Charles Mee: 31 books

Here, award-winning historian Charles L. Mee Jr. explores life in Renaissance Italy - from the ascendancy of Florence and the Medicis to the genius of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Through wars and violence to festivals and feasts, Mee examines the people - artists, clergy, courtiers, merchants, scholars, and women - who fashioned the cradle for the rebirth of the Western world.

For two weeks in the summer of 1945, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Josef Stalin gathered to reconstruct the world out of the ruins of World War II. They met "only a few miles," as President Truman noted, "from the war-shattered seat of Nazi power" - around a baize-covered...

Lorenzo de' Medici was never an old man. He died in 1492 at the age of forty-three. He came to power in fifteenth-century Florence at the age of twenty. In the twenty-odd years of his rule, this banker, politician, international diplomat, free-wheeling poet and songwriter, and energetic revolutionary...

Until now he has remained a mystery, leaving only a few sentences, the letters of his bankruptcy, a mistress's notarized complaint - and the most glorious, compassionate paintings ever to astonish the eye. The first pure biography of this enigmatic legend is a fascinating detective story in which,...

In 1517, Martin Luther, the Germany theologian, tacked his ninety-five theses to the door of the Wittenberg church, thereby setting off the theological revolution that gave birth to the Reformation. Luther confronted a papal establishment headed by Leo X, the pleasure-loving son of Lorenzo de Medici...

The illusion of power - the spectacle of politics - as it is used to dazzle one's own followers, to fool an opponent, and to bemuse oneself has never been displayed more grandly than in the meeting in 1520 of England's Henry VIII and the French King Francis I on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Here,...

Louis Kahn's monolithic buildings defied convention and defined an era. Like the architect himself, his structures were both complex and simplistic, expressing an underlying strength while displaying a singularly bold vision. Here, in this short-form book by award-winning author Charles L. Mee Jr., is Kahn's extraordinary story.

World War I and the Versailles Treaty that followed produced the most serious upheaval in a long and stormy course of modern world history. Four great empires - Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, and Turkey - were part of the war's rubble. Far from restoring order, the diplomats who met in 1919 at...

In diplomatic history, there is perhaps no better example of the rule of unintended consequences than the Yalta Conference. In 1945, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin met to ensure a peaceable aftermath to World War II. But, as this illuminating short-form book by Charles L. Mee...

When Pope Leo rode out of Rome in 452 to meet Attila the Hun, he had no arms, no army, no bodyguards, no great retinue of ambassadors and advisers. Only a few churchmen and lesser officials of the enfeebled and fading Roman Empire accompanied him. Attila came to the encounter leading a large, well-armed,...

By the age of thirty-one, the scholarly monk Desiderius Erasmus was the most renowned and revered humanist theologian in Renaissance Europe. A sickly man, driven by a childhood fear of the plague, Erasmus devoted his life to the goal of uplifting people through faith, reason, and education. He satirized...

At the July 1991 meeting of the so-called G7, President George H. W. Bush of the United States and leaders of the other industrial nations were joined by Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, of what was then still the Soviet Union, for his last hurrah. He was seeking direct foreign aid to shore up his rapidly...

In the 1300s, a third of the population of Europe died of plague carried by rat-borne fleas, shocking the medieval world to its foundations. "Very rarely," award-winning author Charles L. Mee Jr. writes in this short-form book, "does a single event change history by itself. Yet an event...

When Warren G. Harding was elected president in 1920, he brought to Washington some of his political chums from Ohio. They played poker; they sold illegal liquor permits, pardons and paroles. They sold fixes in the Justice Department and transported contraband across state lines. They sold naval oil...