Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi, "This Is Really War:...

Frank Wisner was one of the most powerful men in 1950s Washington, though few knew it. Reporting directly to senior U.S. officials--his work largely hidden from Congress and the public-- Wisner masterminded some of the CIA’s most daring and controversial operations in the early y ...  Show more

A landmark biography of Charles Sumner, the unsung hero of the American Civil War and ReconstructionCharles Sumner is mainly known as the abolitionist statesman who suffered a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the proslavery congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. This violent epi ...  Show more

In the first year of the Iraq War, seven soldiers were captured and held prisoner by the Iraqi forces for 22 days. Two of them were women. One was Private First Class Jessica Lynch, whose story of heroism was prais ...

Raised in Jamaica, Mary Seacole first came to England in the 1850s after working in Panama. She wanted to volunteer as a nurse and aide during the Crimean War. When her services were rejected, she financed her own expedition to Balaclava, where her reputation for her nursing—and ...  Show more

Thousands of Japanese Americans were sent to prison camps after the USA entered World War Two following the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Whole families found themselves housed in barracks behind barbed wire fences. Former Star Trek actor, George Takei, was just a child when he was l ...  Show more

Toto Koopman was remarkable; she was a high society socialite who risked her life wining and dining with Italian blackshirts in order to gather information for the Dutch intelligence service in WWII. When she refused to work as a spy for the Italians, she was thrown in a deten ...