History Books

MURGH THE DEATH They knew nothing of it in England or all the Western countries in those days before Crecy was fought, when the third Edward sat upon the throne. There was none to tell them of the doom that the East, whence come light and life, death and the decrees of God, had loosed upon the world. Not one in a multitude in Europe had ever even heard of those vast lands of far Cathay peopled with... more...

TO AN IMPARTIAL WORLD. No. I. The unconstitutional oppression long and unremittingly practised upon the colonists of Texas, having at length become insupportable, and having impelled them to take up arms in defence of their rights and liberties, it is due to the world that their motives, conduct and causes of complaint should be fully made known. In order to do this it will be necessary to explain the... more...

I. AS TO HUMANNESS. Let us begin, inoffensively, with sheep. The sheep is a beast with which we are all familiar, being much used in religious imagery; the common stock of painters; a staple article of diet; one of our main sources of clothing; and an everyday symbol of bashfulness and stupidity. In some grazing regions the sheep is an object of terror, destroying grass, bush and forest by omnipresent... more...

Kurdistan: A Banned Identity is a powerful historical, political, and cultural study that uncovers the systematic suppression of Kurdish identity across centuries of domination, denial, and forced assimilation. This book confronts the silence imposed on one of the Middle East’s oldest indigenous nations and restores a history that has been deliberately erased, distorted, or forbidden. Drawing on... more...

MY LORD, The completion of this Work affords me the opportunity I have long desired of thanking your Lordship thus publicly, for the kindness with which you acceded to my request to be permitted to dedicate it to you. The encouragement your Lordship was pleased to give me has served to stimulate me in the prosecution of a task, which would, I fear, have been too great for me to have accomplished in my... more...

HISTORY OF THE WARS: BOOK V I Such, then, were the fortunes of the Romans in Libya. I shall now proceed to the Gothic War, first telling all that befell the Goths and Italians before this war. 474-491 a.d.During the reign of Zeno Byzantium the power in the West was held by Augustus, whom the Romans used to call by the diminutive name Augustulus because he took over the empire while still a lad,July 31,... more...

I THE WORLD TRAGEDY We are living under the shadow of the greatest world tragedy in the history of mankind. Not even the overthrow of the old Roman empire was so colossal a disaster as this. Inevitably we are bewildered by it. Utterly unanticipated, at least in its world extent, for we had believed mankind too far advanced for such a chaos of brute force to recur, it overwhelms our vision. Man had been... more...

In the beginning of the spring of 1791, the King, tired of remaining at the Tuileries, wished to return to St. Cloud. His whole household had already gone, and his dinner was prepared there. He got into his carriage at one; the guard mutinied, shut the gates, and declared they would not let him pass. This event certainly proceeded from some suspicion of a plan to escape. Two persons who drew near the... more...

INTRODUCTORY In all the ages of which we have any record there have been men who gained a living by that practice of robbery on the high seas which we know by the name of Piracy. Perhaps the pirates best known to the English-speaking world are the buccaneers of the Spanish Main, who flourished exceedingly in the seventeenth century, and of whom many chronicles exist: principally owing to the labours of... more...

James K. Polk JAMES KNOX POLK was born in Mecklenburg County, N.C., November 2, 1795. He was a son of Samuel Polk, a farmer, whose father, Ezekiel, and his brother, Colonel Thomas Polk, one of the signers of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, were sons of Robert Polk (or Pollock), who was born in Ireland and emigrated to America. His mother was Jane, daughter of James Knox, a resident of... more...