Stanley Weintraub

Historian Stanley Weintraub, author of Silent Night, combines two winning topics-Christmas and the Civil War-in General Sherman's Christmas, new from Smithsonian Books. Focusing on the holiday season of 1864, when General Sherman relentlessly pushed his troops across Georgia to capture Savannah, General Sherman's Christmas includes the voices of soldiers and civilians on both sides of the conflict and is illustrated with striking period prints, making it the perfect holiday present for every history buff.

In the closing days of World War II, America looked up to three five-star generals as its greatest heroes. George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Douglas MacArthur personified victory, from the Pentagon to Normandy to the Far East. Counterparts and on occasion competitors, they had leapfrogged each other, sometimes stonewalled each other, even supported and protected each other throughout their celebrated careers. In the public mind they stood for glamour, integrity, and competence. The story of their interconnected lives opens a fascinating window onto some of the twentieth century's most crucial events, revealing the personalities behind the public images and showing how much of a difference three men can make. This book presents the intertwined lives of these three great men against the sweeping background of six unforgettable decades, from two world wars to the Cold War.--From publisher description

An account of the 1944 Battle of the Bulge between Allied forces and Hitler's surviving army describes how Germany broke through Allied lines in the Ardennes Forest, sparking a ten-day conflict that proved pivotal to the war's outcome.

"Jefferson's Demons" shows how complicated Jefferson's own efforts to pursue happiness were. The book reveals the hidden life of a man who suffered through periods of headache and morbid horror.

"Charlotte was young and beautiful. Lionel, almost ten years older, was rich and her cousin. Theirs was an arranged betrothal joining two branches of Europe's most powerful banking firm. It seemed an unlikely love match, and even their wedding had to survive catastrophe. Yet their marriage lasted through tragedies and triumphs. Charlotte became one of the grand chatelaines of the Victorian era; Lionel, England's leading financier persevered through years of bigotry to become the first of his faith to be seated in Parliament. In Charlotte and Lionel, acclaimed biographer Stanley Weintraub, using full access to the Rothschild family archives, tells the story of their stunning and surprising love for each other, opening a fascinating window into a memorable age.". "Lionel (and, behind the scenes, Charlotte) influenced events worldwide, helping to fund relief to a starving Ireland, aiding persecuted Jews in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, brokering the purchase of the Suez Canal, and arranging for France's postwar reparations to Germany. Yet despite the distractions of their power, glamour, and wealth, and problems of health for which money could buy no solutions, they remained intensely devoted to each other and their family. Although Charlotte lost a daughter, then her beloved husband, and had to come back herself from severe illness, she remained unbroken."--BOOK JACKET.

Stanley Weintraub, biographer of Victoria and other major figures of her era, here unveils for the first time the largely hidden role of Albert, establishing him as one of the greatest men of his days. Drawing on previously unexplored sources, Weintraub delves into Albert's political, familial, financial, medical, and sexual life. As a youth, Albert had few choices of vocation. Plucked from foreign obscurity - literally a "student prince" - he would sire the succession in what was then the most powerful empire on earth. His marriage, arranged as it was and stormy at times, remains one of the most surprising and arresting of love stories. Yet while Victoria adored him, his adopted people never accepted him, nor were they pleased with his behind-the-scenes behavior as surrogate sovereign. He was active, often secretly, in foreign affairs and in military affairs. He played a major part in running the Crimean War, and early in the American Civil War played a major part in keeping Britain from intervening for the South. He was Britain's leading exponent of industrial and technological progress, culminating in the renowned Crystal Palace exhibition, the first - and most successful - World's Fair. Indeed, virtually all royal instructions from the Queen to her officials, were drafted by the Prince Consort.

How could Bernard Shaw have found anything to admire in Queen Victoria? Or in the passionate evangelical "General" William Booth of the Salvation Army? What possible connections could there be between Shaw, the passionate socialist, and the Tory Winston Churchill, who seemed to represent everything Shaw should have rejected and despised? In Shaw's People, noted scholar Stanley Weintraub explores the relationships between Shaw and twelve of his contemporaries, including Queen Victoria, Oscar Wilde, H. L. Mencken, James Joyce, and Winston Churchill. Weintraub chose these individuals as lenses through which to look at Shaw but also for the ways in which their lives are illuminated through their often paradoxical relationships with Shaw.

In Potsdam, amid the ruins of a vanquished Germany, the new American President, Harry Truman, matches wits and wills with the aging Winston Churchill (soon to be voted out of office) and a cynical Joseph Stalin. The boundary lines of the new Europe and the future of the bloody end of the war against Japan are both at stake. In the Pacific, Americans closing in on Japan's home islands fend off waves of kamikaze attacks, even as a massive U.S. buildup for the final assault on the Japanese homeland (code name "Olympic")is being readied, with plans that calculate appalling casualties. And, in complete secrecy, a new kind of weapon known as an atomic bomb is being shipped by sea from the U.S. mainland to a far Pacific atoll within air-strike distance of Japan....

When her husband was diagnosed with leukemia, Catherine Dornan and their two young sons accompanied him to New York, during the Christmas season, for a life-saving operation. Hoping to divert the boys from worry about their father, and to temper her own near despair, on Christmas Eve Catherine takes the boys to see Rockefeller Center's famous Christmas tree. When they stop to listen to a street musician, Brian, the younger boy, sees a woman take his mother's wallet, which holds a precious memento his grandmother has just given them, a St. Christopher medal that saved her husband's life in World War II, and which she and Brian believe will save his father's life now. Unable to get his mother's attention, Brian impulsively follows the woman who has taken the wallet into the city's subways, thereby beginning a journey that will threaten his life and change that of his mother and of the thief, as well.

This book recaptures the whirlwind events sweeping the world on the calendar day that may be the most momentous of the twentieth century. In the kaleidoscope of Stanley Weintraub's narrative, events reveal themselves in dramatic hour-by-hour simultaneous time as scenes shift from front lines to home fronts. In the day's lens are Roosevelt and Churchill, Marshall and MacArthur, Hitler and Göring, Tojo and Yamamoto, as yet uncelebrated future leaders and obscure participants - all facing the crucial tests of their lives. --from inside jacket.