Showing results for "Lee" in 20th Century

Learn about the U.S. Federal Reserve with iMinds insightful audio knowledge series. The Federal Reserve is stirring more excitement these days than is probably recommended for a central bank just shy of its 100th birthday. The Fed, tasked with fostering economic growth and price stability in the US, was ratified by President Woodrow Wilson in 1913.

Learn about landing a man on the Moon with iMinds insightful audio knowledge series. When the Cold War was at its height in the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. and Russia were fierce rivals. So, with burgeoning technology making flying safer and easier, these two world powers embarked on a "space race" to see who could be the first to launch a man into space - and eventually to put a man on the Moon.

The story behind D-Day begins in 1939 when Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, attacked Poland and ignited World War Two. The following year, the Germans occupied France and Western Europe and launched a vicious air war against Britain. In 1941, they invaded the Soviet Union. Seemingly unstoppable, the Nazis now held virtually all of Europe. However, by 1943, the tide had begun to turn in favor of the Allies, the forces opposed to Germany.

"Bay of Pigs" refers to the 1961 invasion of Cuba by a force of CIA-backed Cuban exiles attempting to overthrow Fidel Castro's left-wing government. In Cuba the invasion is called the Battle of Girón, one of the beaches in the Bay of Pigs, which is on the south coast of Cuba. The invasion was one of the flashpoints of the Cold War and pushed the world towards the brink of nuclear war.

The story of the Internet begins in the early 1960s, when Russia launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial earth satellite. Afraid of the technological potential of the Russians, the United States Department of Defense formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), in order to develop US science and technology, and in particular its application in the military.

The terror and purges of Stalin's Russia in the 1930s discouraged Soviet officials from leaving documentary records, let alone keeping personal diaries. A remarkable exception is the unique diary assiduously kept by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943. This selection from Maisky's diary grippingly documents Britain's drift to war during the 1930s, appeasement in the Munich era, negotiations leading to the signature of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact....

Steve Gillon follows Lee Harvey Oswald for the 48 hours after the Kennedy assassination in search of answers to the question that has been troubling America for the past five decades: Why did he shoot JFK? The Warren Commission speculated that Oswald was simply a deranged sociopath. But recently declassified materials raise new troubling questions.

In the inspiring tradition of Black Hawk Down, this is the riveting real-life story of how an Australian SAS signalman's courage under fire saved more than 80 lives. It is an enthralling eyewitness account of the war on terror. Jock Wallace was pumped. It was the start of Operation Anaconda, the US-led military offensive to flush out al Qaeda and Taliban from their last stronghold in the Shahi Kot Valley in Afghanistan.

Based on the true story of her mother, Mona Golabek describes the inspirational story of Lisa Jura's escape from Nazi-controlled Austria to England on the famed Kindertransport. Jewish musical prodigy Lisa Jura has a wonderful life in Vienna. But when the Nazis start closing in on the city, life...

The story of the NR-1 is told against the tense background of the Cold War and peopled with such rich characters as the acerbic Admiral Hyman Rickover, ocean scientist Robert Ballard (who found the Titanic), the designers and builders who faced almost impossible tasks to give life to the ship, the unique officers and sailors who took the little boat down into depths on covert missions, and the families who waited for them on shore, unaware that there would be no escape if the boat ran into trouble.

Two Who Survived chronicles the true story of two children from different worlds: a city boy and a country girl. When the persecution of Jews begins, both are plucked from their reality and thrust into concentration camps. They are stripped of everything they know and forced to navigate a truly incomprehensible, volatile, dangerous, and unpredictable world.

In the winter of 1952, at the height of the Korean War, the CIA flew a covert mission into China to pick up an agent. Trained on a remote Pacific island, the agent belonged to an obscure anti-communist group known as the Third Force based out of Hong Kong. The exfiltration would fail disastrously, and one of the Americans on the mission ended up a prisoner of Mao Zedong's government for the next twenty years. Unraveling the truth behind decades of Cold War intrigue, John Delury documents the damage that this hidden foreign policy did to American political life.

In 1940, the Polish Underground wanted to know what was happening inside the recently opened Auschwitz concentration camp. Polish army officer Witold Pilecki volunteered to be arrested by the Germans and report from inside the camp. His intelligence reports, smuggled out in 1941, were among the first eyewitness accounts of Auschwitz atrocities: the extermination of Soviet POWs, its function as a camp for Polish political prisoners, and the "final solution" for Jews. Pilecki received brutal treatment until he escaped in April 1943; soon after, he wrote a brief report....

The dream of capturing and organizing knowledge is as old as history. From the archives of ancient Sumeria and the Library of Alexandria to the Library of Congress and Wikipedia, humanity has wrestled with the problem of harnessing its intellectual output. The timeless quest for wisdom has been as much about information storage and retrieval as creative genius. In Cataloging the World, Alex Wright introduces us to a figure who stands out in the long line of thinkers and idealists who devoted themselves to the task.

Based on previously undisclosed archival materials, this book tells the fascinating, untold, and troubling story of an anti-Protestant campaign in Italy that lasted longer, consumed more clerical energy and cultural space, and generated far more literature than the war against Italy's Jewish population.