Showing results by author "Charles Rivers" in All Categories

One of his biographers called him "a complex man: a born leader, a brilliant soldier, a devoted husband, a proud father; intelligent, instinctive, brave, compassionate, vain, egotistical, and arrogant." As that description suggests, every account of Erwin Rommel's life must address what appears to be its inherent contradictions.

In the course of his work, Debs changed the political scene in America. He established the Socialist Party, and when he ran for president in 1912, he attracted a noticeable percentage of the popular vote. No Socialist politician has been as successful on the national level before or since. Eugene V. Debs: The Life and Legacy of America’s Most Famous Socialist Political Leader chronicles the life and work that made him one of America’s most influential men.

The United States has no shortage of famous military units, from the Civil War's Iron Brigade to the 101st Airborne, but one would be hard pressed to find one that had to go through as many hardships off the field as the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of African American fighter pilots who overcame Jim Crow at home and official segregation in the military to serve their country in the final years of World War II.

In 1957, little-known comedian and actor Andy Griffith won acclaim for his portrayal as a country drifter who uses his powers of persuasion to become a television host in A Face in the Crowd, so it was only fitting that the role helped propel him to become the face of one of America's most beloved sitcoms. The Andy Griffith Show starred Griffith and a motley crew of eccentric characters, most notably his sidekick Barney Fife (played by Don Knotts).

The study of the apocryphal gospels, documents about the life or sayings of Jesus that did not become part of the New Testament, is a popular discipline among scholars that now fills several shelves of any respectable library. However, few consider the question of whether the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Bible, is "complete" and whether in antiquity there were other books besides "Genesis", the "Exodus" or "Judges", with different histories and unknown characters, that were excluded from the canon and got lost in the sands of time.

The belief in lycanthropy is far older and more complex than most people suspect, dating all the way back to antiquity, and werewolves were once assumed to be very real. Indeed, people were even put on trial and executed because the courts of law were convinced they could change their form and kill innocent people. For thousands of years, werewolves have represented a strange and ancient tradition that still echoes through culture to this day.

In terms of geopolitics, perhaps the most seminal event of the Middle Ages was the successful Ottoman siege of Constantinople in 1453. The city had been an imperial capital as far back as the fourth century, when Constantine the Great shifted the power center of the Roman Empire there, effectively establishing two almost equally powerful halves of antiquity’s greatest empire. Constantinople would continue to serve as the capital of the Byzantine Empire even after the Western half of the Roman Empire collapsed in the late fifth century.

The Apache of the American Southwest have achieved almost legendary status for their fierceness and their tenacity in fighting the US Army. Names like Nana, Cochise, and Geronimo are synonymous with bravery and daring, and the tribe had that reputation long before the Americans arrived. Indeed, among all the Native American tribes, the Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans learned the hard way that the warriors of the Apache were perhaps the fiercest in North America. Based in the Southwest, the Apache fought all three in Mexico and the American Southwest.

The Boer War was the defining conflict of South African history and one of the most important conflicts in the history of the British Empire. Naturally, complicated geopolitics underscored it, going back centuries. In fact, the European history of South Africa began with the 1652 arrival of a small Dutch flotilla in Table Bay, at the southern extremity of the African continent, which made landfall with a view to establishing a victualing station to service passing Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) ships.

What happens when you put good people in a bad place? That was the question that an experiment in 1971 set out to answer when Stanford University professor and psychologist Philip Zimbardo used funding provided by the U.S. Office of Naval Research to create a make-believe prison in the basement of a university building. Male students were offered the chance to take part in the two-week experiment (and to make $15 per day). All applicants were carefully screened to ensure that they were healthy, emotionally and psychologically stable. 24 men were selected out of 75 that had applied.

On October 21, 1600, two massive Japanese armies, totaling an estimated 200,000 soldiers armed to the teeth with swords, yari (spears), arrows, muskets, and cannons, faced off on a battlefield near the town of Sekigahara. A bitter fight to the death ensued, and the results would determine the course of Japanese history for the next 250 years. On the battlefield was the warlord Leyasu Tokugawa, a man desiring domain over the entire island of Japan, but standing in his way was Ishida Mitsunari, a warlord controlling vast swaths of western Japan.

The man who would become the Father of Organized Crime in the United States was born Salvatore Lucania in Sicily, but he would quickly make a name for himself after his family moved to New York City when he was still a child. By his teenage years, he was running the streets, organizing his own teenage gang, and moving in circles with the likes of Meyer Lansky, who would become key figures in Lucky's rise to power.

A serial killer in earth-gray uniform and polished jackboots, Eichmann found an unprecedented opportunity for unleashing his homicidal impulses during the Final Solution from 1942-1945, at the height of the Nazi Third Reich's rule in Germany.

In the early 19th century, two literary works appeared and helped shape Christmas. The first was a collection of stories by Washington Irving, entitled Sketch Book, from 1819. Next came "A Visit from St. Nicholas", a children's poem better known as “The Night Before Christmas”, which was published anonymously in 1823. The poem spread quickly and helped install a definitive image of Santa Claus in the popular imagination, with his sleigh, his eight reindeer (each one with a name), his red nose, and his journeys down chimneys to fill children's stockings with toys.

It was in the nature of Belgium’s withdrawal from Africa that power was essentially handed over to the first in line to receive it. Very little of the careful preparation that characterized the British withdrawal from Africa was evident in Congo. As it turned out, the first in line to take power was a tall, stern-featured ideologue by the name of Patrice Lumumba. This audiobook looks at one of the most important African leaders of the 20th century.

Any work about the mercurial Aleister Crowley is better off being labeled a “story” than a “biography” thanks to the impossibility of being sure that anything one reads about him is true. The basic recorded facts, including birth date, educational records, and published works, are reliable indicators that can be likened to stars guiding a lost desert traveler if the sky is clear. For the rest, one is wandering in the wilderness.

For the ancient Greeks, there were few divine beings more important, and more generous, to humanity than the goddess Athena. She was also called "Pallas", "Pallas Athena", and (to the Romans) "Minerva". The daughter of Zeus, Athena was famous as a virgin warrior woman who was born from her father's skull bearing a helmet, shield, and spear. Yet she was far more than simply a warrior goddess.

The road to the modern age of cultural harmony and acceptance is one of the finest feats of human progress, but having said that, there was once a time when the mere doubt of a religious figure's existence was not only punishable by law, it could very well cost a man his life. This was the crime of heresy.

Who were the Cathars, and why was the Catholic Church so committed to getting rid of them? The Cathars: The History and Legacy of the Gnostic Christian Sect During the Middle Ages examines the origins of the cult, their fascinating belief system, their gradual development over the years, and the events that contributed to their epic downfall.

On Wednesday, March 28, 1979, 36 seconds after the hour of 4:00 a.m., several water pumps stopped working in the unit 2 nuclear power plant on Three Mile Island, 10 miles southeast of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania