Historical & Political Biographies

This updated edition of John Maclean: Red Clydesider marks the centenary of the death of John Maclean; the Glasgow schoolteacher who became one of the finest socialist leaders the British working class has ever produced. A fierce opponent of empire, Britain''s war cabinet saw Maclean as public enemy number one, whereas Lenin and the leaders of the first ever workers'' government in Russia regarded him as Britain''s outstanding revolutionary. A key figure of Red Clydeside, Maclean was involved with the Clyde Workers'' Committee, which spearheaded the rank and file revolt against the dismantling of trade union conditions during the First World War. He campaigned against spiraling wartime prices and helped lead the successful Glasgow rent strike of 1915, which pioneered council housing. He was only forty four when he died of pneumonia in November 1923. Yet his powerful legacy of -anti-imperialism and commitment to workers'' power lives on, making him a figure from history whose political mess

This book is a true story about the life of the author, Chad Harris, and drug addiction and how he and other veterans were given drugs that came to the United States from the thirty-second degree of the Free Mason--the CIA.

A FASCINATING ACCOUNT OF ONE GENERATION OF REMARKABLE AMERICANS WHO EMERGED FROM THEIR PIONEER ROOTS TO HELP SHAPE SOME OF THE KEY EVENTS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.Charlie Ross and Harry Truman were boyhood friends and classmates in Independence, Missouri. Charlie Ross went on to help found the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri and later became the Washington correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch where he was awarded a Pulitzer prize. He was named Press Secretary by President Truman in 1945 and was a close friend and advisor to Truman during some of the twentieth century's most pivotal events.The author, John B. Ross, is the grandson of Charlie Ross. Using his unique access to family members, letters, photos, and unpublished memoirs, John Ross describes the life and times of Charlie Ross in vivid detail. He widens his lens to weave in the stories of Charlie's six younger sisters and their remarkable lives as independent and accomplished women in mid-twentieth-century America.

Josiah Symon arrived in South Australia from Scotland in 1866 just before his 20th birthday. His baggage included two boxes of books, references praising his primary school teaching and a few English pounds. In 1934 he left an estate valued in modern terms at $A 22 million.Symon acquired his wealth as the acknowledged leader of the Adelaide Bar for 30 years, by investments in shares and property in London and Australia, and through his highly regarded vineyard and winery.Knighted for contributions to the federal cause, Symon served in the House of Assembly (1881-1887) and in the Australian Senate (1901-1913) and was, briefly, both a State and a Commonwealth Attorney-General.He headed a large family, owned an estate and working farm and was also a philanthropist, a bibliophile, Shakespearean scholar, president of cultural societies and a sought-after public speaker.His contemporaries knew him as a major figure, but he is now mainly remembered, if at all, as a reactionary and a master of vituperation. To restore balance requires recognition that this largely self-made Scot, composed of many allegiances and contradictions, took principled stands which placed him ahead, alongside and behind his times.

She's the humanitarian compared to Mother Teresa, hailed as the "Hong Kong Angel," and beloved by her community in Humboldt County. She miraculously survived the worst of brutalities to become a beacon for humanity and an inspiration for all. Meet Betty Kwan Chinn.

After his graduation from Princeton University and Naval Officer Candidate School, Bud Mackey finds himself aboard the USS Chevalier (DD 805) in the early days of the Vietnam War as the ship powers its way across the Pacific toward the Gulf of Tonkin. Along the journey, he contemplates major events of WWII, writes poetry about his experience, and journals about the people and places he encounters. In this memoir, based on old journals and logbooks, Mackey shares his trenchant and often humorous descriptions of life on the high seas and in port. "We had the experience but missed the meaning," he writes. Ultimately, this is his attempt to glean insight from those long-ago days.

Olgen Williams traces his dramatic journey from embittered, drug-using Vietnam veteran tonationally acclaimed neighborhood activist and deputy mayor of Indianapolis, Indiana. His suddenmiraculous orientation from drugs and despair to faith and freedom will inspire all thoseconcerned with the social and personal costs and consequences of illegal drugs anddrug-related crime. In December 2002, for his crime of having stolen less than eleven dollarswhile serving as a postal worker in 1971, Olgen Williams received one of seven pardonsgranted by President George W. Bush. Today, Olgen Williams is firmly grounded in family,faith, and neighborhood in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he served for thirteen years as directorof Christamore House, a community center in the settlement house tradition. He haspioneered and nurtured many programs--ranging from carpentry to theater, from communitypolicing to parenting and seniors programming--that serve the diverse needs of a multiethnic inner-city neighborhood. His book is not only the story of an extraordinary life-in-progress but alsoa working handbook for neighborhood activism and transformation.

Have you been through some dark times in early life or faced failures in your career? More importantly, did you let your past disappointments hinder your future prosperity? This autobiography will alter your way of thinking and put you right on track. Marvin Kasim, Sr walks you through his life journey of incessant obstacles, sharing a detailed account of how he rose from the darkness of being a foster kid, homelessness, and struggles, to a prosperous professional life. By telling his inspiring story, he proves that success is less about power, fame, or riches, and more about the happiness and feelings of satisfaction one gets from leading a particular way of life. Also, he shows how the value of everything you get is truly realized when you endure pain and struggle to acquire it. So, hold your breath and get ready to embark on this rollercoaster ride!

An influential yet controversial naval officer who played key roles in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars through unconventional methods and secretive operations.Quicksilver Captain is the story of Sir Home Popham (1762-1820), an extraordinary and under-appreciated personality of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Popham was a bundle of highly unusual contradictions. He achieved the rank of post-captain without a ship; he was more often employed by the War Department than by the Admiralty; and, as an expert in combined operations, he spent almost as much time serving on shore as at sea. In just over 25 years as a naval officer, Popham acted as an agent for transports, an unofficial diplomat, an intelligence officer, a Member of Parliament, an acclaimed hydrographer, a scientist and inventor, a publicist, and a government adviser, among many other roles.Popham's career was literally as well as figuratively amphibious. So was his personality. Popham's well-known past as an illicit private trader, as well as his notorious lack of scruples, marred his reputation. People meeting him for the first time did not know what to make of him: 'He seems a pleasant man, but a dasher.' He fully understood the importance of communication and is best known for inventing a signal code that the Royal Navy used for decades. When he died, he left reams of correspondence behind him. But he also understood that words could either obfuscate or illuminate the truth, and his genius for twisting the facts to suit his own purposes made him an unreliable narrator. Many contemporaries distrusted and loathed him; after his court martial in 1807 for attacking Buenos Aires without orders (he escaped with a reprimand), many of his naval peers refused outright to serve with him again. And yet, even his greatest critics could not deny his abilities. One of his fellow naval captains wrote what could have been his epitaph: 'He is an extraordinary man, and would have been a great man, had he been honest.'Quicksilver Captain paints a portrait of an ambitious man who built a career based on secrets and shadows. Popham's direct line to important patrons like William Pitt and Henry Dundas allowed him to play a role far beyond that of an ordinary post-captain. His ideas for using Britain's naval might for imperial defense and expanding British trade, as well as his knowledge of combined operations, made him the politicians' go-to expert. They wanted results, no matter what the cost, and Popham's willingness to play dirty - using bribery, threats, and experimental weaponry - appealed to them. In return, they protected him from his many foes, although in the end, they could not save him from his worst enemy - himself.

A gripping memoir of a Swedish soldier's journey through the Napoleonic Wars, offering vivid tales of camaraderie, battles, and historic events.A Swedish Soldier in the Napoleonic Wars is an important and rare memoir by a low-ranking officer. It contains lively anecdotes and stories of soldiers, commanders, and life on campaign from 1808 to 1814 in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and North Germany. Available for the first time in English, it provides a new perspective of little-known actions, small by the standards of continental Europe, but vital to our understanding of Sweden's part in the war.In 1808, at the age of 18 and whilst a student at Linköping High School, Carl Magnus Hultin enlisted as a junior officer in the militia, answering the call-to-arms in the nation's efforts to stem the Russian tide before Finland was lost. He then transferred to the regular army as an ensign in the Jönköping Regiment. He took part in the ill-fated Västerbotten expedition against the Russians on Swedish soil in 1809 and witnessed the 1809 coup d'etat to remove the unpopular King Gustav IV Adolf. Following the 'phoney' war with Britain 1811-1812, he served in Mecklenberg, Holstein and Belgium against France and Denmark in the 1813-1814 campaign under Napoleon's former Maréchal Bernadotte, who had been elected as Sweden's Crown Prince. Finally, he participated in the 1814 Norwegian campaign that saw the Union of Norway and Sweden, which lasted until 1905. He remained in the army after the war, retiring as a captain in 1842.Very late in life, he was persuaded to set down his memoirs, which were published in 1872. Two separate editions of the book were reprinted in Sweden in 1954 and 1955 with minimal editing after the expiry of the copyright 70 years after the author's death. The editor's preface to the 1954 edition noted, 'The present volume is ... unique to the extent that it may constitute the only document of literary value from our history of war', whilst the 1955 editor noted 'the account ... was greatly acclaimed' and that Hultin's friends were 'much entertained by his lively, sometimes rather burlesque tales about military life both on and off campaign.'This translation, by a descendent of Captain Hultin, includes extensive explanatory notes together with maps and illustrations to support the narrative.

How a reluctant soldier and ranger, excelling in reconnaissance, intelligence, and covert operations, details his journey post-Cold War training to the War on Terror.I am a soldier and a ranger - a specialist in reconnaissance, intelligence, and covert operations. I never wanted to be a soldier, but I found that I excelled at it. I have fired my weapons in anger, infiltrated terrorist groups, and made and burnt sources. Number 788 is my story.Being good at doing bad things is not always a blessing. You can't be the judge, only the executioner. The concept of 'for the greater good' always has a flip side. You are moving and living in the shadows. The ones in control grant you the ultimate power of life, but a life lived in the shadows is never your own.My development was slow and meticulous; it was improvised and innovative. Now, I write about what it was like to be pushed past the brink of what I thought was humanly possible. I aim to share my flawed path, lessons learned, relationships forged, revelations of self and the workings of others, with the very small hope of inspiring a few new generation warriors.I was trained at a unique time, as I joined the forces after the Cold War but just before the attacks of 9-11. During my formation, the lack of controls and regulation came with tremendous risks but also significant opportunities - I seized them. I am the product of brave officers who took action with great personal risk to save a regiment without permission and by asking for forgiveness later. Officers who believed in the saying, 'Who Dares Wins'. I share my small place as a silent mediator between the light and shadows in the long and flawed history of Western and Nordic fighters.The end of the Cold War and subsequent peacekeeping missions caught the Swedish military flatfooted when the War on Terror came around. The need for special operations forces was in high demand, but for the most part, Sweden lacked this niche capability. While still in its conceptual form, the International Ranger Platoon, an elite force that became a Special Purpose Unit within the Ranger Battalion, was used to fill the gap. Newly recruited, I was drawn to the challenge and adventure of it all; I took on the tough selection course - the reward was to be part of something new - the Special Purpose Units.

A fascinating eyewitness account of some of the lesser-known episodes in World War Two, written by an Indian Army officer turned RAF pilot. Full of self-deprecating humour, Dunford Wood's war diaries record adventure, boredom, terror, love and more. Accompanied by photographs and maps, his adventures began on the North-West Frontier of British India in early 1939 and continued through operations in Iraq, Burma, China, Holland and Germany. Over this period he piloted over 100 aircraft types, including Audaxes, Lysanders, Hurricanes and Spitfires. He was one of 39 pupil pilots who fought at Habbaniya in May 1941; he was shot down by friendly fire in Burma in 1942; he flew the last Hurricane out in the face of the marauding Japanese, before returning to Burma as part of the Arakan campaign in 1943; and he flew Spitfires in support of the Allied crossing of the Rhine in 1945. Of 60 Indian Army officers who originally volunteered to transfer to the RAF when war broke out, he was one of just two survivors. It's an incredible tale.

The real story that inspired the BBC drama, The GoldOn Saturday, 26 November 1983, an armed gang stole gold bullion worth almost £26 million from the Brink's-Mat security depot near London's Heathrow Airport. It was the largest robbery in world history, and only the start of an extraordinary story. For forty years, myths and legends have grown around the Brink's-Mat heist and the events that followed. The heist led to a wave of international money laundering, provided dirty money that helped fuel the London Docklands property boom, caused seismic changes in both British crime and policing, and has been linked to a series of deaths that continued until 2015. The Gold is the conclusion of extensive research and includes exclusive testimony from one of the original robbers who gives his version of events for the first time. The result is the astonishing true story of the robbery of the century.

They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. For the better part of two centuries, batture dwellers such as Macon Fry have raised shantyboats on stilts, built water-adapted homes, foraged, fished, and survived using the skills a river teaches. Until now the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here. Beginning in 2000, Fry set about recording the stories of all the old batture dwellers he could find: maritime workers, willow furniture makers, fishermen, artists, and river shrimpers. Along the way, Fry uncovered fascinating tales of fortune tellers, faith healers, and wild bird trappers who defiantly lived on the river. They Called Us River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and Louisiana's most powerful politicians. These conflicts have ended in legal battles, displacement, incarceration, and even lynching. Today Fry is among the senior generation of "River Rats" living in a vestigial colony of twelve "camps" on New Orleans's river batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the other side.

A heartrending and beautiful trilingual book that gives voice to the children of war-torn Ukraine, interspersed with moving works of art. What is it like to be a child living in a country under siege-or living in a foreign city or land far from everything you have known and loved? In this moving and unforgettable book, Ukraine's children speak out about growing up in amid the violence, terror, and death of war. Through the Eyes of Children is a collection of children's quotes paired with evocative color artwork. Each quote appears in Cyrillic, transliterated Ukrainian, and English, making the book a tool for both language learning and language preservation. Each copy sold funds a week's mental health assistance for a Ukrainian child.

"There are many women like Belén whose names we don’t know, but whose stories are just as important. An uplifting chronicle of one woman’s fight for justice."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)Foreword by Margaret AtwoodThe heartbreaking true story of an Argentinian woman imprisoned for having a miscarriage—an injustice that galvanized a feminist movement and became a global rallying cry in the fight for reproductive rights.In 2014, Belén, a twenty-five-year-old woman living in rural Argentina, went to the hospital for a stomachache—and soon found herself in prison. While at the hospital she had a miscarriage—without knowing she was pregnant. Because of the nation’s repressive laws surrounding abortion and reproductive rights, the doctors were forced to report her to the authorities. Despite her protestations, Belén was convicted and sentenced to two years for homicide.Belén’s imprisonment is a glaring example of how women’s health care has become increasingly criminalized, putting the most vulnerable—BIPOC, rural, and low-income—women at greater risk of prosecution. Belén’s cause became the centerpiece of a movement to achieve greater protections for all women. After two failed attempts to clear her name, Belén met feminist lawyer Soledad Deza, who quickly rallied Amnesty International and ignited an international feminist movement around #niunamas—not one more—symbolized by thousands of demonstrators around the globe donning white masks, the same kind of mask Belén wore when leaving prison. The #niunamas movement was instrumental in pressuring Argentine president Alberto Fernández to decriminalize abortion in 2021. In this gripping and personal account of the case and its impact on local law, Ana Correa, one of Argentina’s leading journalists and activists, makes clear that what happened to Belén could happen to any woman—and that we all have the power to raise our collective voices and demand change.Translated by Julia Sanches

This crash course on late medieval literature reveals what Richard III read and what his reading says about the society of his day

A fascinating history of China's relations with the West--told through the lives of two eighteenth-century translators The 1793 British embassy to China, which led to Lord George Macartney's fraught encounter with the Qianlong emperor, has often been viewed as a clash of cultures fueled by the East's lack of interest in the West. In The Perils of Interpreting, Henrietta Harrison presents a more nuanced picture, ingeniously shifting the historical lens to focus on Macartney's two interpreters at that meeting--Li Zibiao and George Thomas Staunton. Who were these two men? How did they intervene in the exchanges that they mediated? And what did these exchanges mean for them? From Galway to Chengde, and from political intrigues to personal encounters, Harrison reassesses a pivotal moment in relations between China and Britain. She shows that there were Chinese who were familiar with the West, but growing tensions endangered those who embraced both cultures and would eventually culminate in the Opium Wars. Harrison demonstrates that the Qing court's ignorance about the British did not simply happen, but was manufactured through the repression of cultural go-betweens like Li and Staunton. She traces Li's influence as Macartney's interpreter, the pressures Li faced in China as a result, and his later years in hiding. Staunton interpreted successfully for the British East India Company in Canton, but as Chinese anger grew against British imperial expansion in South Asia, he was compelled to flee to England. Harrison contends that in silencing expert voices, the Qing court missed an opportunity to gain insights that might have prevented a losing conflict with Britain. Uncovering the lives of two overlooked figures, The Perils of Interpreting offers an empathic argument for cross-cultural understanding in a connected world.

Nel 1992, in una cerimonia per commemorare il 50º anniversario dell'Office of Strategic Services (OSS) e dedicare un memoriale ai membri che persero la vita durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale, il direttore della CIA Robert M. Gates menzionò in particolare un individuo: Roderick Stephen Goodspeed Hall. La proposta di Hall di "lanciare un uomo con il paracadute" dietro le linee nemiche nel nord-est dell'Italia con l'intenzione di bloccare il Passo del Brennero e così accelerare la fine della guerra, e la sua successiva morte in un campo di prigionia nazista, sono state oggetto di una biografia scritta dallo storico militare Patrick K. O'Donnell, che definisce l'episodio "la missione spia più audace" della guerra. Donna Hennessee Bryan, la cui suocera era la prima cugina non geneticamente imparentata di Hall e anche la sua prima innamorata, rivela come le dinamiche familiari abbiano aiutato a motivare Hall a ideare e cercare di eseguire un piano così audace. Pubblicate qui per la prima volta ci sono due delle storie di Hall, che confermano il suo desiderio di diventare scrittore e forse l'eroe della sua stessa storia. Anche pubblicata qui per la prima volta in inglese c'è una trascrizione del diario di guerra di Hall con annotazioni dello storico italiano Paolo Zoratti. Ma la cosa più significativa di tutte è la narrazione di Bryan sull'entità con cui Hall viene ricordato decenni dopo nel nord-est dell'Italia, basata su interviste con partigiani con cui ha lavorato e sulla partecipazione di Bryan alle cerimonie organizzate per raccontare la storia della Resistenza italiana e ricordare l'eredità di Steve Hall. Come ha riconosciuto Gates, la saga di Hall è una delle storie più memorabili emerse dalla Seconda Guerra Mondiale.

The Tomahawk Warriors, a crew of nine who perished in a 1944 B-17 Flying Fortress crash in England, was a mystery of WWII until explained in this book. It would have lain in partial obscurity if it were not for the author's initial involuntary involvement. As a child, he witnessed what would become a dogged determination in his lifetime later to tell this story. As the faint light of dawn was breaking the morning of August 12, 1944, a crippled American B-17 bomber flew perilously close over the roof of the author's house in Southern England. Around 30 seconds later, it crashed and exploded. In 2016, the author, David E. Huntley, after almost a lifetime, came across the story of the crew known as the 'Tomahawk Warriors' and recognized it as the accident he had witnessed as a child.He started his own research and began asking himself many questions about the disaster. How did this plane crash and why, particularly in that location? For what reason was the plane misnamed 'The Tomahawk Warrior' through all those years? What strange circumstance led the author to come into possession of the navigator's diary that no one knew even existed? Why did one airman not take his place on board that day and become a part of the 'missing airman' legend?Despite the coincidence that the plane of the 'Tomahawk Warriors' and the plane of Lt. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. crashed on the same day; Huntley revealed a further significant link between them. This incident adds a further little-known aspect about the Kennedy's in American history.Based on Declassified Secret Operational Records, analysis of other official and unofficial records, the author's personal observations on the day of the accident, and his pursuit of other facts, those mysteries became fully resolved. This story provides a distinct understanding of the immense courage those young 20 to 26-year-old American airmen displayed. Mission after mission, they climbed aboard their craft and carried out their respective duties at 28,000 ft in sub-zero temperatures, hoping their electric-heated protective clothing would not short out during the 9 to 10-hour flight. They prayed that flak and enemy fighters would give them that 70 percent chance of getting back home.The book offers vivid descriptions of those who got shot down, baled out, and died or got captured to spend the rest of the war as POWs.The narrative places its emphasis on the lives of the heroes who served in WWII and their loved ones who have grown up in their shadows. He obtained a posthumous honor to the deceased crew, as well as a Permanent Commemorative Marker, and brought relief and closure to the descendants' relatives. This is not a post-mortem of wartime machinery, but a window into the lives of some heroes who sacrificed themselves for a cause, as well as a personal insight into the familial relationships with their loved ones at home.

Sanjo, Jack, and Frank are three ex-Navy buddies that reunite to compare notes and re-evaluate their lives near Topeka-Kansas several years after being discharged from active duty aboard a 'WESPAC' ammunition ship during the Vietnam war. Their mutual fondness for 'Cassandra', a working girl from the 'California Club' in Olongapo, Philippines, finds all three sailors searching for the 'good old days', as they attempt to reorganize their complicated lives and prospect for new adventures. Their plans become more complicated as they include Pernicious and Enchanté in their exploits. The book also includes several poems that were written by the author while serving aboard the USS Flint in the Pacific

Baron Manfred von Richthofen, Germany's renowned First World War flying ace, was known as 'The Red Knight' or more the war as 'The Red Baron' due to the colour of his Albatros aeroplane. He was attributed with eighty 'kills' before losing his life inaction in 1918.Written by a remarkable war correspondent, Floyd Gibbons, shortly after the cessation of hostilities, The Red Knight is a fascinating insight into the life of this most ruthless and talented war pilot. Gibbons had access to extensive first-hand sources including personal letters from von Richthofen to his mother. He also interviewed airmen who had survived aerial combat with the uncompromising von Richthofen, who wrote before his death, 'I have not found a happier hunting ground than the Battle of The Somme'.He is widely hailed as the 'greatest fighter pilot who has ever lived' - Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC