Search results for ""Author Peter Oliver""

It was where World War II began on September 1, 1939. Its wartime experience was immortalized in Gunter Grass`s The Tin Drum. Later it attracted worldwide attention as the site where workers` strikes led by Lech Walesa and the ensuing Solidarity movement led to the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Proud Hanseatic port, heart of the Baltic Sea trade, twice a Free City, present-day liberal, cosmopolitan center: Gdansk''s story between Germany and Poland is rich and fascinating.As Peter Oliver Loew colorfully shows, Gdansk, also known as Danzig, is incomparable not only because of its recent past but also in how it has so uniquely embodied the tensions of the European continent over the last millennium. Situated geographically and culturally within these tensions, the city has developed a fascinating identity amid frequent conflict and shifting national affiliations. From prehistoric amber workers to early Slavic dukes, the conquest of the Teutonic Order, and submission to the Polish

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Twenty of the world's most thrilling Alpine destinations, from classic resorts to off-piste powder stashes to heli-skiing and beyond. Skiers and snowboarders, prepare to realize your wildest travel dreams as we take you to twenty of the best mountains on the planet. They include: Alta and Snowbird's incomparable Utah powder; glitzy Aspen's motherload of overlooked backcountry; Whistler, B.C., and the secret of its fame and fortune; boundless adventures on the glaciers and couloirs of Chamonix, Verbier, Val d'Isere, and St. Anton in the European Alps; the lesser-known treasures at Fernie, B.C., Big Mountain, Montana, and La Grave, France; and finally some way-off-the-charts lines to be experienced in Alaska, Greenland, and Antarctica.

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One difficulty in writing a balanced history of the American Revolution arises in part from its success as a creator of our nation and our nationalistic sentiment. Unlike the Civil War, unlike the French Revolution, the American Revolution produced no lingering social trauma in the United States—it is a historic event widely applauded by Americans today as both necessary and desirable. But one consequence of this happy unanimity is that the chief losers of the War of Independence—the American Loyalists—have fared badly at the hands of historians. This explains, in part, why the account of the Revolution recorded by self-professed Loyalist and Chief Justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts, Peter Oliver, has heretofore been so routinely overlooked. Oliver's manuscript, entitled "The Origins & Progress of the American Rebellion," written in 1781, challenges the motives of the founding fathers, and depicts the revolution as passion, plotting, and violence. His descriptions of the leaders of the patriot party, of their program and motives, are unforgiving, bitter, and inevitably partisan. But it records the impressions of one who had experienced these events, knew most of the combatants intimately, and saw the collapse of the society he had lived in. His history is a very important contemporary account of the origins of the revolution in Massachusetts, and is now presented here in it entirety for the first time.

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