American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines carried whiskey at Yorktown, Gettysburg, Manila, and Da Nang. It bolstered their courage, calmed their nerves, and treated their maladies. As a serious
Although Theodore Roosevelt was not a wartime president, he took his role as commander in chief very seriously. In Command explores Roosevelt’s efforts to modernize the American military before,
Building the Nation draws from foreign-policy reports and interviews with U.S. military officers to investigate recent U.S.-led efforts to “nation-build” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Heather S
Approximately 2.5 million men and women have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in the service of the U.S. War on Terror. Marian Eide and Michael Gibler have collected and compiled personal combat accou
“Well there it is. It won’t work, but you must bloody well make it,” said the chief of Britain’s military leaders when he gave orders to begin planning for what became known as
As a scholar of terrorism, John Maszka has examined how politics, the media, and the War on Terror play off one another. His most startling claim is that the War on Terror is a war for natural resourc
San Tran Croucher’s earliest memories are of fleeing ethnic attacks in her Vietnamese village, only to be later tortured in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. Katya Cengel met San when San was se
Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968 seems like it should be an open-and-shut case. Many people crowded in the small room at Los Angeles’s famed Ambassador Hotel that fateful night
On August 7, 1998, three years before President George W. Bush declared a War on Terror, the radical Islamist group al-Qaeda bombed the American embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where Prudence Bushnell was
Our national security increasingly depends on access to the most sophisticated and advanced technology. Yet the next time we set out to capture a terrorist leader, we may fail. Why? The answer lies in
After the death of Joanie Holzer Schirm’s parents in 2000, she found hundreds of letters, held together by rusted paperclips and stamped with censor marks, sent from Czechoslovakia, Great Britai
Strategy and reality collide in Peter Fey’s gripping history of aircraft carrier USS Oriskany’s three deployments to Vietnam with Carrier Air Wing 16 (CVW-16). Its tours coincided with the
Though she only lived to be twenty-seven, Sarah Aaronsohn led a remarkable life. The Woman Who Fought an Empire tells the improbable but true odyssey of a bold young woman—th
There was a time when Wyoming and other Rocky Mountain and Midwest states were as likely to elect a liberal Democrat to Congress as a conservative Republican. Gale McGee (1915–92) was elected to
If you’ve ever seen an episode of Law and Order, you can probably recite your Miranda rights by heart. But you likely don’t know that these rights had their roots in the case of a young Ch
Han-centrism, a virulent form of Chinese nationalism, asserts that the Han Chinese are superior to other peoples and have a legitimate right to advance Chinese interests at the expense of other countr
During World War II many escape-line organizations contributed to the Allied cause by funneling hundreds of servicemen trapped behind enemy lines out of occupied Europe. As the Germans tightened
Seven years after the death of his mother, Malka, Stanley A. Goldman traveled to Israel to visit her best friend during the Holocaust. The best friend’s daughter showed Goldman a pamphlet s
In this ambitious work, David Byrne analyzes the ideas that informed Ronald Reagan’s political philosophy and policies. Rather than appraising his personal and emotional life, Byrne’s inte
Over the past few decades, the complicated divides of geography, class, religion, and race created deep fractures in the United States, each side fighting to advance its own mythology and political in
In the late 1990s, NATO led the Kosovo Force (KFOR), charged with stabilizing Kosovo and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia after genocide and other atrocities were carried out in the Balkan re
Lt. Gen. John C. H. Lee wore six stars on his helmet, three in front and three in back—an unusual affectation. He was a stickler for discipline and a legendary military figure whom servicemen an
Captured by the Japanese after the fall of Bataan, Lester I. Tenney was one of the very few who would survive the legendary Death March and three and a half years in Japanese prison camps. With an und
As the world has become increasingly digitally interconnected, military leaders and other actors are ditching symmetric power strategies in favor of cyberstrategies. Cyberpower enables actors to chang
African American Officers in Liberia tells the story of seventeen African American officers who trained, reorganized, and commanded the Liberian Frontier Force from 1910 to 1942. In this West African
Bourbon whiskey has made a surprising contribution to American legal history. Tracking the history of bourbon and bourbon law illuminates the development of the United States as a nation, from conquer
During the Cold War, stories of espionage became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imagination of readers and filmgoers alike as secret police quietly engaged in surveillance un
Long before it became the slogan of the presidential campaign for Barack Obama, Dorothy Ferebee (1898–1980) lived by the motto “Yes, we can.” An African American obstetrician and civ
Revealing the little-known facts of Harry Truman’s remarkable military performance, as a soldier and as a politician, The Soldier from Independence adds a whole new dimension to the already fasc
“Who Murdered the Vets?” writer Ernest Hemingway demanded in an impassioned article about the deaths of hundreds of former soldiers. Their fate came as part of the larger and often overloo
American society is angrier, more fragmented, and more polarized than at any time since the Civil War. We harbor deep insecurities about our economic future, our place in the world, our response to te
Since its inception the United States has sent envoys to advance American interests abroad, both across oceans and to areas that later became part of the country. Little has been known about these fir
On August 6, 1974, a bomb exploded at Los Angeles International Airport, killing three people and injuring thirty-five others. It was the first time an airport had been bombed anywhere in the world. A
Lt. Benjamin Loring (1824–1902) lived the life of an everyman Civil War sailor. He commanded no armies and devised no grand strategies. Loring was a sailor who just wanted to return home, where
Brooke King has been asked over and over what it’s like to be a woman in combat, but she knows her answer is not what the public wants to hear. The answers people seek lie in the graphic details
