Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War

9:31 PM |
















Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War
Oxford University Press, USA | 2008-10-10 | ISBN 978-0-19-533305-3 | English | 400 pages | PDF | 3.4MB

The emir of Bukhara used assassin bugs to eat away the flesh of his prisoners. General Ishii Shiro during World War II released hundreds of millions of infected insects across China, ultimately causing more deaths than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. These are just two of many startling examples found in Six-legged Soldiers, a brilliant portrait of the many weirdly creative, truly frightening, and ultimately powerful ways in which insects have been used as weapons of war, terror, and torture.

Beginning in prehistoric times and building toward a near and disturbing future, the reader is taken on a journey of innovation and depravity. Award-winning science writer Jeffrey A. Lockwood begins with the development of "bee bombs" in the ancient world and explores the role of insect-borne disease in changing the course of major battles, ranging from Napoleon's military campaigns to the trenches of World War I. He explores the horrific programs of insect warfare during World War II: airplanes dropping plague-infested fleas, facilities rearing tens of millions of hungry beetles to destroy crops, and prison camps staffed by doctors testing disease-carrying lice on inmates. The Cold War saw secret government operations involving the mass release of specially developed strains of mosquitoes on an unsuspecting American public--along with the alleged use of disease-carrying and crop-eating pests against North Korea and Cuba. Lockwood reveals how easy it would be to use of insects in warfare and terrorism today: In 1989, domestic ecoterrorists extorted government officials and wreaked economic and political havoc by threatening to release the notorious Medfly into California's crops.

A remarkable story of human ingenuity--and brutality--Six-Legged Soldiers is the first comprehensive look at the use of insects as weapons of war, from ancient times to the present day. READ MORE
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A Military History of Russia: From Ivan the Terrible to the War in Chechnya

7:14 PM |















A Military History of Russia: From Ivan the Terrible to the War in Chechnya
Praeger Security International| 2006|ISBN 0–275–98502–4| English| PDF|281 pages| 1.3 MB

This book brings to light Russia's undeservedly-obscure military past, rectifying the tendency of American and Western military historians to neglect the Russian side of things. Russia, as both a Western and non-Western society, challenges our thinking about Western military superiority. Russia has always struggled with backwardness in comparison with more developed powers, at some times more successfully than others. The imperatives of survival in a competitive international environment have, moreover, produced in Russian society a high degree of militarization. While including operational and tactical detail that appeals to military history enthusiasts, this book simultaneously integrates military history into the broader themes of Russian history and draws comparisons to developments in Europe. The book also challenges old assumptions about the Russian military. Russian military history cannot be summed up simply in a single stock phrase, whether perennial incompetence or success only through stolid, stoic defense; it also shows numerous examples of striking offensive successes. Stone traces Russia's fascinating military history, and its long struggle to master Western military technology without Western social and political institutions. It covers the military dimensions of the emergence of Muscovy, the disastrous reign of Ivan the Terrible, and the subsequent creation of the new Romanov dynasty. It deals with Russia's emergence as a great power under Peter the Great and culminating in the defeat of Napoleon. After that triumph, the book argues, Russia's social and economic stagnation undermined its enormous military power and brought catastrophic defeat in the Crimean War. The book then covers imperial Russia's long struggle to reform its military machine, with mixed results in the Russo-Japanese War and World War I. The Russian Revolution created a new Soviet Russia, but this book shows the continuity across that divide. The Soviet Union's interwar innovations and its harrowing experience in World War II owed much to imperial Russian precedents. A superpower after the war, the Soviet Union's military might was purchased at the expense of continuing economic backwardness. Paradoxically, the very militarization intended to provide security instead destroyed the Soviet Union, leaving a new Russia behind the West economically. Just as there was a great deal of continuity after 1917, this book demonstrates how the new Russian military has inherited many of its current problems from its Soviet predecessor. The price that Russia has paid for its continued existence as a great power, therefore, is the overwhelming militarization of its society and economy, a situation it continues to struggle with. READ MORE
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Friday, August 15, 2008

Digital Art History (Intellect Books - Computers and the History of Art)

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Digital Art History
Intelect Books | 2005 | ISBN 1-84150-116-6 | 136 pages | PDF | 3.6 MB

This book looks at the transformation that Art and Art history is undergoing through engagement with the digital revolution. Since its initiation in 1985, CHArt (Computers and the History of Art) has set out to promote interaction between the rapidly developing new Information Technology and the study and practice of Art. It has become increasingly clear in recent years that this interaction has led, not just to the provision of new tools for the carrying out of existing practices, but to the evolution of unprecedented activities and modes of thought.This collection of papers represents the variety, innovation and richness of significant presentations made at the CHArt Conferences of 2001 and 2002. Some show new methods of teaching being employed, making clear in particular the huge advantages that IT can provide for engaging students in learning and interactive discussion. It also shows how much is to be gained from the flexibility of the digital image – or could be gained if the road block of copyright is finally overcome. Others look at the impact on collections and archives, showing exciting ways of using computers to make available information about collections and archives and to provide new accessibility to archives. [Download]
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Monday, May 26, 2008

Twentieth Century United States History

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Twentieth Century United States History

Publisher : Currents in American Scolarship
Publication date : October 2004
Language : English
Pages : 36
Format : PDF

You may not know it but the number of historical writings about the United States in the 20th century has grown so much. When we say history we think immediately of events that took place hundreds of years ago. But this book is concerned with the recent history of the United Stae of America in the 20th century. Todays scholars have explored in depth historical controversies in America's recent history using a wide and plentiful sources like unpublished archival materials, recordings, films, oral accounts, documentaries, and statistical information. [more...]
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Saturday, April 26, 2008

The War Between the Generals: Inside the Allied High Command

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The War Between the Generals: Inside the Allied High Command
Parforce UK Ltd. | 2003 | isbn 02381021506 | English | 452 pages | PDF | 1.3 MB

A look inside the Allied high command. Some of their fiercest battles were fought against each other, but this was covered up. Not until David Irving began his research did the full truth emerge. Prepare to be surprised!
David Irving has been called 'one of Britain's foremost historians' by The Times. He is the author of The Trail of the Fox, The Destruction of Dresden, and other works of contemporary history.




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Friday, April 25, 2008

Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944

6:10 PM |



















Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944
Enigma Books | 2000 | ISBN 1-929631-05-7 | English | 790 pages | PDF | 6.3 MB

One of the most significant documents of recent history. This book records private,off the record,informal conversations of a man, who, more then anyone else, came close to destroying the western world.

Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944 records the private, off the record, informal conversations of a man who, more than anyone else, came close to destroying the western world. On Martin Bormann's instructions, the secret conversations at Hitler's headquarters from July 1941 to November 1944 were all recorded. This is the real companion volume to Hitler's Mein Kampf, whereby what had been a project suddenly was reality, almost to the disbelief of its author.

Here is a startling account of Hitler freely talking about his enemies, his friends, his ambitions, his failures, his secret dreams voicing his thoughts to his intimate associates as the sun set at the end of each day of the war. We see here a conversational Hitler letting down his guard to his trusted henchmen. Miraculously, Martin Bormann persuaded Hitler to let these talks be taken down by a team of specially picked shorthand writers. Hitler had intended, after his famous tyranny, to use these notes as source material for the books he planned to write about the glory of the Thousand-Year Reich.

Now they have come to us, indisputably authentic, a raw, fascinating, unretouched look at the inner recesses of the mind of Adolf Hitler. Der Fuhrer's mind was crude and narrow; he had little education and, as we see here, no humanity; but we can also see that he was (as he himself knew) a political genius, a terrible simplifier, a man who, with no equipment except his own will power, personality and ideas, attempted to bring mankind into a terrible darkness.

As Trevor-Roper says in his brilliant introduction if we are to discover the mind of Hitler, we must penetrate behind the thick curtains of superficial evidence which conceal it the repellant character which formed its expression, and for which no power of thought can compensate, and the unreliable intermediaries who have commented upon it. We must go directly to Hitler's personal utterances: not indeed to his letters and speeches these, so valuable, are too public, too formalized for such purposes to his secret conversations, his table talk.



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