Wars & Conflicts

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Soul of America unites centuries of essential American voices to understand our national debates and divisions from 1619 to the present, with his signature commentary on the consequential speeches, letters, and essays that led us to this moment...

It is newly estimated that 750,000 soldiers died in the American Civil War. But less well-known than the war’s death toll are the roughly 400,000 Union and Confederate troops who were captured and imprisoned. Many POWs died from starvation, dysentery, and exposure, and at the worst of the prison pens, more than 30,000 soldiers were caged in the equivalent of ten city blocks. Against the backdrop of a brutal internecine conflict, the Civil War’s prison camps were a harrowing milestone in the history of mass dehumanization.

By the close of World War II, six million Jews had been erased from the face of the earth. Those who eluded death had lost their homes, families, and entire way of life. Their response was quintessentially Jewish. From a people with a long-history of self-narration, survivors gathered in groups and wrote books, yizkor books, remembering all that had been destroyed. Jane Ziegelman’s Once There Was a Town takes listeners on a journey through this largely uncharted body of writing and the vanished world it depicts.

From May 1941 to the end of night raids in 1943, Luftwaffe bombers attacked provincial cities across England, Scotland, and Wales. However, these air raids are not considered part of the Blitz—at least, not according to the British Official History. The official historiography maintains that the Blitz on the United Kingdom ended when aircraft were redeployed to support the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, after the final major raid against London that May.

Radical Antiquity takes you on a unique journey in search of anarchy, statelessness, and social experimentation in the Graeco-Roman world. Sweeping across the Mediterranean from the time of the first Olympic Games in 776 BCE until the emergence of Islam in 610 CE, Christopher B. Zeichmann introduces the listener to communities of escaped enslaved people, pirates, and religious sects—all of whom sought a more egalitarian way of life that avoided the coercion, hierarchy, and exploitation of the state.

Vladka Meed, born Feigele Peltel, was just a teenager when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. Increasingly devastated by the deportation and murder of 300,000 Jews—including her mother, brother, and sister—who were sent from Warsaw to the death camp of Treblinka, she heeded the call for armed resistance, joining the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), established in Warsaw in July 1942.

A thrilling memoir from one of the last living WW2 pilots, published to mark his 105th birthday 'Colin Bell DFC is one of the most remarkable people I've ever met' JAMES HOLLAND 'A terrific read, combining laugh-out-loud reminiscences with jaw-dropping accounts of aerial warfare' JOHN NICHOL...

As the soldiers lifted me from the floor, my father's eyes locked with my own. For just a moment, I thought I saw a shadow of sadness across his face. But it disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, replaced with my father's look of perpetual determination. "You'll find me at the hospital," I...

A Force for Good is the biography of the heroic life of Gisela Warburg Wyzanski, a courageous young German Jewish woman who leveraged her wealth and family connections to save countless children from annihilation at the hands of the Nazis.

They are the lone wolves of the battlefield. Tracking the enemy, lying in wait for the target to appear—then they shoot to kill. Armed with an unerring eye, infinite patience and a mastery of camouflage, combat snipers stalk the enemy with only one goal....