5 History / Military eBooks

Arthur Hacker, "China Illustrated: Western Views of the Middle Kingdom"
Richard Hollingham - Blood and Guts: A History of SurgeryBlood and Guts: A History of Surgery
Christopher Hale, "Hitler's Foreign Executioners: Europe's Dirty Secret"
Professor Kendra Eshleman, "The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire: Sophists, Philosophers, and Christians"
Sheila L. Skemp - The Making of a Patriot: Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit

Arthur Hacker, "China Illustrated: Western Views of the Middle Kingdom"
English | ISBN: 0804835195 | 2004 | EPUB | 240 pages | 38 MB
From the mid-16th century to the beginning of World War II, foreigners learned a great deal about China through trade contacts. This lavishly illustrated social history highlights the lives and lifestyles of the merchants, mercenaries, missionaries, adventurers and refugees who came to China during this period, set against the backdrop of China’s great cities and the ancient culture of its people.
A short commentary on the history of the period sets the scene in each chapter, allowing readers to follow the dramatic changes that took place through these turbulent years. The informative text and hundreds of images, many never published before, brilliantly capture the atmosphere of China throughout the centuries.

Richard Hollingham - Blood and Guts: A History of SurgeryBlood and Guts: A History of Surgery
Published: 2008-09-23 | ISBN: 1250057736, 1846075033 | EPUB + MOBI | 320 pages | 8 MB
Today, astonishing surgical breakthroughs are making face transplants, limb transplants and a host of other previously undreamed of operations possible. But getting here has not been a simple story of selfless men working tirelessly in the pursuit of medical advancement. Instead it's a bloodstained tale of blunders, arrogance, mishap and murder. In trying to keep us alive, surgeons have all too often killed us off, and life-saving solutions have often come from the most surprising places. Accompanying a BBC series, Blood and Guts is an incredible story of stolen corpses, medical fraud, lobotomized patients - and every now and then courageous advances that have saved the lives of millions around the world. You may think twice before going under the knife…

Christopher Hale, "Hitler's Foreign Executioners: Europe's Dirty Secret"
English | ISBN: 0752459740 | 2011 | EPUB | 448 pages | 9,6 MB
How and why more than one million non-Germans joined Hitler's "war of annihilation" Revealing for the first time Heinrich Himmler's master plan for Europe, this book discusses his dream of an SS empire with no place for either the Nazi Party or Adolf Hitler. His astonishingly ambitious plan depended on the recruitment of tens of thousands of "Germanic" peoples to build an "SS Europa." This book, researched in archives all over Europe and using first-hand testimony, exposes Europe's dirty secret—that nearly half a million Europeans and more than a million Soviet citizens enlisted in the armed forces of the Third Reich—to fight a crusade against "Jewish-Bolshevism." No other historian has examined the connections between these SS "foreign legions" (both police and Waffen-SS) and the Holocaust. Even today, some apologists claim that the foreign volunteers were merely soldiers "like any other" and fought a decent war against Stalin's Red Army. Christopher Hale demonstrates conclusively that these surprisingly common views are mistaken.

Professor Kendra Eshleman, "The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire: Sophists, Philosophers, and Christians"
English | 2012 | ISBN: 1107026385 | PDF | pages: 306 | 1,7 mb
This book examines the role of social networks in the formation of identity among sophists, philosophers and Christians in the early Roman Empire. Membership in each category was established and evaluated socially as well as discursively. From clashes over admission to classrooms and communion to construction of the group's history, integration into the social fabric of the community served as both an index of identity and a medium through which contests over status and authority were conducted. The juxtaposition of patterns of belonging in Second Sophistic and early Christian circles reveals a shared repertoire of technologies of self-definition, authorization and institutionalization and shows how each group manipulated and adapted those strategies to its own needs. This approach provides a more rounded view of the Second Sophistic and places the early Christian formation of 'orthodoxy' in a fresh context.

Sheila L. Skemp - The Making of a Patriot: Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit
Published: 2012-04-04 | ISBN: 0195386574, 0195386566 | PDF | 208 pages | 1.95 MB
On January 29, 1774, Benjamin Franklin was called to appear before the Privy Council–a select group of the king's advisors–in an octagonal-shaped room in Whitehall Palace known as the Cockpit. Spurred by jeers and applause from the audience in the Cockpit, Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn unleashed a withering tirade against Franklin. Though Franklin entered the room as a dutiful servant of the British crown, he left as a budding American revolutionary. In The Making of a Patriot, renowned Franklin historian Sheila L. Skemp presents an insightful, lively narrative that goes beyond the traditional Franklin biography–and behind the common myths–to demonstrate how Franklin's ultimate decision to support the colonists was by no means a foregone conclusion. In fact, up until the Cockpit ordeal, he was steadfastly committed to achieving "an accommodation of our differences."
The Making of a Patriot sheds light on the conspiratorial framework within which actors on both sides of the Atlantic moved toward revolution. It highlights how this event ultimately pitted Franklin against his son, suggesting that the Revolution was, in no small part, also a civil war.