Item category 1: Countries: History & Geography

A chronicle of the mid-nineteenth-century wagon train tragedy draws on the perspectives of one of its survivors, Sarah Graves, recounting how her new husband and she joined the Donner party on their California-bound journey and encountered violent perils, in an account that also offers insight in...

Traces the creation and establishment of the city as a significant centre for overseas and colonial trade, and Australia's first and last port of call for international shipping.

The title Many Maps, Charting Two Cultures, looks at the way two contrasting societies often misunderstood each other in the western third of Australia. Maps can be drawn and interpreted in different ways. It is possible to map a path through life, find a way through a forest, traverse a desert o...

The Sixties - an era of protest, free love, civil disobedience, duffel coats, flower power, giant afros and desert boots, all recorded on grainy black and white footage marked a turning point for change. Radicals found their voices and used them. While the initial trigger for protest was oppositi...

In the First World War of 1914-1918, thousands of boys across Australia and New Zealand lied about their age, forged a parent's signature and left to fight on the other side of the world. Though some were as young as thirteen, they soon found they could die as well as any man. Like Peter Pan's lo...

While Ian Fleming's extravagant and glamorous lifestyle is well known, little has been published concerning his contribution during the Second World War. As this book reveals, Fleming, the creator the iconic James Bond, 007, and a man who lived life in the fast lane, spent the Second World War in...

Imagine a book about an unnecessary war written by the ruthless general of an occupying army--a vivid and dramatic propaganda piece that forces the reader to identify with the conquerors and that is designed, like the war itself, to fuel the limitless political ambitions of the author. Could such...

Detailing the development of the prison and its outlying stations, including its dreaded coal mines and providing an account of the changing views to convict rehabilitation, Convict-era Port Arthur focuses in on a number of individuals, telling the story through their eyes. Charles O'Hara Booth, ...

In his long-awaited first book, Carlin tackles some of history's biggest what ifs with all his trademark charm and erudition, from whether historical heroes like Alexander the Great were in fact comparable to Hitler to whether our greatest social upheavals came in the wake of our most deadly epid...

In 1839, when John Lloyd Stephens, a dashing U.S. special ambassador to Central America, and Frederick Catherwood, an acclaimed British architect and draftsman, set out into the unexplored jungles of the Yucatan, Charles Darwin was aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, the Bible was the basic template of his...