Books with author Michael Simmons

What did Alexander Hamilton ever do besides get shot in a duel by Aaron Burr? When it comes to the American government, the answer is: practically everything.Born in the West Indies, Hamilton was the illegitimate child of a Scottish nobleman who lost a fortune in sugar plantations. Orphaned as a teenager, he came to America in search of an education, a home, and the war that would at last bring him fame and honor. As George Washington’s most trusted aide, Hamilton helped to win the American Revolution—but after the war, his enemies lost no time accusing him of trying to sell his country back to the British. He was the most powerful member of Washington’s presidential cabinet—so why did Adams and Jefferson hate him so much?In this book, you will learn how the author of the Federalist Papers and the first Secretary of the Treasury nearly ruined his career by fighting duels, seducing women, and getting involved in America’s first sex scandal. The duel that killed Alexander Hamilton is the most famous duel in American history, but you’ll have to come up with your own answer to its greatest mystery: who shot first, Hamilton or Burr?

Born an obscure German princess who suffered under the control of a domineering, narcissistic mother, the fourteen-year-old Princess Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst seemed to be destined for a minor marriage and a forgettable career. Destiny had other plans for her: summoned to Russia, then considered by most Europeans to be a vast, primitive wasteland, devoid of culture or sophistication, she became the Grand Duchess Ekaterina, wife of the future emperor Peter III.What followed her short, unhappy marriage was a legendary rise to supreme power. At the age of 33, the Grand Duchess Catherine became the Empress Catherine II, ruler in her own right of the largest empire on earth.In this book, you will learn how, during Catherine’s lonely years as a neglected wife in the court of the Empress Elisabeth, she bided her time and amassed the necessary political and military support to overthrow the heir to the Romanov dynasty and seize his throne. You will also learn why, over the course of her 34-year reign, which saw rebellions, foreign wars, popular uprisings, and a string of jealous lovers vying for her favor, she came to be remembered by history under the name conferred upon her by her own people: Catherine the Great.

The tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales, triggered an unprecedented worldwide outpouring of grief from the public that adored her ever since she was first identified as the girlfriend of the Prince of Wales in 1981. Ever since August 31, 1997, people have struggled to account for the depth of the impact she seemed to have on people’s hearts and minds. First the little girl who felt that she had disappointed her family by not being a boy, then the schoolgirl who preferred pranks to studying, then the shy kindergarten teacher who won the heart of Prince Charles, Diana’s anonymity ended forever only a few weeks after she began dating the heir to the British throne. Over the next sixteen years, she lived her life in the public eye—a smiling, dutiful royal wife and mother, who eventually rocked the monarchy to its foundations by disclosing the details of her troubled marriage to the world, shining a light on the hidden life of the notoriously private royal family.This book examines the contrast between the private Diana and the public princess—the troubled yet radiant woman who believed that one must suffer in order to have compassion for others.

Nikola Tesla: inventor or magician? Tesla was one of the most famous inventors who ever lived, but after his death, he was nearly forgotten. He was a celebrity during the height of America’s Gilded Age. In this book, you will read about his friendship with Mark Twain, his furious competition with his former employer Thomas Edison, his uneasy relationship with billionaire J.P. Morgan, and his rivalry with Albert Einstein. During his lifetime, Tesla revolutionized the field of electrical engineering with his most famous invention: the induction motor. But that wasn’t all he contributed to the world of technology. His coils, turbines, robotic boats, and mysterious “death ray” continue to beguile the imagination and inspire the inventors of the 21st century.But who was Tesla really? This book will take you from his early childhood in Croatia, where he experienced strange optical visions and “luminous phenomenon” that gave him near super-human powers of memory and visualization, to the “War of the Currents”, Thomas Edison’s bizarre campaign to ruin Tesla’s reputation. From trying to fight the Spanish American War with robots, to electrifying the skies of the Colorado desert, and to starting an earthquake in the middle of New York city, learn how Nikola Tesla shaped the world we live in today.

Everyone knows that Thomas Edison is America’s most famous inventor. But what exactly drove him to invent? Have you ever heard of the phonograph, or the kinetoscope? And what made his incandescent light bulb so special anyway?In this book, you will learn about Edison’s busy childhood as a young inventor and entrepreneur conducting chemical experiments aboard a moving train car, his nomadic youth as a wandering telegraph operator, and about the five miraculous years of invention that produced the phonograph and the incandescent light bulb, inventions that made Edison the most famous American in history before he was thirty five years old.Through the inclusion of primary documents, including letters written by Edison himself, his diary entries, and newspaper articles from the 19th century and after, this book will help you see through the eyes of an ordinary American glimpsing electric light for the first time, or listening to records on the phonograph, or viewing the very first motion pictures. From his friendship with Henry Ford, to his work for the American navy during World War I, Thomas Edison was the original American hero, lighting all of history with his extraordinary inventions.

Three-foot-tall hairdos, “let them eat cake”, and the guillotine: this is the sum total of what most people know about Marie Antoinette, the last Queen of France. The wife of King Louis XVI and the daughter of Maria Teresa, Holy Roman Empress did, indeed, wear her hair three feet high, when she wasn’t wearing straw bonnets and simple muslin gowns and playing at being a dairymaid at her fantasy retreat of Petit Trianon. But she never said “let them eat cake”, nor was she the vain, shallow creature who was said to have drained the coffers of France to pay for her luxuriant amusements. The guillotine was real, however.In this book, you will read about life of the woman who was born an insignificant archduchess, who defied all expectations for her future by marrying the heir to the throne of France, only to go seven years without consummating her marriage. The victim of a misogynistic, sex-obsessed tabloid pamphlet industry, Marie Antoinette went from being a popular young queen to the most hated woman in France. The national obsession with the foreign born queen ignited a revolution, destroying a thousand year old monarchy—and the lives of everyone she loved.

What did Alexander Hamilton ever do besides get shot in a duel by Aaron Burr? When it comes to the American government, the answer is: practically everything. Born in the West Indies, Hamilton was the illegitimate child of a Scottish nobleman who lost a fortune in sugar plantations. Orphaned as a teenager, he came to America in search of an education, a home, and the war that would at last bring him fame and honor. As George Washington’s most trusted aide, Hamilton helped to win the American Revolution—but after the war, his enemies lost no time accusing him of trying to sell his country back to the British. He was the most powerful member of Washington’s presidential cabinet—so why did Adams and Jefferson hate him so much? In this book, you will learn how the author of the Federalist Papers and the first Secretary of the Treasury nearly ruined his career by fighting duels, seducing women, and getting involved in America’s first sex scandal. The duel that killed Alexander Hamilton is the most famous duel in American history, but you’ll have to come up with your own answer to its greatest mystery: who shot first, Hamilton or Burr?

When Elizabeth I took the throne of England in 1559, hardly anyone knew what to make of her. Born the heir to the throne, she was declared a bastard when she was three years old, after her mother was executed for treason, witchcraft, and incest. During the reign of her sister, Mary I, she was a prisoner in the Tower of London, where she was expected to die. But when she became Queen, at the age of 25, she swiftly stunned the royal court by stepping into the seat of power with grace, intelligence, and an air of majesty that maddened and enchanted the men around her.For 44 years, Elizabeth I guided England through religious upheavals and plots to overthrow the government. Courted by all the most powerful princes in Europe, she baffled her advisors by refusing to marry any of them. And when England stood under threat of invasion by the most powerful nation in Europe, Elizabeth’s navy destroyed the Spanish Armada so decisively that it was seen as an act of God. In this book, you will discover why no English monarch has ever been more famous, more successful—or more deeply loved by her people.

A Dictionary of American Presidents Vol. 1: Presidents 1-24 George Washington to Grover Cleveland offers an introductory glimpse into the background, upbringing, education, and political agendas of every American president from the years following the Revolutionary War to the end of the 19th century and Reconstruction. The first in a two-volume collection, this book offers the reader the opportunity to trace the development of the United States and the office of the Presidency from its inception in 1789 to the brink of the 20th century. This lively, informative examination of the people and events that shaped the first one hundred years of the American presidency answers the question: what sort of person does it take to shepherd a new nation from its rocky, tumultuous beginnings, to an era of increasing international prestige and geographical expansion? From the Founding Fathers and the Era of Good Feelings, to the Civil War and the Gilded Age, from Virginia plantations to log cabins on the western frontier, from self-taught lawyers to storied military heroes, from the Bill of Rights to the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution: the story of the American presidency is neither more nor less than the story of the American nation.

Apart from Abraham Lincoln the most famous name of the Civil War is undoubtedly that of Ulysses S. Grant. He was the first Lieutenant General created by the American army since George Washington. After the war, he was the only president between Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson to be elected to two successive terms in office. His legacy as a military strategist is unparalleled to this day: American victory in the first and second world wars was achieved by upholding the strategic doctrine of overwhelming force that Grant established in his relentless pursuit of Robert E. Lee during the Overland campaign.In this book, which focuses exclusively on Grant’s military career, you will read about the young infantry officer and quartermaster who served in the Mexican-American War under Zachary Taylor, whose common-sense approach to leadership would serve as a role model for Grant’s own command style. You will also read the highlights of every major battle Grant fought during the Civil War, including his great victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, Shiloh, and Chattanooga, his near disastrous failure at Cold Harbor, and at last the long campaign through a Wilderness and beyond that ended in Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in 1865.

William Shakespeare was the most brilliant writer in the history of the English language. But his life is a complete mystery to us. No biographies were written for almost a hundred years after his death. His friends, family, and all those who knew him as a poet in London’s theatrical scene died before anyone could ask them: who was Shakespeare? What was he like? What were his habits, his amusements, his passions?Nearly the only answers we have are those we can divine from reading his plays and poems. Shakespeare’s uncanny ability to grasp the technical languages of skilled professions makes it difficult to judge what precisely he got up to during his “lost years”—the two periods of life in which he disappears from the historical record entirely.In this book, you will learn what it is we know for certain about William Shakespeare, and by delving into the plays, you will discover all that can be surmised about his uneasy relationship with authority, the religious conflicts in his family, his relationship with the father who fulfilled his lifelong dream to become a gentleman, and his own unexpected ambition: to become a wealthy, respectable country landlord in his hometown of Stratford.

Nikola Tesla: inventor or magician? Tesla was one of the most famous inventors who ever lived, but after his death, he was nearly forgotten. He was a celebrity during the height of America’s Gilded Age. In this book, you will read about his friendship with Mark Twain, his furious competition with his former employer Thomas Edison, his uneasy relationship with billionaire J.P. Morgan, and his rivalry with Albert Einstein. During his lifetime, Tesla revolutionized the field of electrical engineering with his most famous invention: the induction motor. But that wasn’t all he contributed to the world of technology. His coils, turbines, robotic boats, and mysterious “death ray” continue to beguile the imagination and inspire the inventors of the 21st century. But who was Tesla really? This book will take you from his early childhood in Croatia, where he experienced strange optical visions and “luminous phenomenon” that gave him near super-human powers of memory and visualization, to the “War of the Currents”, Thomas Edison’s bizarre campaign to ruin Tesla’s reputation. From trying to fight the Spanish American War with robots, to electrifying the skies of the Colorado desert, and to starting an earthquake in the middle of New York city, learn how Nikola Tesla shaped the world we live in today.