Showing results for "The War of the Worlds" in Expeditions & Discoveries

Using never-before-published archives, Abbott Kahler weaves a chilling, stranger-than-fiction tale worthy of Agatha Christie. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the march to World War II, with a mystery as alluring and curious as the Galápagos itself, Eden Undone explores the universal and timeless desire to seek utopia–and lays bare the human fallibility that, inevitably, renders such a quest doomed.

From 1931 to 1953, there was a race like no other. It was a race to the top of the world - a race primarily between Great Britain, Nazi Germany and the United States. Carried on across nearly the entire sweep of the Himalayas, it involved not only the greatest mountain climbers of the era, but statesmen and millionaires, world-class athletes and bona fide eccentrics, scientists and generals, obscure villagers and national heroes.

In the gold rush era of Virginia City, Montana, crime was afoot and justice shaky. Lawlessness ran amok in the form of gamblers, saloonkeepers, miners, dance hall girls, and road agents - outlaws who ambushed travelers on the road for a chance to steal precious gold. Of all the road agents, Henry Plummer was their king and elected sheriff. Plummer’s notorious road-agent band terrorized the highways until a group of ordinary citizens resolved to take the responsibility of social governance into their hands.

In Dreams of El Dorado, H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West. He takes us from John Jacob Astor's fur trading outpost in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush. He shows how the migrants' dreams drove them to feats of courage and perseverance that put their stay-at-home cousins to shame - and how those same dreams also drove them to outrageous acts of violence against indigenous peoples and one another. El Dorado was at least as elusive in the West as it ever was in the East.

On November 12, 1912, a rescue team trekking across Antarctica's Great Ice Barrier finally found what they sought - the snow-covered tent of the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott. Inside, they made a grim discovery: Scott's frozen body lay between the bodies of two fellow explorers. They had died just eleven miles from the depot of supplies which might have saved them.

John Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalayas. Michael Spender was the first to survey the northern approach to the summit of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers - W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender - achieved literary fame, they vied for a place on an expedition that would finally conquer Everest, a quest that had become a metaphor for Britain’s efforts to maintain power over India. To this rivalry was added another: in the summer of 1938 both men fell in love with a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would determine each man’s wartime loyalties.

The Sea War is a wonderful, accessible history rooted in the Second World War. As the Soviet Union played its role in the fracas, Ally convoys from the UK, the United States and Iceland fought to deliver essential supplies to Russia. In a clash of extreme elements and fierce Axis opposition, the effort demonstrated like no other the commitment from other nations to supporting the Soviet Union.

Imperial conquest and colonization depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace is a panoramic history of how these routines of violence remapped the contours of empire and reordered the world from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries.

On May 25, 1961, less than two months after a Soviet cosmonaut had made the very first space flight, President John F. Kennedy told Congress, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

It was November 1806. The explorers had gone without food for one day, then two. Their leader, not yet thirty, drove on, determined to ascend the great mountain. Waist deep in snow, he reluctantly turned back. But Zebulon Pike had not been defeated. His name remained on the unclimbed peak-and new adventures lay ahead of him and his republic. In Citizen Explorer, historian Jared Orsi provides the first modern biography of this soldier and explorer, who rivaled contemporaries Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

In the final days of World War II, with the ravenous Red Army marching across Czechoslovakia, a wily band of American soldiers did the unexpected: They teamed up with the Nazis and went behind enemy lines to save the world's rarest horses from imminent extinction at the hands of the Russians - including the exquisite white Lipizzaner, whose bloodlines date back to Genghis Khan.

Huge international companies and corporations are a normal part of our everyday lives today. For most, their unimaginable wealth and power, rivaling even some of the smaller countries of the world, is something we take for granted. And we see them as the living embodiment of the capitalist system, regardless if we take it as a good or a bad omen. However, this wasn’t always the case.

In November 1943, Marine 1st Lt. Alexander Bonnyman Jr. was mortally wounded while leading a successful assault on critical Japanese fortifications on the Pacific atoll of Tarawa. But it was not until August 2015 that he was finally laid to rest. Bonnyman Jr. was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor and Purple Heart for his heroic actions during the bloody battle, which would ultimately claim the lives of almost 2,000 Marines and 5,000 Japanese soldiers. But the lieutenant, along with hundreds of other Marines, was buried in an unmarked grave.