Charles Norwood Stephenson

Following the Fall of France and the surrender of Paris on 14 June 1940, the British Government announced that the Channel Islands had no strategic importance and would not be defended. The Germans occupied the islands from the end of June onwards and remained in control until the end of the war. On...

The idea of printing these slight memoirs of my grandfather, my father, and my uncle was originally conceived only for the purpose of preserving the memory of three interesting people for the younger members of their family, to whom otherwise they would be but names. But on reading Sir Frederick Ste...

The Beat! was the first book to explore the musical, social, and cultural phenomenon of go-go music. In this new edition, updated by a substantial chapter on the current scene, authors Kip Lornell and Charles C. Stephenson, Jr., place go-go within black popular music made since the middle 1970s--a p...

The Island of Malta occupies a pivotal position in the Mediterranean, forming an outpost between North Africa and the soft underbelly of Europe. Such has been its strategic importance throughout the years that it has become one of the most fortified places in the world. Following the successful defe...

A disgraced outcast samurai living in early seventeenth-century Manila, Kitazume is contemplating ritual suicide when a divine force (of a sort) intervenes: Luis, a rogue Jesuit priest and Kitazume’s longtime friend. At Luis’s insistence, the samurai agrees to help smuggle a Manchu princess to Mexic...

On 2 July 1900 the people of Friedrichshafen, Germany, witnessed a momentous occasion - the first flight of LZ 1, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin's first airship. Although deemed a failure, a succession of better craft (LZ2 to 10) enabled the Zeppelin to expand into the consumer market of airship trave...

While the word "castle" conjures up an image of the classic medieval stone edifice, resplendent with towers and turrets, battlements and barbicans, and the odd oubliette, the impulse to build defensive works is as old as civilization itself; and the evolution of such architecture not only encompasse...

This is the first book in the English language to offer an analysis of a conflict that, in so many ways, raised the curtain on the Great War. In September 1911, Italy declared war on the once mighty, transcontinental Ottoman Empire – but it was an Empire in decline. The ambitious Italy decided to ad...