Charles River

*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the campaign written by generals and soldiers on both sides *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "Never had there been such an overwhelming victory during the Civil War - indeed, never in American military history." - Wiley Ford's comment on the Franklin-Nashville Campaign As Sherman began his infamous march to the sea, Lincoln instructed Grant to redirect General George H. Thomas' efforts back to Tennessee to protect Union supply lines and stop the offensive mounted by Confederate general John Bell Hood. Hood had broken away from Atlanta and was trying to compel Sherman to follow him, thus diverting him from his intended path of destruction. With Sherman marching east toward the sea, he directed Thomas to try to block Hood around Nashville. In late November, the Army of the Ohio, being led by Thomas' principal subordinate John Schofield, all but blindly stumbled into Hood's forces, and it was only through luck that some of them had not been bottled up before they could regroup together. Receiving word of Union troop movement in the Nashville area, General Hood sent for his generals while attempting to hold off Schofield's advance. Hood knew that if Schofield reached Thomas' position, their combined armies would number more than twice his. Though the Confederates successfully blocked Schofield's route to Nashville, the Union general managed to execute an all-night maneuver that brought him to Franklin, about 18 miles south of Nashville. On November 30, the Union army began digging in around Franklin, and that afternoon Hood ordered a frontal assault on the dug in Union army which deeply upset his own officers. After repeated frontal assaults failed to create a gap in the Union lines, Schofield withdrew his men across the river on the night of November 30, successfully escaping Hood's army. Meanwhile, Hood had inflicted nearly 8,000 casualties upon his army (men the Confederacy could scarcely afford to lose), while the Union lost about a quarter of that. Despite practically wrecking his army, which was now only about 25,000 strong, Hood marched his battered army to a position outside Nashville, Tennessee, where he took up defensive positions while awaiting reinforcements from Texas. On December 1, General Thomas sent word to Grant that he had "retired to the fortifications around Nashville until I can get my cavalry equipped", a reference to the fact that Forrest's cavalry had more than double the manpower of the Union cavalry. But Thomas also added that "if Hood attacks our position, he would be seriously damaged, but if he makes no attack until our cavalry can be equipped, I] or General Schofield will move against him at once." The following day Grant wired back, "If Hood is permitted to remain quietly about Nashville, you will lose all the road back to Chattanooga, and possibly have to abandon the line of the Tennessee. Should he attack you it is all well; but if he does not, you should attack him before he fortifies. Arm and put in the trenches your quartermaster's employees, citizens, etc." Even with Grant constantly urging him forward, Thomas held back for nearly two weeks, partly because of a bad ice storm, and his delay nearly resulted in having Grant remove him from command. When it was clear reinforcements wouldn't arrive by December 15, Thomas finally devised a complex two-pronged attack that feinted at Hood's right flank while bringing overwhelming force on the left flank. During the two day battle, Thomas effectively destroyed Hood's command, inflicting about 8,000 more Confederate casualties while losing less than half that. Upon reaching his headquarters at Tupelo, Mississippi, General Hood requested to be relieved of command rather than be removed in disgrace.

*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the massacre by a former raider *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "Kansas should be laid waste at once." - William Clarke Quantrill "No more terrifying object ever came down a street than a mounted guerrilla wild for blood, the bridle-reins between his teeth or over the saddle-horn, the horse running recklessly, the rider yelling like a Comanche, his long unkempt hair flying wildly beyond the brim of his broad hat, and firing both to the right and left with deadly accuracy. When a town was filled with such men bent on death, terror ensued, reason and judgment fled, and hell yawned." - William Elsey Connelley, author of Quantrill and the Border Wars The Civil War is best remembered for the big battles and the legendary generals who fought on both sides, like Robert E. Lee facing off against Ulysses S. Grant in 1864. In kind, the Eastern theater has always drawn more interest and attention than the West. However, while massive armies marched around the country fighting each other, there were other small guerrilla groups that engaged in irregular warfare on the margins, and among these partisan bushwhackers, none are as infamous as William Quantrill and Quantrill's Raiders. Quantrill's Raiders operated along the border between Missouri and Kansas, which had been the scene of partisan fighting over a decade earlier during the debate over whether Kansas and Nebraska would enter the Union as free states or slave states. In "Bleeding Kansas", zealous pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces fought each other, most notably John Brown, and the region became a breeding ground for individuals like Quantrill who shifted right back into similar fighting once the Civil War started. Rather than target military infrastructure or enemy soldiers, the bushwhackers rode in smaller numbers and targeted civilians on the other side of the conflict, making legends out of men like Bloody Bill Anderson and John Mosby. The reason Quantrill's Raiders remain so notorious today is for the raid on Lawrence, Kansas in August 1863, during which they slaughtered nearly 200 boys and men between the ages of 14-90 under the pretext that they were capable of holding a gun and thus helping the Union cause. After that massacre, Union forces in the area retaliated in similar fashion, forcing Southern sympathizers out of several counties in the area and burning the property. Union forces also detained those accused of assisting Quantrill's Raiders, including their relatives. After raiding Lawrence, Quantrill's Raiders headed south, and they eventually split off into several groups. Quantrill himself was killed while fighting in June 1865, nearly two months after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, but his name was kept alive by the notorious deeds of his Raiders during the war and the criminal exploits of former Raiders like Jesse James and his brother, as well as the Younger brothers. These men, who had fought with Quantrill, became some of America's most famous outlaws, and they used guerrilla tactics to rob banks and trains while eluding capture. The Lawrence Massacre: The History of the Civil War's Most Notorious Guerrilla Attack chronicles the events that led up to the raid and its aftermath. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Lawrence Massacre like never before, in no time at all.

*Includes pictures *Includes contemporary accounts of the meetings and events that incited the rebellion *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "Such excise laws had always been unpopular among the small farmers in Great Britain; they excited hatred, which they brought with them to this country, and which may be regarded as hereditary. Scarcely any of the causes of complaint which led to the revolution, had so strong a hold on the people of Pennsylvania as the stamp act, an excise regarded as an oppressive tax on colonial industry." - H. H. Brackenridge, History of the Western Insurrection in Western Pennsylvania It should come as no surprise to anyone that it is much easier to overthrow a government than form a new one, and that in turn it is easier to form a government than to govern. The men who founded America knew these facts in theory, but in the last decade of the 18th century, they learned them by experience when just a few years after the new Constitution had been ratified, a rebellion arose over taxes. As it turned out, some of the people who fought a war against taxation without representation were also upset by taxation even with Congressional representation. Given that most people are averse to being parted from their hard-earned money for any reason, this is not surprising, but it still had to be dealt with, and firmly, or the new republic might not have survived. As Secretary of Treasury, Alexander Hamilton was looking for ways to shore up the young nation's finances and pay off the debts incurred by the Revolution. At the same time, he believed in strengthening the federal government vis- -vis the states, which would eventually make him a leader of the Federalist party but also compel him to push for a tax on distillers of alcohol, many of whom took their excess corn and grain crops and produced liquors. Ironically, Hamilton came up with the idea of this tax to avoid more direct forms of taxation, and because he didn't think it would be difficult to collect. What Hamilton didn't consider was just how ubiquitous the production of whiskey and other liquors were on the frontier, where they were often used as a form of currency itself. In addition to being upset at this new tax, Westerners believed it was disproportionately aimed at them because Americans still residing on the East Coast weren't as reliant on the production of whiskey. With opponents holding conventions in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the very state currently hosting the Washington administration at the capital of Philadelphia, the opposition was viewed by many as a direct threat to the legitimacy of the federal government itself. In 1794, violence actually broke out, and with the tax opponents numbering in the thousands, President Washington himself felt compelled to raise a militia force and personally lead it to deal with the rebels, the only time an American president actually led soldiers in the field. Ultimately, no pitched battle took place once the militia was marched into western Pennsylvania, but dozens were arrested and tried for treason in the wake of the episode. While the breaking up of the revolt was praised by most Americans, Westerns continued to oppose the tax until Jefferson's administration repealed it upon coming to power in 1801. The Whiskey Rebellion of 1791: The History of Early America's Most Famous Popular Uprising looks at the origins behind one of the most famous insurrections in American history. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Whiskey Rebellion like never before, in no time at all.

*Includes pictures *Explains the appeasement of the Nazis in Czechoslovakia and Austria, and reactions to it *Includes accounts of the fighting in Poland *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "We have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat ... you will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi r gime. We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude ... we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road ... we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged." - Winston Churchill "My good friends," the mustached, bony man with thick eyebrows and large, strong teeth somewhat reminiscent of those of a horse, shouted to the crowds from the second-floor window of his house at 10 Downing Street, "this is the second time in our history, that there has come back to Downing Street from Germany peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time." (McDonough, 1998, 70). The man addressing the crowd, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, had just returned from the heart of Nazi Germany following negotiations with Adolf Hitler, and the crowd gathered outside the English leader's house on September 30, 1938 greeted these ringing words with grateful cheers. The piece of paper Chamberlain flourished exultantly seemed to offer permanent amity and goodwill between democratic Britain and totalitarian Germany. In it, Britain agreed to allow Hitler's Third Reich to absorb the Sudeten regions of Czechoslovakia without interference from either England or France, and since high percentages of ethnic Germans - often more than 50% locally - inhabited these regions, Hitler's demand for this territory seemed somewhat reasonable to Chamberlain and his supporters. With Germany resurgent and rearmed after the disasters inflicted on it by the Treaty of Versailles following World War I, the pact - known as the Munich Agreement - held out hope of a quick end to German ambitions and the return of stable, normal international relations across Europe. Of course, the Munich agreement is now notorious because its promise proved barren within a very short period of time. Chamberlain's actions either failed to avert or actually hastened the very cataclysm he wished to avoid at all costs. The "Munich Agreement" of 1938 effectively signed away Czechoslovakia's independence to Hitler's hungry new Third Reich, and within two years, most of the world found itself plunged into a conflict which made a charnelhouse of Europe and left somewhere between 60-80 million people dead globally. Of course, as most people now know, the invasion of Poland was merely the preface to the Nazi blitzkrieg of most of Western Europe, which would include Denmark, Belgium, and France by the summer of 1940. The resistance put up by these countries is often portrayed as weak, and the narrative is that the British stood alone in 1940 against the Nazi onslaught, defending the British Isles during the Battle of Britain and preventing a potential German invasion. In particular, the campaign in Poland is remembered as one in which an antiquated Polish army was quickly pummeled by the world's most modern army. Polish lancers charging in a valiant yet idiotic attack against German tanks is the only image from the 1939 Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland remaining in the popular imagination today. Originating as a piece of Nazi propaganda, paradoxically adopted by the Poles as a patriotic myth, the fictional charge obscures the actual events of September 1939. Outnumbered, outgunned, and under-equipped, the Polish army nevertheless inflicted heavy losses on the invading Wehrmacht. In fact, only the unexpected advance of Soviet forces from the east put a quick end to the struggle.

*Includes pictures *Profiles the seminal events that helped Hitler rise to power and consolidate his position, including the end of World War I, the Beer Hall Putsch, the Burning of the Reichstag, and the Night of the Long Knives *Includes online resources for further reading *Includes a table of contents "I cannot remember in my entire life such a change in the attitude of a crowd in a few minutes, almost a few seconds ... Hitler had turned them inside out, as one turns a glove inside out, with a few sentences. It had almost something of hocus-pocus, or magic about it." - Dr. Karl Alexander von Mueller It is often claimed that Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany through democratic means, and while that is a stretch, it is true that he managed to become an absolute dictator as Chancellor of Germany in the 1930s through a mixture of politics and intimidation. Ironically, he had set such a course only because of the failure of an outright coup attempt known as the Beer Hall Putsch about a decade earlier. At the close of World War I, Hitler was an impoverished young artist who scrapped by through selling souvenir paintings, but within a few years, his powerful oratory brought him to the forefront of the Nazi party in Munich and helped make the party much more popular. A smattering of followers in the hundreds quickly became a party of thousands, with paramilitary forces like the SA backing them, and at the head of it all was a man whose fiery orations denounced Jews, communists and other "traitors" for bringing upon the German nation the Treaty of Versailles, which had led to hyperinflation and a wrecked economy. The early 1930s were a tumultuous period for German politics, even in comparison to the ongoing transition to the modern era that caused various forms of chaos throughout the rest of the world. In the United States, reliance on the outdated gold standard and an absurdly parsimonious monetary policy helped bring about the Great Depression. Meanwhile, the Empire of Japan began its ultimately fatal adventurism with the invasion of Manchuria, alienating the rest of the world with the atrocities it committed. Around the same time, Gandhi began his drive for the peaceful independence of India through nonviolent protests against the British. It was in Germany, however, that the strongest seeds of future tragedy were sown. The struggling Weimar Republic had become a breeding ground for extremist politics, including two opposed and powerful authoritarian entities: the right-wing National Socialists and the left-wing KPD Communist Party. As the 1930s dawned, these two totalitarian groups held one another in a temporary stalemate, enabling the fragile ghost of democracy to continue a largely illusory survival for a few more years. That stalemate was broken in dramatic fashion on a bitterly cold night in late February 1933, and it was the Nazis who emerged decisively as the victors. A single act of arson against the famous Reichstag building proved to be the catalyst that propelled Adolf Hitler to victory in the elections of March 1933, which set the German nation irrevocably on the path towards World War II. Like other totalitarian regimes, the leader of the Nazis kept an iron grip on power in part by making sure nobody else could attain too much of it, leading to purges of high-ranking officials in the Nazi party. Of these purges, the most notorious was the Night of the Long Knives, a purge in the summer of 1934 that came about when Hitler ordered the surprise executions of several dozen leaders of the SA. This fanatically National Socialist paramilitary organization had been a key instrument in overthrowing democratic government in Germany and raising Hitler to dictatorial power in the first place. However, the SA was an arm of the Nazi phenomenon which had socialist leanings and which was the private army of Ernst R hm, which was enough for Hitler to consider the organization dangerous.

*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the construction written by Gustave Eiffel and others *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "Being the most striking manifestation of the art of metal structures by which our engineers have shown in Europe, it is one of the most striking of our modern national genius." - Gustave Eiffel It's the home of kings, emperors, and aristocrats, and the home of the Champs- lys es, the Bastille, the Louvre and the salons that fueled the Enlightenment. For foreigners like Benjamin Franklin, it was the most beautiful city in the world, and millions of people still visit those same sites every year. Known as the "City of Light," Paris seamlessly blends its rich past with all the trappings of a modern city, and the city's features and qualities are taken for granted today, but Paris was not always that way. In fact, it took nearly half a century of redesigning the city during the 19th century to transform it into the city it is today. Paris's expansion also required new monuments, administrative buildings, and other public buildings. The urban renewal of Paris coincided with the Neoclassicism movement in art and architecture that had taken hold across Europe, which incorporated the classical architecture of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. All over Paris, builders constructed marble colored buildings with arches, pillars, domes, and neoclassical art that used the themes of antiquity. Fittingly, the construction of the Eiffel Tower for the 1889 World's Fair was a capstone of sorts to the reconstruction of Paris, and it remains one of the world's most famous and visited landmarks. Designed as an entrance to the fair, the Eiffel Tower, soaring over 1,050 feet into the air, was an architectural wonder that served as the world's tallest man-made object for over 40 years. As its designer, Gustave Eiffel, put it, "It seems to me that if] it had no other rationale than to show that we are not simply the country of entertainers, but also that of engineers and builders called from across the world to build bridges, viaducts, stations and major monuments of modern industry, the Eiffel Tower deserves to be treated with consideration." Though it may be hard to believe today, the Eiffel Tower was initially met with derision by many Frenchmen, some of whom compared it to the Tower of Babel and complained that the "useless and monstrous" structure would obscure treasures such as Notre Dame. In response to such criticisms, Eiffel himself pointed out, "Can one think that because we are engineers, beauty does not preoccupy us or that we do not try to build beautiful, as well as solid and long lasting structures? Aren't the genuine functions of strength always in keeping with unwritten conditions of harmony? ... Besides, there is an attraction, a special charm in the colossal to which ordinary theories of art do not apply." It's safe to say that Eiffel was correct. Each year, millions of people refute those original notions by riding to the top and making it the most visited paid monument in the entire world. Indeed, the Eiffel Tower has welcomed over 250 million visitors in less than 130 years. Eiffel had the good fortune of being vindicated in his lifetime, and as he once joked, "I ought to be jealous of the tower. She is more famous than I am." The Eiffel Tower: The History of Paris' Most Famous Landmark traces the history of the landmark from its construction to the present day. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Eiffel Tower like never before, in no time at all.

*Includes pictures *Includes Hawking's own quotes about his life and work *Includes footnotes, online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all." - Stephen Hawking "I am just a child who has never grown up. I still keep asking these 'how' and 'why' questions. Occasionally, I find an answer." - Stephen Hawking In the pantheon of great theoretical physicists that includes the names of such historical luminaries as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, it is, perhaps, supremely ironic that the successor to the leading scientific minds of their generations has produced such "groundbreaking work in physics and cosmology", while at the same time battling one of the world's most insidious and relentless diseases. Dr. Stephen William Hawking, British mathematician, theoretical physicist, and cosmologist, is the face of twenty-first century physics, and yet cannot speak directly to his audience. For verbal communication, he relies on the use of an electronically activated vocal synthesizer. The scientist who has most notably carried the ideas of Einstein and his colleagues forward from the early-to-mid 20th century, whether in terms of explanation, rejection, or confirmation of any given question, is no longer able to move his limbs due to the incapacitating effects of ALS, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. The affliction is better known in the United States as "Lou Gehrig's Disease," named after the great American baseball player. Since 2009, in fact, Hawking can no longer operate his wheelchair. With a failing body but a world-leading mind that has remained active and keen through the years, Dr. Hawking continues to fight for any means of communication that he or his scientific environment can devise, presently placing much of his attention on systems with which to "translate his brain patterns into switch activations." This desperate struggle to stay connected comes at a time in which the amassing of Hawking's theories, developed over the past half-century, seems poised to discover and affirm new solutions to the mysteries of the universe. Occupying a unique place in the history of physics, Hawking, more than Newton or Einstein, lives in the perfect era from which to stand at the threshold of new possibilities for balancing and synchronizing the theories of General Relativity, put forth by his great predecessors, and the newer field of the quantum world, hinted at in the mid-twentieth century but only more recently brought forward by leading proponents. He has devoted the lion's share of his adult life to "probing the space-time described by general relativity and the singularities where it breaks down," and is, in advancing years, more driven than ever by the urge to uncover all he can about the nature of the larger universe. Stephen Hawking: The Life of the World's Most Famous Scientist examines the life and career of the English physicist. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Stephen Hawking like never before, in no time at all.