The Greatest Day in History: How on the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month, the First World War Finally Came to an End

By Nicholas Best

Follows the events that led up to this historic cease-fire, including the week of negotiations, military offensives, and the thousands of additional casualties, that brought a final conclusion to one of the deadliest wars in the twentieth century.

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1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History

By Charles Bracelen Flood

The author of Grant and Sherman presents a dramatic account of the sixteenth president's final year, covering such topics as the last campaigns of the Civil War, Lincoln's re-election, and his plans for reunifying the South.

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Shenandoah 1862: Stonewall Jackson's Valley Campaign

By Peter Cozzens

A Civil War historian gives equal attention to both Union and Confederate perspectives on the 1862 Shenandoah Valley Campaign in a study that offers new interpretations of the campaign, the reasons for Stonewall Jackson's success, and a detailed appraisal of the Union leadership.

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Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned

By Rufus Phillips
Beginning in 1954, Phillips spent almost 10 years doing undercover and pacification work for the CIA and the U.S. Agency for International Development in South Vietnam. In the high-level power struggle over America’s Vietnam policy. Phillips, then a government adviser, was a strong proponent of helping build a stable democratic government that the South Vietnamese would willingly fight to preserve from the Communist North—and a vocal opponent of sending in American combat troops. In this sober and informed memoir, Phillips provides a fascinating look at the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ refusal to give more than lip service to pacification, with revealing portraits of such figures as the “singular” Maj. Gen. Edward Lansdale, South Vietnamese Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, President Kennedy and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and other prominent officials. Phillips states firmly that those “best and brightest,” especially McNamara, exhibited “poor judgment, bureaucratic prejudice, and personal hubris” as they steered Vietnam War policy on a disastrous course. Phillips’s short chapter on lessons the U.S. should have learned from the Vietnam War should be mandatory reading in Washington, D.C.

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Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War

By Edwin G. Burrows
Between 1775 and 1783, some 200,000 Americans took up arms against the British Crown, and just over 6,800 died in battle. About 25,000 became prisoners of war, most of them confined in New York City under conditions so atrocious that they perished by the thousands. Evidence suggests that at least 17,500 Americans may have died in these prisons--more than twice the number to die on the battlefield. New York City was the principal base of the Crown's military operations. Beginning with the American captives taken during the 1776 invasion of New York, captured Americans were stuffed into a hastily assembled collection of public buildings, sugar houses, and prison ships. The prisoners were shockingly overcrowded and chronically underfed--those who escaped alive told of comrades so hungry they ate their own clothes and shoes. This book is the first-ever account of these hell-holes, a sobering commentary on how much we have forgotten about our struggle for independence.

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Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson

By David S. Reynolds
A chronicle of political events between 1815 and 1848 evaluates their role in shaping period and subsequent culture, covering such topics as the slavery controversy, the rise of capitalism, and the birth of urbanization while evaluating the political philosophies of the period's presidents and influential artists.

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The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States, and the Next Revolution

By Daniel P. Erikson
Draws on extensive interviews with policymakers and opposition leaders to explore the final years of the Castro era, in a report that makes predictions about what is likely to happen in Cuba as well as the ramifications of imminent changes on the island nation's relationship with America.

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How the States Got Their Shapes

By Mark Stein
An accessible history of how each of the fifty United States obtained their unique shapes offers insight into such topics as the super-sized geography of Texas, Oklahoma's panhandle, and Maryland's unusual layout, in a lighthearted chronicle that features complementary information on land disputes and military skirmishes.

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One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Krushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

By Michael Dobbs
An eye-opening study of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis offers an hour-by-hour chronicle of the tense standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union over the placement of missiles in Cuba, offering an in-depth analysis of the events and personalities involved that reveals how close the world actually came to all-out nuclear war.

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