Tag: War

Free Download Martin van Creveld, Arthur Morey (Narrator), "The Culture of War"
English | ASIN: B003ZJFK08 | 2010 | MP3@64 kbps | ~18:26:00 | 525 MB
A respected scholar of military history and an expert on strategy, Martin van Creveld recently explored the modern world’s shifting method of combat in The Changing Face of War. Now, in The Culture of War, he argues that there is much more to war than just soldiers killing one another for whatever reason. War has always been a topic of deep intrigue. Fighting itself can be a source of great, perhaps even the greatest, joy; out of this joy and fascination an entire culture has grown – from the war paint of tribal warriors to today’s "tiger suits," from Julius Caesar’s red cloak to Douglas MacArthur’s pipe, from the decorative shields of ancient Greece to modern aircraft nose art, and from the invention of chess around A.D. 600 to cyber era combat simulators. The culture of war has had its own traditions, laws, rituals, music, art, literature, and monuments since the beginning of civilization. Through the ages, the culture of war has usually been highly esteemed. Not so in today’s advanced countries, which tend either to mock it ("Military intelligence is to intelligence what military music is to music") or to denounce it as "militaristic." This provocative book, the first of its kind, sets out to show how wrongheaded, and even dangerous, such attitudes are. The Culture of War argues that men and women today, contrary to the hopes of some, are just as fascinated by war as they have been in the past. A military that has lost touch with the culture of war is doomed not merely to defeat but to disintegration. Innovative, authoritative, and riveting, The Culture of War is a major work by one of the world’s greatest and most insightful military historians.

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Free Download The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (Audiobook)
English | August 16, 2016 | ASIN: B01H41C1TU | M4B@64 kbps | 25h 32m | 745 MB
Author: Thomas Asbridge | Narrator: Derek Perkins
The Crusades is an authoritative, accessible single-volume history of the brutal struggle for the Holy Land in the Middle Ages. Thomas Asbridge-a renowned historian who writes with "maximum vividness" (Joan Acocella, The New Yorker)-covers the years 1095 to 1291 in this big, ambitious, readable account of one of the most fascinating periods in history.
From Richard the Lionheart to the mighty Saladin, from the emperors of Byzantium to the Knights Templar, Asbridge’s book is a magnificent epic of Holy War between the Christian and Islamic worlds, full of adventure, intrigue, and sweeping grandeur.

Free Download The Black Hawk War of 1832: Campaigns and Commanders Series by Patrick J. Jung, Peter Hassinger, University Press Audiobooks
English | 216 | ISBN: B01ETUC72K | Format: M4B / Bitrate: 128 Kbps / 8 hours and 25 minutes | 229 Mb
In 1832, facing white expansion, the Sauk warrior Black Hawk attempted to forge a pan-Indian alliance to preserve the homelands of the confederated Sauk and Fox tribes on the eastern bank of the Mississippi. Here, Patrick J. Jung re-examines the causes, course, and consequences of the ensuing war with the United States, a conflict that decimated Black Hawk’s band. Correcting mistakes that plagued previous histories, and drawing on recent ethno-historical interpretations, Jung shows that the outcome can be understood only by discussing the complexity of intertribal rivalry, military ineptitude, and racial dynamics.

Free Download Secret War in Laos: Green Berets, CIA, and the Hmong by Steven Schofield, Andrew Rowe
English | 2020 | ISBN: B083Y51VR1 | Format: M4B / Bitrate: 64 Kbps / 8 hours and 5 minutes | 440 Mb
The tale of a young Green Beret medic, Vietnam combat veteran with the top secret Studies and Observations Group (SOG) who was recruited by the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
Schofield worked five and a half years providing medical support for the Hmong and other Hill Tribes who fought the CIA’s secret war in Northern Laos, and was among the last Americans to leave SE Asia in May 1975.
It was a surreal time and place that would be impossible to even imagine today.

Free Download Jessica M. Chapman, Suzie Althens (Narrator), "Remaking the World: Decolonization and the Cold War"
English | ASIN: B0CQ3Y5F6S | 2023 | M4B@64 kbps | ~12:30:00 | 391 MB
Remaking the World examines the connections between the Cold War and decolonization, which helped define the post-World War II global order. Drawing on new scholarship, this comprehensive study provides a chronological overview from World War I to the Soviet collapse and highlights key developments in the international system as decolonization unfolded in tandem with the Cold War. Through six carefully selected case studies-India, Egypt, the Congo, Vietnam, Angola, and Iran-historian Jessica M. Chapman addresses the shifting of Soviet, American, Chinese, and Cuban policies, the centrality of modernization, the role of the United Nations, the often-outsized influence of regional actors like Israel and South Africa, and seminal post-Vietnam War shifts in the international system. Each of the case studies analyzes at least one geopolitical turning point, demonstrating that the Cold War and decolonization were mutually constitutive processes in which local, national, and regional developments altered the superpower competition.
Chapman describes a picture of the complexities of international relations and the ways in which local communist and democratic movements differed from their Soviet and American counterparts, including their visions for independence and success.

Free Download Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945 by Luke Turner
English | 2023 | ISBN: B0BJL23D33 | Format: MP3 / 10 hours and 42 minutes | 291 Mb
As a child, Luke Turner was obsessed with the Second World War. He spent hours painstakingly constructing models of his favourite aircraft, watching Sunday afternoon war films, pouring over stories of derring-do and relishing in birthday trips to air museums. Lying in bed beneath Airfix bombers and fighter planes suspended from his bedroom ceiling, he would often think about the men that might sit in their cockpits, and whether he could ever be one of them. Now, as an adult who has come to terms with a masculine identity and sexuality that is often erased from dominant military narratives, he undertakes a refreshingly honest analysis of his fascination with the war.
In Men at War, Turner looks beyond the increasingly retrogressive and jingoistic ideal of a Britain that never was to discover a much richer history. He goes inside the machines of war and strips away uniform cloth to discover the true depth and complexity of men of war as creatures of love, fear, hope and desire. From writers, filmmakers, artists and ordinary men – including those in his own family – Turner assembles a broad cast of characters to bring the war to life. There are conscientious objectors, a bisexual Commando, a pacifist poet who flew for Bomber Command, a transgender RAF pilot, a soldier who suffered in Japanese POW camps and later in life became an LGBT+ activist, and those who simply did what they could just to survive and return home to a complicated peace.
As the conflict moves beyond living memory and the last veterans leave us, we are in danger of missing the opportunity to gain a true understanding of the rich humanity that lies beyond the myths, machines and iconography. By exploring a wartime experience that embraces sex, lust and the body as much as tactics and weaponry, Turner argues that the only way we can really understand the Second World War is to get to grips with the complexity of the lives and identities of those who fought and endured it.

Free Download Christopher Lynch, David Colacci (Narrator), "Machiavelli on War"
English | ASIN: B0CP9ZD2X8 | 2023 | M4B@64 kbps | ~14:47:00 | 428 MB
Machiavelli on War offers a comprehensive interpretation of the philosopher-historian’s treatment of war throughout his writings, from poems and memoranda drafted while he was Florence’s top official to his posthumous works, The Prince and Discourses on Livy. Christopher Lynch argues that the issue of war permeates the form and content of each of Machiavelli works, the substance of his thoughts, and his own activity as a writer, concluding that he was the first great modern philosopher because he was the first modern philosopher of war.

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Free Download Richard L. Miller, David Stifel (Narrator), "John P. Slough: The Forgotten Civil War General"
English | ASIN: B0CQ3X94F9 | 2023 | M4B@64 kbps | ~10:44:00 | 315 MB
John Potts Slough, the Union commander at the Battle of Glorieta Pass, lived a life of relentless pursuit for success that entangled him in the turbulent events of mid-nineteenth-century America. As a politician, Slough fought abolitionists in the Ohio legislature and during Kansas Territory’s fourth and final constitutional convention. He organized the 1st Colorado Volunteer Infantry after the Civil War broke out, eventually leading his men against Confederate forces at the pivotal engagement at Glorieta Pass. After the war, as chief justice of the New Mexico Territorial Supreme Court, he struggled to reform corrupt courts amid the territory’s corrosive Reconstruction politics.
Slough was known to possess a volcanic temper and an easily wounded pride. These traits not only undermined a promising career but ultimately led to his death at the hands of an aggrieved political enemy who gunned him down in a Santa Fe saloon. Recounting Slough’s timeless story of rise and fall during America’s most tumultuous decades, historian Richard L. Miller brings to life this extraordinary figure.

Free Download Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age by Stephen R. Platt, Mark Deakins, Random House Audio
English | 2018 | ISBN: B07C3CPG3V | MP3@64 kbps | ~17:50:00 pages | EPUB | 567 Mb
As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the 19th-century Opium War.
As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it.
In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to "open" China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage.

Free Download Digital Civil War: Confronting the Far-Right Menace by Peter Daou, Jonathan Yen, HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
English | 2019 | ISBN: B07R238KCR | Format: MP3 / 6 hours and 38 minutes | 138 Mb
The Far Right’s rise to power has ignited a digital civil war that rages across multiple fronts and multiple platforms. It is waged with words and images that are designed to inflict psychological harm, to injure through verbal violence, to intimidate and incite, to wreak havoc with rhetoric. The combatants are citizens, activists, politicians, pundits, coders, conspiracists, trolls, agitators, hackers, and journalists. At stake are the nation’s bedrock principles: equal rights, fair elections, freedom of speech, racial justice, and the rule of law.
In Digital Civil War: Confronting the Far-Right Menace, Peter Daou, a veteran digital media adviser to major political figures, provides a firsthand account from the war’s front lines. He explains that the unceasing toxicity of social media – often treated as an aberration – is a feature, not a bug, of digital warfare.
A better understanding of how the underlying value systems and moral arguments of the warring parties play out online, Daou argues, aids us in confronting the Far Right’s takeover of the Republican Party and the consequent assault on truth, facts, and the foundations of our democracy.