Diana Preston

"When twenty-two-year-old aspiring geologist Charles Darwin boarded the HMS Beagle in 1831 with his microscopes and specimen bottles-invited by ship's captain Robert FitzRoy who wanted a travel companion at least as much as a ship's naturalist-he hardly thought he was embarking on what would become perhaps the most important and epoch-changing voyage in scientific history. Nonetheless, over the course of the five-year journey around the globe in often...

An account of the World War I German torpedo attack on and sinking of the passenger liner, the Lusitania, describing the experiences of some of those involved.

An account of the mid-nineteenth-century war in Afghanistan documents how the British government sought to protect regional interests by attempting to install a puppet ruler only to be defeated by united Afghanistan tribes.

"In six weeks during April and May 1915, as World War I escalated, Germany forever altered the way war would be fought with poison gas, torpedoes killing civilians, and aerial bombardment. Each of these actions violated rules of war carefully agreed at the Hague Conventions of 1898 and 1907. The era of weapons of mass destruction had dawned. While each of these momentous events has been chronicled in histories of the war, historian Diana Preston links...