The irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British spy ring in wartime Washington

By Jennet Conant.

"Following her bestselling accounts of the most guarded secrets of the Second World War, Conant offers a rollicking true story of spies, politicians, journalists, and intrigue in the highest circles of Washington during the tumultuous days of World War II." (Library Catalogue)

My life as a spy: one of America's most notorious spies finally tells his story

By John A. Walker, Jr.

"What motivated a career naval officer to become a spy during the height of the Cold War? Over the years, statements by Walker have been reported in various publications, but Walker has never told his own story... until now." (Library Catalogue)

Shot in the Tower: the story of the spies executed in the Tower of London during the First World War

By Leonard Sellers

"The first reaction to Leonard Sellers fascinating account of the spies who were executed in the Tower of London during the First World War is likely to be one of amazement at their ineptitude. Not one of them seems to have had any proper training or any idea of how to set about the job. This, of course raises the intriguing question: how many others were there who did know what they were up to and managed to escape detection? However, thanks to the more liberal attitude now prevalent regarding access to hitherto 'sensitive' material and to years of dogged research by Len Sellers, the remarkable, but somehow pathetic, stories of the eleven foreign agents who were caught and subsequently shot in the Tower for espionage can now be told. In these days when a mind-boggling array of equipment is available for the assimilation and transmission of supposedly secret information their antics strike one as little short of farcical, but for their efforts, inspired, it seems, more often by greed than patriotism, these men paid the ultimate price and paid it in the most historic site in Britain. Whether they deserved their fate, or indeed the niche in history which this book gives them, is for the reader to decide. What cannot be denied is that their collected histories make remarkable reading." (Amazon)

Claude and Madeleine: a true story

By Edward Marriott

"When Claude Peri and Madeleine Bayard meet in Indochina in the 1930s, they fall immediately and passionately in love. They are soulmates, and not only lovers: each works as a spy for the French government. Claude travels alone through Hitler's Germany (where he is invited to dinner with Hermann Goering), the Middle East, India and Thailand. Then, travelling together to Paris in 1939, Claude and Madeleine are appalled as they watch their countrymen flee the capital in terror as the German army advances. Claude and Madeleine tells how, aboard their beloved ship Le Rhin, they abandon their allegiance to France and throw in their lot with the British. After mutiny, mistrust and seemingly impossible hardship, SS Le Rhin eventually becomes HMS Fidelity, running secret missions for the British navy. Full of extraordinary stories and compelling characters, taking the reader from Hanoi to Calcutta, Europe and beyond, Claude and Madeleine combines social history, politics, travel and biography in an epic and tumultuous story which is by turns thrilling, revealing and deeply moving." (Amazon)

Abraham Lincoln

By George McGovern.

"...His presidency is the hinge on which American history pivots, the time when the young republic collapsed of its own contradictions but emerged after a bloody conflict in a new birth of freedom that created the United States we know today. ..The Abraham Lincoln he describes is a complex and admirable figure - and, above all, deeply human". (Book Jacket)

Brady's Civil War journal: photographing the war, 1861-65.

By Theodore P. Savas.

"This photographic collection chronicles the events of the Civil War by showcasing a selection of Mathew Brady's moving, one-of-a-kind images." (Library Catalogue)

Race and reunion.

By David W. Blight.

"No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion." (Library Catalogue)

DVD's:

General Custer.

"George Armstrong Custer is one of military history's most colourful characters, a flamboyant and dashing commander... The dashing and ambitious Custer often flouted military convention, lacing his trust instead in his famous 'luck' which, unfortunately for him, ran out during the Battle of the Little Big Horn." (Case slick)

The Civil War. Volumes 1-3.

"Featuring over 16,000 startling archival photographs, innumerable period paintings, battlefield tours, newsreel footage of veterans and music from the period, Ken Burns' The Civil War captures all the major events of the bloodiest conflict in US history. Highly recommended." (Library Catalogue).

Online:

• The Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863
• Confederate States of America
• Civil War, U.S

The age of the dictators

By David G. Williamson.

"In his new book, David Williamson examines the regimes that characterized this age. Nazism, Stalinist Russia, and Italian Fascism are dealt with alongside the authoritarian regimes of Spain, Portugal, Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Examined both individually and in comparison with each other, Williamson leads us to some striking revelations and uncomfortable truths regarding the roots, reality and impact of these dictatorial states and the men who ran them." (Book Jacket)

Freedom from fear: the American people in depression and war, 1929-1945

By David M. Kennedy

"Between 1929 and 1945, two great travails were visited upon the American people: the Great Depression and World War II. Freedom From Fear tells the story of how Americans endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of those unprecedented calamities. The Depression was both a disaster and an opportunity. As David Kennedy vividly demonstrates, the economic crisis of the 1930s was far more than a simple reaction to the alleged excesses of the 1920s. ... The same generation of Americans who battled the Depression eventually had to shoulder arms in another conflict that wreaked world wide destruction, ushered in the nuclear age, and forever changed their own way of life and their country's relationship to the rest of the world. Freedom From Fear explains how the nation agonized over its role in World War II, how it fought the war, why the United States won, and why the consequences of victory were sometimes sweet, sometimes ironic. ...Freedom From Fear is a comprehensive and colourful account of the most convulsive period in American history, excepting only the Civil War." (Annotation Library Catalogue)

The forsaken: from the Great Depression to the Gulags: hope and betrayal in Stalin's Russia

By Tim Tzouliadis.

"Of all the great movements of population to and from the United States, the least heralded is the migration, in the depths of the Depression of the 1930s, of thousands of men, women and children to Stalin's Russia. Through official records, memoirs, newspaper reports and interviews, Tzouliadis searches the most closely guarded archive in modern history to reconstruct the emigrants' story - one of honesty, vitality and idealism brought up against the brutal machinery of repression." (Book Jacket)

The moral consequences of economic growth

By Benjamin M. Friedman.

"Are we right," Benjamin M. Friedman asks, "to care so much about economic growth as we clearly do?" To answer, Friedman reaches beyond economics. He examines the political and social histories of the large Western democracies - particularly of the United States since the Civil War - distinguishing times of generally rising living standards from those of pervasive stagnation to illustrate how rising incomes render a society more open and democratic. ...Friedman also delineates the role of economic growth in determining which developing nations extend the broadest freedoms to their citizenry. He makes clear that growth, rather than just the level of living standards, is key to effecting political and social liberalization in the third world. But he also warns that the democratic values of countries even as wealthy as our own are at risk whenever incomes stagnate for extended periods. Merely being rich is no protection against a society's retreat into rigidity and intolerance once enough of its citizens lose the sense that they are getting ahead. Finally, Friedman shows us why, if America is to strengthen democratic institutions around the world as a bulwark against terrorism and social unrest, we must aggressively pursue growth at home and promote worldwide economic expansion beyond what purely market-driven forces would create. And for the United States, he offers concrete suggestions for policy steps to achieve those objectives." (Book Jacket)

Origins of the crash

By Roger Lowenstein.

"Drawing on his sense of history, Lowenstein inquires how a financial system that arose out of the wreckage of the Depression and that was intended to avert the miscues of that era could ultimately repeat the very same scenario of massive speculation and corruption leading to collapse. He discovers the roots of the recent crisis in the financial culture that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as America encouraged companies to hand out ever-greater packages of stock options to their executives. In an enthralling narrative, Lowenstein ties together all of the characters of the great boom and bust: Alan Greenspan, Jack Grubman, Jack Welch, Abby Cohen, Henry Blodget, and a host of dot-com pioneers. But it is the collective rendering of such figures -- the unique portrayal of the culture of the era -- that truly distinguishes Origins of the Crash as the book that will frame our appreciation of the period. Just as John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash was the canonical text of 1929, Lowenstein's Origins of the Crash is destined to be the definitive account of the 1990s." (Book Jacket)

The Great Depression, 1929-1939

DISCovering World History. Online Edition. Gale, 2003. Reproduced in History Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale.

This is a reference article from our History Resource Center database that briefly discusses the effect of the Great Depression on the United States, Herbert Hoover as the "do-nothing" President, and FDR's New Deal.

Causes of the Great Depression

History in Dispute, Vol. 3: American Social and Political Movements, 1900-1945. Robert J. Allison, ed. St. James Press, 2000. Reproduced in History Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale

This is a reference article from our History Resource Center database that describes two different viewpoints about what caused the Great Depression.

Viewpoint 1: The Great Depression was caused by a global economic crisis as well as poor investment practices in the United States.

Viewpoint 2: The Great Depression was caused by a decline in spending and consumption in the United States, not simply by the stock-market crash or the mistakes of the Federal Reserve.