In his account of World War II, historian Jon Lewis has selected 300 first-hand accounts, from Heinz Guderian rolling his panzer tank into Poland to VJ Day in London and New York. More than a eyewitness chronicle, this collection gives the reader an insight into how the repercussions from the war shaped our modern world, and how nothing from geo-politics to rock 'n' roll can really be understood without considering it.

The ultimate guide to the history, background and meaning of whether UFOs really exist, plus associated phenomena such as alien abduction, crop circles and cattle mutilations. There is also a comprehensive overview of the many conspiracy theories which surround UFOs and abductions - from the craft as secret Nazi technology to weird CIA plots. Written by a ufologist with many years in the field, this exciting and highly provocative book at times reads like a thriller. What messages do UFOs hold for us and for the future of life on earth?

A new and truly awesome collection of comic fantasy masterpieces! It isn't often you find a posse of Greek goddesses putting down insurrection among unruly classical mortals, stranded aliens escaping earth in a church converted into a rocket, or a light-fingered time-traveller attempting to steal the universe - but here they all are, in another selection of bizarre comic fantasies.

Letters of seamen below the rank of commissioned officer which tell us a great deal about shipboard life and about seamen's attitudes.

The Great War haunts the world still. It slaughtered a generation of young men; claimed limbs, wounded souls; drenched battlefields in blood; made sad legends of the Western Front, Gallipoli, and Jutland, and made heroes of poets; farmers, and factory workers. Clerks it made into Tommies, doughboys, or the Hun. And in this new Mammoth volume the voices of such eyewitnesses to history as these are heard again. So are the words of generals, statesmen, and kings. From the trenches in Flanders to the staff rooms of the Imperial German Army, with the Land Girls in England and U-boat crews in the Atlantic, alongside T. E. Lawrence in Arabia's desert and the Red Baron in the air—with a variety of extracts from letters, speeches, memoirs, diaries, and dispatches, this gripping collection covers each year and every facet of World War I. Among its wide range of witnesses are King George V, Robert Graves, Leon Trotsky, Erwin Rommel, Ernst Junger, Ernest Hemingway, American aviator Eddie Rickenbacker; and Winston S. Churchill. The pieces in this volume compose a stirring human drama of the conflict that redrew the map of the modern world and determined the political course of the twentieth century.

In July 1862, Union Lieutenant Stephen Spalding wrote a long letter from his post in Algiers, Louisiana, to his former college roommate. Equally fascinating and unsettling for modern readers, the comic cynicism of the young soldier’s correspondence offers an unusually candid and intimate account of military life and social change on the southern front. A captivating primary source, Spalding’s letter is reproduced here for the first time, along with contextual analysis and biographical detail, by Michael D. Pierson. Lt. Spalding in Civil War Louisiana lifts the curtain on the twenty-two-year-old’s elitist social attitudes and his consuming ambition, examining the mind of a man of privilege as he turns to humor to cope with unwelcome realities. Spalding and his correspondent, James Peck, both graduates of the University of Vermont, lived in a society dominated by elite young men, with advantages granted by wealth, gender, race, and birth. Caught in the middle of the Civil War, Spalding adopts a light-hearted tone in his letter, both to mask his most intimate thoughts and fears and distance himself from those he perceives as social inferiors. His jokes show us an unpleasantly stratified America, with blacks, women, and the men in the ranks subjected to ridicule and even physical abuse by an officer with more assertiveness than experience. His longest story, a wild escapade in New Orleans that included abundant drinking and visits to two brothels, gives us a glimpse of a world in which men bonded through excess and indulgence. More poignantly, tactless jests about death, told as his unit suffers its first casualties, reveal a man struggling to come to terms with mortality. Evidence of Spalding’s unfulfilled aspirations, like his sometimes disturbing wit, allows readers to see past his entitlement to his human weaknesses. An engrossing picture of a charismatic but flawed young officer, Lt. Spalding in Civil War Louisiana offers new ways to look at the society that shaped him.