Places of Destiny: 50 Places Where History Was Made - Tapa dura

In Places of Destiny, Ben Dupré offers a rich selection of dramatic historical events and locations: the resistance of Leonidas' Spartans, an enduring epic of last-ditch heroism, in the face of Xerxes' Persians at the lonely pass of Thermopylae in 480 BC; the sack of Rome in AD 410 when the Visigothic army under the command of Alaric swarmed into Rome and subjected the Eternal City to three days of looting; the establishing of a settlement of courageous dissenters, harbinger of a great new nation, on Jamestown Island, Virginia, in 1607; the storming of a prison and the birth of modern republican politics in Paris on 14 July 1789; the extinction, senseless and bloody, of an entire generation of Western European manhood on the shattered plains of the Somme Valley in 1916; and the irruption of terror from the skies into a bright Manhattan morning on the most dreadful day of the infant 21st century. As well as retailing the extraordinary stories of the events associated with each site, Places of Destiny also examines how succeeding generations have commemorated and interpreted those events. Richly informative and deeply thought-provoking, and interspersed throughout with informative maps and colour illustrations, Places of Destiny offers an enthralling and often moving sequence of narratives that will appeal to anyone who enjoys top-notch popular historical writing.

Thermopylae 480 BC. The Rubicon 49 BC. Bethlehem 4 BC. Teutoburg Forest AD 9. Jerusalem AD 70. Rome 410. Yarmuk 636. Tours 732. Rome 800. Hastings 1066. Ain Jalut 1260. Constantinople 1453. The Bahamas 1492. Tenochtitlán 1521. Plymouth Hoe 1588. Jamestown 1607. Culloden 1746. Botany Bay 1770. Philadelphia 1776. The Bastille 1789. Waterloo 1815. Galapagos Islands 1835. Gettysburg 1863. Sarajevo 1914. Dublin 1916. Somme Valley 1916. Petrograd 1917. Guernica 1937. Pearl Harbor 1941. Stalingrad 1943. Auschwitz 1945. Hiroshima 1945. Dallas 1963. Chernobyl 1986. Berlin 1989. Lower Manhattan 2001.