black Death. In a sequence of scholarly but accessible articles – accompanied by an array of beautiful and authentic images of the era, plus timelines, maps, boxed features and display quotes – distinguished historian Hywel Williams sheds revelatory light on every aspect of a rich and complex period of European history. Ottonians and Salians; Rise of the Capetians; Normans in England; Birth of the city-states; The Normans in Sicily; The First Crusade; The Investiture contest; The Hohenstaufen; The Angevin Empire; 12th-century Renaissance; Triumph of the Capetians; The Third Crusade; The Albigensian Crusade; The glory of Islamic Spain; The Kingdom of Naples; The Hundred Years War I; The Hundred Years War II; Avignon and the Schism; The Golden Age of Florence; The Reconquista; Popes, Saints and Heretics; Medieval society; Medieval culture; Medieval warfare.
Genre: History / Military

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Urban Legends & Historic Lore of Washington, D.C by Robert S. Pohl
Requirements: .ePUB Reader | 5 MB
Overview: A carving of General Lee on the back of the Lincoln monument, the birth of lobbying at the Willard Hotel, a romantic gesture that built the distinctive homes of Capitol Hill–these are legends of Washington, D.C. The capital is home to all manner of colorful rumors and tall tales. According to local lore, the missing J Street was L’Enfant’s snub to Supreme Court justice John Jay, and the course of history could have been changed if only a young baseball player named Fidel Castro had accepted a contract with the Washington Senators. In search of the truth behind these legends and more, local guide and writer Robert S. Pohl takes readers on a tour of the historic lore and urban legends that surround the monuments, neighborhood streets and even the Metro stations of Washington, D.C.
Genre: Non Fiction History > Travel > Pictorial

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The Capture of Adolf Eichmann by Michael Bar Zohar, Nissim Mishal
Requirements: .ePUB Reader | 513 kb
Overview: One consequence of the Holocaust was the determination of many Jews to bring to justice those Nazi war criminals who had escaped after the war and were now in hiding throughout the world. Simon Wiesenthal, an Austrian survivor who had been forced to work in slave labor camps, dedicated his life to hunting down former Nazis and became famous for it. But the most celebrated accomplishment in this continuing campaign for retribution was the capture, trial, and execution of Adolf Eichmann in 1960—1962. As the Nazi officer overseeing the logistics of the Final Solution, Eichmann had been responsible for sending millions of Jews to their extermination in the death camps of Europe. Since the close of the war he had been living under an assumed name in Argentina when the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, learned of his possible whereabouts. Here is the behind-the-scenes story of Eichmann’s capture.
Genre: Non Fiction History

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The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South by Bruce C. Levine
Requirements: .ePUB Reader | 7.1 MB
Overview: In this major new history of the Civil War, Bruce Levine tells the riveting story of how that conflict upended the economic, political, and social life of the old South, utterly destroying the Confederacy and the society it represented and defended. Told through the words of the people who lived it, The Fall of the House of Dixie illuminates the way a war undertaken to preserve the status quo became a second American Revolution whose impact on the country was as strong and lasting as that of our first.
In 1860 the American South was a vast, wealthy, imposing region where a small minority had amassed great political power and enormous fortunes through a system of forced labor. The South’s large population of slaveless whites almost universally supported the basic interests of plantation owners, despite the huge wealth gap that separated them. By the end of 1865 these structures of wealth and power had been shattered. Millions of black people had gained their freedom, many poorer whites had ceased following their wealthy neighbors, and plantation owners were brought to their knees, losing not only their slaves but their political power, their worldview, their very way of life. This sea change was felt nationwide, as the balance of power in Congress, the judiciary, and the presidency shifted dramatically and lastingly toward the North, and the country embarked on a course toward equal rights.
Levine captures the many-sided human drama of this story using a huge trove of diaries, letters, newspaper articles, government documents, and more. In The Fall of the House of Dixie, the true stakes of the Civil War become clearer than ever before, as slaves battle for their freedom in the face of brutal reprisals; Abraham Lincoln and his party turn what began as a limited war for the Union into a crusade against slavery by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation; poor southern whites grow increasingly disillusioned with fighting what they have come to see as the plantation owners’ war; and the slave owners grow ever more desperate as their beloved social order is destroyed, not just by the Union Army, but also from within. When the smoke clears, not only Dixie but all of American society is changed forever.
Brilliantly argued and engrossing, The Fall of the House of Dixie is a sweeping account of the destruction of the old South during the Civil War, offering a fresh perspective on the most colossal struggle in our history and the new world it brought into being.
Genre: Non Fiction History

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