Download or read book The Last Empress of the French written by Philip Walsingham Sergeant and published by London : T.W. Laurie. This book was released on 1907 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Fatal Passion written by Michael John Sullivan and published by Random House (NY). This book was released on 1997 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chronicling the years from 1876 to 1939, "A Fatal Passion" tells the compelling story of Grand Duchess Victoria Melita, granddaughter of Queen Victoria and Emperor Alexander of Russia, and the tragic aftermath of the Russian Revolution. of photos.
Download or read book The Last Empress written by Anchee Min and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Vivid and entertaining ... this is history as it plays upon the emotions. Empires crumble, hearts are broken' THE TIMES From the bestselling author of Red Azalea comes the much-anticipated sequel to Empress Orchid At the end of the nineteenth century China is rocked by foreign attacks and local rebellions. The only constant is the power wielded by one woman, Tzu Hsi, also known as Empress Orchid, who must face the perilous condition of her empire and devastating personal losses. In this sequel to the bestselling Empress Orchid, Anchee Min brings to life one of the most important figures in Chinese history, a very human leader who sacrifices all she has to protect both those she loves and her doomed empire.
Download or read book Marie Antoinette written by Evelyne Lever and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2001-09-24 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the French queen explores the intrigue surrounding her life from her birth, through her unhappy marriage, her lavish life at Versailles, to the events leading up to her death by beheading during the French Revolution.
Download or read book The Last Empress written by Hannah Pakula and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-11-03 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the beautiful, powerful, and sexy Madame Chiang Kai-shek at the center of one of the great dramas of the twentieth century, this is the story of the founding of modern China, starting with a revolution that swept away more than 2,000 years of monarchy, followed by World War II, and ending in the eventual loss to the Communists and exile in Taiwan. An epic historical tapestry, this wonderfully wrought narrative brings to life what Americans should know about China -- the superpower we are inextricably linked with -- the way its people think and their code of behavior, both vastly different from our own. The story revolves around this fascinating woman and her family: her father, a peasant who raised himself into Shanghai society and sent his daughters to college in America in a day when Chinese women were kept purposefully uneducated; her mother, an unlikely Methodist from the Mandarin class; her husband, a military leader and dogmatic warlord; her sisters, one married to Sun Yat-sen, the George Washington of China, the other to a seventy-fifth lineal descendant of Confucius; and her older brother, a financial genius. This was the Soong family, which, along with their partners in marriage, was largely responsible for dragging China into the twentieth century. Brilliantly narrated, this fierce and bloody drama also includes U.S. Army General Joseph Stilwell; Claire Chennault, head of the Flying Tigers; Communist leaders Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai; murderous warlords; journalists Henry Luce, Theodore White, and Edgar Snow; and the unfortunate State Department officials who would be purged for predicting (correctly) the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. As the representative of an Eastern ally in the West, Madame Chiang was befriended -- before being rejected -- by the Roosevelts, stayed in the White House for long periods during World War II, and charmed the U.S. Congress into giving China billions of dollars. Although she was dubbed the Dragon Lady in some quarters, she was an icon to her people and is certainly one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Galla Placidia written by Hagith Sivan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-15 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wedding in Gaul (414) -- Funerals in Barcelona (414-416) -- Making of an empress (417-425) -- Restoration and rehabilitation (425-431) -- Bride, a book, and a pope (437-438) -- Between Rome and Ravenna (438-450).
Download or read book The Last Empress written by Keith Laidler and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2005-01-21 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1851, a sixteen-year-old girl named Yehonala entered the Imperial Palace of China as a concubine third grade, leaving behind her family, the love of her life, and nearly all contact with the outside world. She emerged as Tsu Hsi, Dowager Empress of China and one of the most powerful autocrats in history. A fascinating tale of love, betrayal, murder, intrigue, and survival, The Last Empress offers remarkable insight into life behind the closed doors of the forbidden city.
Download or read book Pearl of China written by Anchee Min and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-04-09 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is the end of the nineteenth century and China is riding on the crest of great change, but for nine-year-old Willow, the only child of a destitute family in the small southern town of Chin-kiang, nothing ever seems to change. Until the day she meets Pearl, the eldest daughter of a zealous American missionary. Pearl is head-strong, independent and fiercely intelligent, and will grow up to be Pearl S Buck, the Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning writer and humanitarian activist, but for now all Willow knows is that she has never met anyone like her in all her life. From the start the two are thick as thieves, but when the Boxer Rebellion rocks the nation, Pearl's family is forced to leave China to flee religious persecution. As the twentieth century unfolds in all its turmoil, through right-wing military coups and Mao's Red Revolution, through bad marriages and broken dreams, the two girls cling to their lifelong friendship across the sea. In this ambitious and moving new novel, Anchee Min, acclaimed author of Empress Orchid and Red Azalea, brings to life a courageous and passionate woman who loved the country of her childhood and who has been hailed in China as a modern heroine.
Download or read book The Last Emperor of Mexico written by Edward Shawcross and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true operatic tragedy of Maximilian and Carlota, the European aristocrats who stumbled into power in Mexico—and faced bloody consequences. In the 1860s, Napoleon III, intent on curbing the rise of American imperialism, persuaded a young Austrian archduke and a Belgian princess to leave Europe and become the emperor and empress of Mexico. They and their entourage arrived in a Mexico ruled by terror, where revolutionary fervor was barely suppressed by French troops. When the United States, now clear of its own Civil War, aided the rebels in pushing back Maximilian’s imperial soldiers, the French army withdrew, abandoning the young couple. The regime fell apart. Maximilian was executed by a firing squad and Carlota, secluded in a Belgian castle, descended into madness. Assiduously researched and vividly told, The Last Emperor of Mexico is a dramatic story of European hubris, imperialist aspirations clashing with revolutionary fervor, and the Old World breaking from the New.
Download or read book Napol on s Last Will and Testament written by Napoleon I (Emperor of the French) and published by Grosset & Dunlap. This book was released on 1977 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Maximilian and Carlota written by M. M. McAllen and published by Trinity University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-08 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new telling of Mexico’s Second Empire and Louis Napoléon’s installation of Maximilian von Habsburg and his wife, Carlota of Belgium, as the emperor and empress of Mexico, Maximilian and Carlota brings the dramatic, interesting, and tragic time of this six-year-siege to life. From 1861 to 1866, the French incorporated the armies of Austria, Belgium—including forces from Crimea to Egypt—to fight and subdue the regime of Mexico’s Benito Juárez during the time of the U.S. Civil War. France viewed this as a chance to seize Mexican territory in a moment they were convinced the Confederacy would prevail and take over Mexico. With both sides distracted in the U.S., this was their opportunity to seize territory in North America. In 1867, with aid from the United States, this movement came to a disastrous end both for the royals and for France while ushering in a new era for Mexico. In a bid to oust Juárez, Mexican conservatives appealed to European leaders to select a monarch to run their country. Maximilian and Carlota’s reign, from 1864 to 1867, was marked from the start by extravagance and ambition and ended with the execution of Maximilian by firing squad, with Carlota on the brink of madness. This epoch moment in the arc of French colonial rule, which spans North American and European history at a critical juncture on both continents, shows how Napoleon III’s failure to save Maximilian disgusted Europeans and sealed his own fate. Maximilian and Carlota offers a vivid portrait of the unusual marriage of Maximilian and Carlota and of international high society and politics at this critical nineteenth-century juncture. This largely unknown era in the history of the Americas comes to life through this colorful telling of the couple’s tragic reign.
Download or read book Catherine Diderot written by Robert Zaretsky and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-18 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dual biography crafted around the famous encounter between the French philosopher who wrote about power and the Russian empress who wielded it with great aplomb. In October 1773, after a grueling trek from Paris, the aged and ailing Denis Diderot stumbled from a carriage in wintery St. Petersburg. The century’s most subversive thinker, Diderot arrived as the guest of its most ambitious and admired ruler, Empress Catherine of Russia. What followed was unprecedented: more than forty private meetings, stretching over nearly four months, between these two extraordinary figures. Diderot had come from Paris in order to guide—or so he thought—the woman who had become the continent’s last great hope for an enlightened ruler. But as it soon became clear, Catherine had a very different understanding not just of her role but of his as well. Philosophers, she claimed, had the luxury of writing on unfeeling paper. Rulers had the task of writing on human skin, sensitive to the slightest touch. Diderot and Catherine’s series of meetings, held in her private chambers at the Hermitage, captured the imagination of their contemporaries. While heads of state like Frederick of Prussia feared the consequences of these conversations, intellectuals like Voltaire hoped they would further the goals of the Enlightenment. In Catherine & Diderot, Robert Zaretsky traces the lives of these two remarkable figures, inviting us to reflect on the fraught relationship between politics and philosophy, and between a man of thought and a woman of action.
Download or read book Dragon Lady written by Sterling Seagrave and published by Alfred A. Knopf. This book was released on 1992 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The last empress of China--Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi (1835-1908)--is remembered as one of history's monsters, an iron-willed concubine who, after usurping power in 1861, ruled from the Dragon Throne for half a century. Her reign, in the aftermath of the Opium Wars and through the Boxer Rebellion until the collapse of the 2,000-year-old empire, has traditionally been seen as one of murder, poison, and intrigue. But the wicked image is false." "In 1974, to the dismay of scholars, Sir Edmund Backhouse--the biographer most responsible for the widespread vision of Tzu Hsi as monster--was revealed to be a con man. And now the author of the celebrated best-seller The Soong Dynasty has undertaken the first complete reappraisal of the empress--exposing Backhouse's writings about her as a major hoax and forgery, and establishing that the most important Western correspondent in Peking during her reign--Dr. George Morrison of the London Times--kept a secret diary contradicting his own dispatches about Tzu Hsi." "Drawing on many unpublished or long-overlooked contemporary sources, Sterling Seagrave shows us Tzu Hsi as a complex woman whose desperate--though often misguided--efforts to hold her country together take on a different coloration in the context of unrelenting foreign attempts to colonize and tear it apart. Far from being all-powerful, she was actually a hostage of vengeful Manchu princes who were using her in a power struggle against both Chinese reformers and foreign interference." "Here at last is an authentic portrait of this fascinating historical figure, as well as insight into the Western craving to believe in a sinister, dragon-haunted Orient. Dragon Lady is at once a compelling biography and the equally compelling story of how a myth was contrived, how it endured, and how, ultimately, the truth has emerged."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Ambition and Desire written by Kate Williams and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From CNN’s official royal historian, a highly praised young author with a doctorate from Oxford University, comes the extraordinary rags-to-riches story of the woman who conquered Napoleon’s heart—and with it, an empire. Their love was legendary, their ambition flagrant and unashamed. Napoleon Bonaparte and his wife, Josephine, came to power during one of the most turbulent periods in the history of France. The story of the Corsican soldier’s incredible rise has been well documented. Now, in this spellbinding, luminous account, Kate Williams draws back the curtain on the woman who beguiled him: her humble origins, her exorbitant appetites, and the tragic turn of events that led to her undoing. Born Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Tascher de La Pagerie on the Caribbean island of Martinique, the woman Napoleon would later call Josephine was the ultimate survivor. She endured a loveless marriage to a French aristocrat—executed during the Reign of Terror—then barely escaped the guillotine blade herself. Her near-death experience only fueled Josephine’s ambition and heightened her determination to find a man who could finance and sustain her. Though no classic beauty, she quickly developed a reputation as one of the most desirable women on the continent. In 1795, she met Napoleon. The attraction was mutual, immediate, and intense. Theirs was an often-tumultuous union, roiled by their pursuit of other lovers but intensely focused on power and success. Josephine was Napoleon’s perfect consort and the object of national fascination. Together they conquered Europe. Their extravagance was unprecedented, even by the standards of Versailles. But she could not produce an heir. Sexual obsession brought them together, but cold biological truth tore them apart. Gripping in its immediacy, captivating in its detail, Ambition and Desire is a true tale of desire, heartbreak, and revolutionary turmoil, engagingly written by one of England’s most praised young historians. Kate Williams’s searing portrait of this alluring and complex woman will finally elevate Josephine Bonaparte to the historical prominence she deserves.
Download or read book Empress Eug nie and the Arts written by Alison McQueen and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstructing Empress Eugénie's position as private collector and public patron, this study is the first to examine Eugénie (1826-1920) in these roles. Her patronage and collecting is considered within the context of her political roles in the development of France's institutions and international relations. The book also examines representations of the empress, and the artistic transformation of a Hispanic woman into a leading figure in French politics.
Download or read book An Enduring Love My Life with the Shah written by Farah Pahlavi and published by Large Print Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times BestsellerIt was like a fairy tale. At twenty-one Farah Diba married Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, and became an international celebrity. But twenty years later unrest shook the country, sending Farah and the seriously ill shah into exile. For the first time, Farah Diba tells the wrenching story of his last years, and of her love for a man and his country.
Download or read book Battle for Paris 1815 written by Paul L. Dawson and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2019-12-19 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “For anyone seeking a full understanding of the end of the Napoleonic era this book is a must read . . . [a] tour de force of research.” —Clash of Steel On the morning of 3 July 1815, the French General Rémi Joseph Isidore Exelmans, at the head of a brigade of dragoons, fired the last shots in the defense of Paris until the Franco-Prussian War sixty-five years later. Why did he do so? Traditional stories of 1815 end with Waterloo, that fateful day of 18 June, when Napoleon Bonaparte fought and lost his last battle, abdicating his throne on 22 June. But Waterloo was not the end; it was the beginning of a new and untold story. Seldom studied in French histories and virtually ignored by English writers, the French Army fought on after Waterloo. Many commanders sought to reverse that defeat—at Versailles, Sevres, Rocquencourt, and La Souffel, the last great battle and the last French victory of the Napoleonic Wars. Marshal Grouchy, much maligned, fought his army back to Paris by 29 June, with the Prussians hard on his heels. On 1 July, Vandamme, Exelmans and Marshal Davout began the defense of Paris. Davout took to the field in the north-eastern suburbs of Paris along with regiments of the Imperial Guard and battalions of National Guards. For the first time ever, using the wealth of material held in the French Army archives in Paris, along with eyewitness testimonies from those who were there, Paul Dawson brings alive the bitter and desperate fighting in defense of the French capital. The 100 Days Campaign did not end at Waterloo, it ended under the walls of Paris fifteen days later.
