A brief history of Cleopatra

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Bob Carroll

A biography of the general who used his skills to carve out the largest and wealthiest empire the world had seen since the fall of Rome.

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Peggy K. Liss

Isabel of Castile was one of the most influential monarchs ever known, the central figure in some of the most potent and far-reaching events in world history. She supported the Spanish Inquisition (which tortured and punished or had executed thousands of baptized Christians accused of practicing Judaism). She waged a successful war against Muslim Granada. And bent upon overseas expansion (she was after all the grand-niece of Prince Henry the Navigator), Isabel sponsored Christopher Columbus. Yet questions remain as to her actual role in these and other events. Why did she introduce the Inquisition? Why did she expel the Jews from Spain and the Muslims from Castile? Was it bigotry or piety or something else? And how aware was she of the injustices committed against New World peoples? For such a notable and controversial figure, much about Isabel has remained a mystery. Now, in Isabel the Queen, Peggy K.^ Liss proposes answers and provides both a sweeping biography of a Queen who had a profound impact on history, and a vivid portrait of a vanished, turbulent world. We see young Isabel as a poor relation at the corrupt court of her half-brother, Enrique IV (known as The Impotent), where she became a pawn in a civil war between the king and the great nobles. We learn how Isabel survived plots to disinherit her, how she won her way to succession, and why she secretly married Fernando, Prince of Aragon. And we witness the unprecedented ceremony in which Isabel assumed the crown alone, without Fernando, thereby paving the way for her daughter and other women to rule in their own right. Peggy Liss works through the fact and fiction, legend and opinion that have swirled around Isabel to reveal for the first time how her goals for Spain, her piety, and swelling power culminated in the remarkable year of 1492.^ (A variety of sources - documents, chronicles, literature, art, and architecture - reveal Isabel's attitudes towards religion, politics, and royal policy.) And finally, she shows us the older Isabel, who having won the respect of Europe, suffered a series of family tragedies ruining her plans and her health and bringing her unprecedented reign to an end in 1504 with her death at the age of fifty-three. Based on years of research, travel, and reflection, Isabel the Queen brings to life the people, places, and events that surrounded one of history's most dynamic monarchs. In these pages we meet the mind of the ruler who left her country with an imperial legacy of power and glory, and a vision of conquest, that would endure over the centuries.

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Dominic Lieven

The basic premise of this book is that it is worth presenting to the public a view of the life and reign of Nicholas II very different to the one commonly held either in the West or in Soviet Russia. To say that this book is more sympathetic than most to Russia's last monarch does not mean that it is an attempt to whitewash Nicholas II or to deny that he was by personality and temperament in many ways ill-suited to the task which fate called upon him to perform. Still less does it attempt to absolve the last Romanov sovereign from responsibility for a number of important errors committed during his reign. What I do intend is to attach the trivialization of Nicholas and his regime, and to question the unthinking imposition of Western liberal or socialist assumptions and values on the history of late imperial Russia. - Preface.

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Sara Gordon Harrell

A biography of the Cherokee chief who led his people for more than 40 years, first in an effort to keep their homeland, and later through their greatest trial when they were forced to go west by the United States government.