The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World by Greg Grandin
Requirements: .ePUB, .MOBI/.AZW reader, 4.1 MB
Overview: From the acclaimed author of Fordlandia, the story of a remarkable slave rebellion that illuminates America's struggle with slavery and freedom during the Age of Revolution and beyond

One morning in 1805, off a remote island in the South Pacific, Captain Amasa Delano, a New England seal hunter, climbed aboard a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans he thought were slaves. They weren't. In fact, they were performing an elaborate ruse, having risen up earlier and slaughtered most of the crew and officers. When Delano, an idealistic, anti-slavery republican, finally realized the deception-that the men and women he thought were humble slaves were actually running the ship-he rallied his crew to respond with explosive violence.

Drawing on research on four continents, The Empire of Necessity is the untold history of this extraordinary event and its bloody aftermath. Delano's blindness that day has already inspired one masterpiece-Herman Melville's Benito Cereno. Now historian Greg Grandin returns to these dramatic events to paint an indelible portrait of a world in the throes of revolution, providing a new transnational history of slavery in the Americas-and capturing the clash of peoples, economies, and faiths that was the New World in the early 1800s.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History


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Realmbreaker, My Best Friend Is an Eldritch Horror 6 by Actus
Requirements: .M4A/.M4B reader, 501.5MB
Overview: The Corruption grows stronger–but so does Damien.

Damien left Mountain Hall victorious, eager to reunite with Sylph and spend some much-earned time relaxing. The Corruption has other ideas. Plans set into motion eons ago are finally clicking into place.

The greatest threat this Cycle has seen mounts on the horizon, but the nobles can’t even settle their petty disputes, much less present a united front against the end of the world. In the end, to Damien and Henry, it doesn’t matter. No matter who stands in their way, they refuse to let everything they’ve worked so hard to protect fall to the Corruption.

If the Mortal Plane is to continue existing, then there’s only one option.

They have to do what even the combined forces of the Void couldn’t–defeat Second once and for all.
Genre: Audiobooks > Fiction


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The Great Battle Never Fought: The Mine Run Campaign, November 26 – December 2, 1863 (Emerging Civil War Series) by Chris Mackowski
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 19.5 MB
Overview: After his stunning victory at Gettysburg in July of 1863, the Union commander spent the following months trying to bring the Army of Northern Virginia to battle once more and finish the job. The Confederate army, robbed of much of its offensive strength, nevertheless parried Meade’s moves time after time. Although the armies remained in constant contact during those long months of cavalry clashes, quick maneuvers, and sudden skirmishes, Lee continued to frustrate Meade’s efforts.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Meade’s political enemies launched an all-out assault against his reputation and generalship. Even the very credibility of his victory at Gettysburg came under assault. Pressure mounted for the army commander to score a decisive victory and prove himself once more.

Smaller victories, like those at Bristoe Station and Rappahannock Station, did little to quell the growing clamor—particularly because out west, in Chattanooga, another Union general, Ulysses S. Grant, was once again reversing Federal misfortunes. Meade needed a comparable victory in the east.

And so, on Thanksgiving Day, 1863, the Army of the Potomac rumbled into motion once more, intent on trying again to bring about the great battle that would end the war.

The Great Battle Never Fought: The Mine Run Campaign, November 26-December 2 1863 recounts the final chapter of the forgotten fall of 1863—when George Gordon Meade made one final attempt to save the Union and, in doing so, save himself.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History


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Romania's Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust (Battlegrounds: Cornell Studies in Military History) by Grant T. Harward
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 3.8 MB
Overview: Romania's Holy War rights the widespread myth that Romania was a reluctant member of the Axis during World War II. In correcting this fallacy, Grant T. Harward shows that, of an estimated 300,000 Jews who perished in Romania and Romanian-occupied Ukraine, more than 64,000 were, in fact, killed by Romanian soldiers. Moreover, the Romanian Army conducted a brutal campaign in German-occupied Ukraine, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, partisans, and civilians. Investigating why Romanian soldiers fought and committed such atrocities, Harward argues that strong ideology―a cocktail of nationalism, religion, antisemitism, and anticommunism―undergirded their motivation.

Romania's Holy War draws on official military records, wartime periodicals, soldiers' diaries and memoirs, subsequent war crimes investigations, and recent interviews with veterans to tell the full story. Harward integrates the Holocaust into the narrative of military operations to show that most soldiers fully supported the wartime dictator, General Ion Antonescu, and his regime's holy war against "Judeo-Bolshevism." The army perpetrated mass reprisals, targeting Jews in liberated Romanian territory; supported the deportation and concentration of Jews in camps or ghettos in Romanian-occupied Soviet territory; and played a key supporting role in SS efforts to exterminate Jews in German-occupied Soviet territory.

Harward proves that Romania became Nazi Germany's most important ally in the war against the USSR because its soldiers were highly motivated, thus overturning much of what we thought we knew about this theater of war. Romania's Holy War provides the first complete history of why Romanian soldiers fought on the Eastern Front.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History


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