HPL 2025 New History | Oak Park Public Library

1) The last days of Budapest: the destruction of Europe's most cosmopolitan capital in World War II

Author

Description

"Budapest, autumn 1943. After four years of war, Hungary was firmly allied with Nazi Germany. Budapest swirled with intrigue and betrayal, home to spies and agents of every kind. But the city remained an oasis in the midst of conflict where Allied POWs and Polish and Jewish refugees found sanctuary. All that came to an end in March 1944 when the Nazis invaded. By the summer Allied bombers were pounding Budapest's grand boulevards and historic squares....

2) America, América: a new history of the New World

Author

Description

"The story of how the United States' identity was formed is almost invariably told by looking east to Europe. But as Greg Grandin vividly demonstrates, the nation's unique sense of itself was in fact forged facing south--no less than Latin America's was indelibly stamped by the looming colossus to the north. In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World Grandin reveals how North and South emerged from a constant, turbulent engagement...

3) The fifteen: murder, retribution, and the forgotten story of Nazi POWs in America

Author

Geroux, William

Series

Thorndike Press large print nonfiction

Formats:

Book, Large Print

Description

"The American government was faced with an unprecedented challenge: where to house the nearly 400,000 German prisoners of war plucked from the battlefield and shipped across the Atlantic. On orders from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Department of War hastily built hundreds of POW camps in the United States. Today, traces of those camps--which once dotted the landscape from Maine to California--have all but vanished. Forgotten, too, is the grisly...

4) The Mesopotamian riddle: an archaeologist, a soldier, a clergyman, and the race to decipher the world's oldest writing

Author

Description

"It was one of history's great vanishing acts. As early as 3500 BCE, scribes in the mud-walled city-state of Sumer used a reed stylus to press tiny wedge-shaped symbols into clay. For three thousand years, the script chronicled the military conquests, scientific discoveries, and epic literature of the grand kingdoms of Mesopotamia - Assyria, Babylon, the mighty Achaemenid Empire - along with precious minutia about everyday life so long ago. But as...

5) Let only red flowers bloom: identity and belonging in Xi Jinping's China

Author

Description

"In the hot summer months of 2021, China celebrated the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party. Authorities held propaganda and education campaigns across the country defining the ideal Chinese citizen: ethnically Han Chinese, Mandarin speaking, solidly atheist, and devoted to the socialist project of strengthening China against western powers. No one can understand modern China-including its response to the pandemic-without understanding...

6) Paris undercover: a wartime story of courage, friendship, and betrayal

Author

Goodman, Matthew

Description

"Two women in Nazi-occupied Paris created a daring escape line that rescued dozens of Allied servicemen. With one in a German prison camp, the other wrote a book about it--a memoir that was built on lies. Now the bestselling author of Eighty Days shares their incredible, never-before-told full story"-- Provided by publisher.

7) Realm of ice and sky: triumph, tragedy, and history's greatest Arctic rescue

Author

Description

"National Outdoor Book Award-winning author Buddy Levy's thrilling narrative of polar exploration via airship--and the men who sacrificed everything to make history. Arctic explorer and American visionary Walter Wellman pioneered both polar and trans-Atlantic airship aviation, making history's first attempts at each. Wellman has been cast as a self-promoting egomaniac known mostly for his catastrophic failures. Instead he was a courageous innovator...

8) An African history of Africa: from the dawn of humanity to independence

Author

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD

Description

"Everyone is originally from Africa, and this book is therefore for everyone. For too long, Africa's history has been dominated by western narratives of slavery and colonialism, or simply ignored. Now, Zeinab Badawi sets the record straight. In this fascinating book, Badawi guides us through Africa's spectacular history--from the very origins of our species, through ancient civilizations and medieval empires with remarkable queens and kings, to the...

9) The first and last king of Haiti: the rise and fall of Henry Christophe

Author

Description

"The essential biography of the controversial rebel, traitor, and only king of Haiti. Henry Christophe (1767 - 1820) is one of the most richly complex figures in the history of the Americas, and was, in his time, popular and famous the world over: in The First and Last King of Haiti, a brilliant young Yale scholar unravels the still controversial enigma that he was"-- Provided by publisher.

10) The Stalin affair: the impossible alliance that won the war

Author

Description

"From international bestselling historian Giles Milton comes the remarkable true story of the motley group of allied men and women who worked to manage Stalin's mercurial, explosive approach to diplomacy during four turbulent years of World War II. In the summer of 1941, Hitler did the unthinkable-he invaded the Soviet Union, shattering what Stalin had until then considered an ironclad partnership. It was a shocking, urgent turning point in the war,...

11) The unlikely war hero: a Vietnam War POW's story of courage and resilience in the Hanoi Hilton

Author

Description

"This is the incredible tale of the youngest and lowest-ranking American POW captured in North Vietnam. Doug Hegdahl convinced his captors he was stupid, then spent the next two years memorizing the names of 254 fellow prisoners and other details of POW life. Upon his release, that information helped improve POW life for those still in captivity"-- Provided by publisher.

12) Embers of the hands: hidden histories of the Viking Age

Author

Barraclough, Eleanor Rosamund

Description

"A "brilliantly written, brilliantly conceived" (Tom Holland) history of the Viking Age, from mighty leaders to rebellious teenagers, told through their runes and ruins, games and combs, trash and treasure"-- Dust jacket flap. "A "brilliantly written, brilliantly conceived" (Tom Holland) history of the Viking Age, from mighty leaders to rebellious teenagers, told through their runes and ruins, games and combs, trash and treasure. In imagining a Viking,...

13) The Eastern Front: a history of the Great War, 1914-1918

Author

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook

Description

The second installment in Lloyd's bravura history of the First World War, The Eastern Front chronicles the bloody fighting in Eastern Europe and the Balkans through diary entries, eyewitness reports and memoirs. The definitive history of the Eastern Front in the First World War, from the acclaimed military historian and author of Passchendaele and The Western Front. In the second volume of his landmark First World War trilogy, Professor Nick Lloyd...

14) Her lotus year: China, the roaring twenties, and the making of Wallis Simpson

Author

Description

"New York Times bestselling author Paul French examines a controversial and revealing period in the early life of the legendary Wallis, Duchess of Windsor-her one year in China. Before she was the Duchess of Windsor, Bessie Wallis Warfield was Mrs. Wallis Spencer, wife of Earl "Win" Spencer, a US Navy aviator. From humble beginnings in Baltimore, she rose to marry a man who gave up his throne for her. But what made Wallis Spencer, Navy Wife, the woman...

15) The roads to Rome: a history of imperial expansion

Author

Fletcher, Catherine

Formats:

Book, eBook, eAudiobook

Description

"Inspired by original research and filled with color and drama, this is an exploration of two thousand years of history as seen through one the greatest imperial networks ever built"-- Provided by publisher.

16) The white ladder: triumph and tragedy at the dawn of mountaineering

Author

Light, Daniel (Mountain climber)

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook

Description

"A sweeping history of mountaineering before Everest, and the epic human quest to reach the highest places on Earth"-- Provided by publisher.

17) Hitler's people: the faces of the Third Reich

Author

Evans, Richard J

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

"Through a connected set of biographical portraits of Nazi leaders and followers that tracks power as it radiated out from Hitler to the inner and outer circles of the regime's leadership, one of our greatest historians answers the enduring question: How does a society come to carry out a program of unspeakable evil? Richard J. Evans, author of the acclaimed Third Reich Trilogy and over a dozen other volumes on modern Europe, is our preeminent scholar...

18) The forbidden garden: the botanists of besieged Leningrad and their impossible choice

Author

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD

Description

"In the summer of 1941, German troops surrounded the Russian city of Leningrad--now St. Petersburg--and began the longest blockade in recorded history, one that would ultimately claim the lives of nearly three-quarters of a million people. At the center of the besieged city stood a converted palace that housed the world's largest collection of seeds--more than 250,000 samples hand-collected over two decades from all over the globe by world-famous...

19) Targeted: Beirut: the 1983 Marine Barracks bombing and the untold origin story of the war on terror

Author

Carr, Jack (Joint pseudonym)

Series

Thorndike Press large print nonfiction

Formats:

Book, Large Print, Audiobook CD

Description

"1983: the United States Marine Corps experiences its greatest single-day loss of life since the Battle of Iwo Jima when a truck packed with explosives crashes into their headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon. This terrorist attack, which killed 241 servicemen, continues to influence US foreign policy to this day, Now, the full story is revealed as never before. Based on comprehensive interviews with survivors, extensive military records, as well as personal...

20) Paris 1944: occupation, resistance, liberation

Author

Bishop, Patrick (Patrick Joseph)

Description

A dramatic social history of the liberation of Paris in 1944, one of the most inspiring and momentous events of the twentieth century. When the Germans marched into the City of Light in 1940--and the lamps went out--the millions who loved Paris mourned. Liberation, four yaers later, triggered an explosion of joy and relief. It was the party of the century and everybody who was anybody was there. General Charles de Gaulle seized the moment to create...