Showing results for "Volume 2" in Historical

This second volume of the best-selling diaries of Henry 'Chips' Channon takes us from the heady aftermath of the Munich agreement, when the prime minister Chips so admired was credited with having averted a general European conflagration, through the rapid unravelling of appeasement, and on to the tribulations of the early years of the Second World War. It closes with a moment of hope, as Channon, in recording the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, reflects: 'The war must be more than half over.'

By the end of The Life of William Faulkner, Volume 1, the young Faulkner had gone from an unpromising, self-mythologizing bohemian to the author of some of the most innovative and enduring literature of the century, including The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. The second volume of Carl Rollyson’s ambitious biography finds Faulkner lamenting the many threats to his creative existence. Feeling, as an artist, he should be above worldly concerns and even morality, he has instead inherited only debts and numerous mouths to feed and funerals to fund.

Volume Two opens in March, 1862 with Lee back in Richmond after a lengthy absence. He was shocked by the chaos and panic evident in the Confederate capital. McClellan had assembled a superbly equipped army of over 100,000 soldiers which Virginians feared might invade at any time. In May, McClellan began to move his huge Army of the Potomac up the peninsula and so close to Richmond that church steeples were within his view. The situation seemed hopeless.

Thomas Cromwell started as a scrappy blacksmith’s son from Putney. Before he became the King’s right-hand man, Cromwell was a soldier, a merchant, and (allegedly) a bit of a dodgy dealer. By the time Henry VIII noticed him, he’d already survived Italy, bankruptcy, and at least one attempt on his life. Somehow, he ended up masterminding the greatest religious upheaval England had ever seen.

Grace Brewster Hopper (December 9, 1906 to January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. A pioneer of computer programming, Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages and used this theory to develop the FLOW-MATIC programming language and COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. She was also one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark I computer.

Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (September 29, 1881-October 10, 1973) was an Austrian-American Austrian School economist, historian, logician, and sociologist. Mises wrote and lectured extensively on the societal contributions of classical liberalism and the power of consumers. He is best known for his work on human behavior studies comparing communism and capitalism.

Abraham Lincoln called "Billy" Herndon “my man always above all other men on the globe". After Lincoln's assassination, Herndon and co-author Jesse Weik conducted many interviews with Lincoln's family and friends for this biography. The result - although not without flaws - has been recognized as one of the most important biographies of the Great Emancipator ever published. This volume covers the period of Lincoln's life in New Salem, Illinois, as a young man, through his love affair with Ann Rutledge, becoming a lawyer, his marriage to Mary Todd, and service in Congress.