Collection: Adult Non Fiction - History & Military

In ancient times, the vast area that stretches across what is now modern-day Iraq and Syria saw the rise and fall of epic civilizations who built the foundations of our world today. It was in this region, which we call Mesopotamia, that history was written down for the very first time. With start...

For almost five decades after the Second World War, Europe was divided by the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. The Iron Curtain, a near-impenetrable barrier of wire and wall, tank traps, minefields, watchtowers and men with dogs, stretched for 4,300 miles from the Arctic to the B...

When Ovid was exiled from Rome to a border town on the Black Sea, he despaired at his new bleak and barbarous surroundings. Like many Greeks and Romans, Ovid thought the outer reaches of their world was where civilisation ceased to exist. Our fascination with the Greek and Roman world, and the ab...

The members of the Australian battalion of Gull Force endured some of the harshest prisoner-of-war conditions of any Australian during the Second World War. In February 1942, on the remote island of Ambon in Indonesia, 1150 Australian soldiers were preparing for invasion by Japanese forces. Outnu...

A gripping account of hidden identity, military courage, and an against-all-odds reunion. Four days after Germany's surrender in May 1945, a young British officer took a jeep and headed east into Germany. But this was no ordinary soldier. Manfred Gans was searching for his family. As a Jewish boy...

The official history of the Royal Australian Air Force claims that no enemy submarines operating off the Australian coast during World War II were sunk. But what if history got it wrong? In a fierce and decisive air action off the coast of New South Wales, RAAF Beaufort bombers engaged a colossal...

The impact of World War I still ripples through time. In this moving and essential book, historian Patricia Skehan brings to light secret details of Anzac experiences on the Western Front. In the annals of human history, the stakes are highest in war. And in World War I, what was at stake was the...

Rarely, however, do we think of France as a melting pot, but it's no less a melange of foreign ingredients than the United States, and by some measures more. The Shortest History of France charts more than two millennia of eventful and surprising history, from 'glorious defeat' in 52 BCE at the h...

The award-winning author of The Sydney Wars reveals the breadth of frontier resistance warfare. The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance ended in 1824 with a series of massacres conducted by settlers in the Bathurst region. From the 1830s, colonists began occupying more and more Aboriginal land acro...

Fascinating stories from Australia's colonial navies and the early Royal Australian Navy, whose untried ships and the eager crew manning them performed feats of great courage in World War I. Just months before the start of World War I, Winston Churchill withdrew the Royal Navy's most formidable s...