Where are Gran Colombia, La Plata, and Dutch Guiana? And where are New Granada, the Isle of the True Cross, and the River of Silver? What makes them important? And why should anyone care about them? The answers to all these questions and many more nestle between the covers of this small book. Few things excite the imagination more than the lure of faraway places. The call of strange-sounding names stirs the spirit of adventure in even the most timid among us. Nothing unlocks new vistas like a fresh look at old times and places. So, delve into the pages of this fascinating mini-history of Latin America and fly down to Rio on the wings of imagination. Settle revolutions in New Spain. Chart the waters of the Spanish Main. And climb the mountains known as Andes. By journey s end you will find that big books sometimes come in small sizes....

Leif Eriksson is arguably the best known of all those fierce, seafaring adventurers known as Vikings. His renown eclipses even that of his father, Erik the Red, the founder of Greenland. In 1000 CE, Leif seized fame and an enduring place in history as the first European to land in North America almost 500 years before Columbus discovered the New World. On his historic voyage, Erik s son backtracked on a course followed by another Viking fifteen years earlier. In a frail, all-purpose merchant vessel known as a knörr, Leif sailed northward along Greenland s west coast, crossed the frigid waters of present-day Baffin Bay, and turned southward to what is generally believed to be Newfoundland. There, Leif established the first European colony on the North American continent. Find out about his family s murderous history, and what it took to brave the icy waters and stormy lands of the North Atlantic during the Viking Age....

Few people recall the name of Eirik Thorvaldsson, who began life in Jaederen, Norway, around 950. When he was nine years old, his father killed a man or maybe two and was forced to flee with his family to Iceland. Young Eirik grew up in the harsh environs of that wind-swept isle in the North Atlantic. Harsh lands breed harsh men, and Eirik fit the mold. Like his father before him, he battled with neighbors and killed several men in blood feuds. Banished from Iceland for three years, he sailed west to seek refuge in an unexplored land. After three years in exile, Eirik returned to Iceland with tales of his discoveries in that new land to the west. He called it Greenland to entice others to join him there. Around 985, he sailed west again from Iceland with twenty-five ships of colonists. History records him as the founder of the first European settlement in Greenland and the father of Leif Eriksson. People remember him best as Erik the Red....

In 481 CE, the Salian Franks crowned Clovis I their king. At the age of fifteen, the young monarch set about uniting all the Franks barbarian tribes that inhabited much of the region that became modern-day France and Germany. A fierce warrior and an astute administrator, he expanded his originally modest kingdom in northeast Gaul (France) by all possible means, including conquest, marriage, diplomacy, and deception. When he married Clotilda, a devout Roman Catholic, he converted to Catholicism and became instrumental in spreading his new religion across Europe. By the time Clovis died in 511, his domain covered most of Western Europe, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the source of the Danube River. The French regard him as the founder of their monarchy....

Blitzkrieg Hitler s lightning war tactic combined devastating air attacks with swiftly moving ground forces. The Germans tested their theories of air-ground coordination in the 1936 39 Spanish Civil War, a proving ground for German and Soviet weapons and tactics. In September 1939, Hitler launched his first blitzkrieg in Poland and captured the Polish capital of Warsaw in twenty-seven days, igniting World War II. Hitler turned his attention to the west in the spring of 1940. Using both seaborne and airborne assault troops, along with blitzkrieg tactics, Germany overwhelmed Norway and Denmark, then rolled across the Low Countries and France in fewer than four months of actual fighting including Poland. Hitler s blitzkrieg tactics lost their magic in the sand of North Africa and in the mud and snow of the Soviet Union from 1942 to 1945. Allied forces took the final measure of Hitler s lightning war in the Ardennes Forest, during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944....

In the 1920s, life was good for most Americans and great for many. Prosperity built on the new economic premise of buy now, pay later ruled the decade known as the Roaring Twenties. Then the bubble burst, and America s house of cards came tumbling down. With stunning suddenness, the stock market Crash of 29 revealed the flaws in America s economy and plunged the nation into the worst depression it had ever known. The troubled citizenry called on its newly elected president to lead it out of economic chaos. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-second president of the United States, stood forth to meet the challenge. At his inauguration in March 1933, he told the American people they had nothing to fear but fear itself. FDR calmed their fears and embarked on a whirlwind program of domestic reform. His program became known as the New Deal. It empowered the government like never before and changed the face of America forever....

The story of the brothers Custer, George, Tom, and Boston, reads like a Hollywood thriller almost too incredible to be true. George Armstrong Custer, known to family and friends as Autie, graduated last in his class from West Point. What Autie lacked in the classroom he made up for on the battlefields of the Civil War. He rose from a brash second lieutenant to a seasoned brevet lieutenant general and leader of thousands of Union cavalrymen. His heroics at Gettysburg turned the tide of battle for the North and likely saved the Union. Autie s brother, Thomas Ward Custer, or simply Tom, enlisted in the Union Army as a private. Tom s spectacular deeds of valor earned him a battlefield commission and not one but two Medals of Honor. Autie s youngest brother, Boston, was too young to serve in the Civil War, but he was not too young to join his older brothers in a date with fate on the Little Bighorn....