A Dawn Like Thunder: The True Story of Torpedo Squadron Eight

By Robert J. Mrazek

One of the great untold stories of World War II finally comes to light in this thrilling account of Torpedo Squadron Eight and their heroic efforts in helping an outmatched U.S. fleet win critical victories at Midway and Guadalcanal. These 35 American men--many flying outmoded aircraft--changed the course of history, going on to become the war's most decorated naval air squadron, while suffering the heaviest losses in U.S. naval aviation history.
Mrazek paints moving portraits of the men in the squadron, and exposes a shocking cover-up that cost many lives. Filled with thrilling scenes of battle, betrayal, and sacrifice, A DAWN LIKE THUNDER is destined to become a classic in the literature of World War II.
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Eyewitness Pacific Theater: Firsthand Accounts of the War in the Pacific from Pearl Harbor to the Atomic Bombs

By John T. Kuehn and D.M. Giangreco

From the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to the dropping of the atomic bomb that ended the war, the Pacific Theater of World War II comes alive in a compilation of eyewitness accounts of the battles, campaigns, events, and personalities of the war, complemented by hundreds of period photographs and a CD containing personal narratives.
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The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America

By William Kleinknecht

Kleinknecht shares Will Bunch' s opinion of Ronald Reagan' s current image (see Tear Down This Myth, 2009) but doesn' t credit Reagan, as Bunch does, for failing to match action to rhetoric. Of course, Kleinknecht doesn' t mention foreign policy, in which Reagan did some good. His focus is domestic, and in 11 cogent chapters, he reveals further falseness in the Reagan myth and the devastating effects of Reaganism on America per se. Reagan pretended to represent small-town, small-enterprise America as embodied by his hometown, which, after leaving for Hollywood, he seldom visited and only for personal publicity' s sake, and whose livelihoods of family farming and small industry his favoritism for high-rolling wheeler-dealers has nearly extinguished. To explain Reagan s duplicity, Kleinknecht contrasts Reagan s developed politics of the self with the traditional community politics of his practical opponent during his administration, Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill. While O'Neill was inextricable from his community, Reagan made himself a man from nowhere, untrammeled by personal connections, who ignored all damage done in the pursuit of self-aggrandizement. Contemporary America' s decimated manufacturing, fraudulent banking and finance, criminalized poor and minorities, inaccessible health care, venal politics, all this and more, according to Kleinknecht, constitute the real and living Reagan legacy.
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Weller's War: A Legendary Foreign Correspondent's Saga of World War II on Five Continents

By George Weller; Edited by Anthony Weller
Reporting on WWII for the Chicago Daily News from 1941 to 1945, George Weller (1907–2002) filed stories from every theater. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for a story on an emergency appendectomy performed with kitchen utensils on a submarine in Japanese waters. He was strafed and shelled, contracted recurrent malaria, trained as a paratrooper, flew a mission over Italy on a B-17 with two engines down. He was the first outside observer at nuclear-devastated Nagasaki. He reported it all in an urbane, understated style that never palls. Weller had no sense of himself as a Great Journalist, which perhaps is why he was one. Weller's 1944 presentation of "the worldwide American" stands out as a model of brevity and insight: "His foreign policy represents an attempt to become popular by being benevolent, rather than to be respected by being reasonable." Weller has been obscured by better known personalities like Ernie Pyle. This anthology, edited by his son, should give him the recognition his work merits.
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Henry Hudson: Dreams and Obsession

by Corey Sandler

The surviving records of Henry Hudson's four voyages of 1607-10 are apparently scant but provided enough information to be used in a previous history of his explorations (Donald Johnson's Charting the Sea of Darkness, 1992). Sandler, author of dozens of travel guides, converts the Hudson documentation into a travelogue to several of Hudson's haunts. He traveled somewhat more comfortably than Hudson did, embarking on a cruise ship to Spitzbergen, driving up the Hudson River Valley, and flying to Hudson Bay. Healthily quoting the mariner's logbooks to contrast travel then and now, Sandler also avails himself of the four centuries of history these places have experienced since Hudson sailed by, integrating nuggets of fact with what people have to say about Hudson. Some are quite loquacious on the subject, such as the captain of a replica of Hudson's ship Half Moon.

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The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War

by James Mann

The author of Rise of the Vulcans presents a controversial analysis of the fortieth president's role in ending the cold war, in a provocative report that challenges popular beliefs, reveals lesser-known aspects of the Reagan administration's foreign policy, and cites the contributions of such figures as Nixon, Kissinger, and Gorbachev.

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In Lincoln's Hand: His Original Manuscripts With Commentary by Distinguished Americans

Edited by Harold Holzer and Joshua Wolf Shenk


In honor of the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth, a collection of writings includes images of a variety of handwritten speeches, letters, childhood notebooks, and more, accompanied by commentary by James M. McPherson, Ken Burns, Doris Kearns Goodwin, John Updike, Steven Spielberg, Toni Morrison, and other notables.

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In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The distinguished scholar examines the origins and history of African-American ancestry as he profiles nineteen noted African Americans--Oprah Winfrey, Maya Angelou, Quincy Jones, Sidney Poitier, and others--and illuminates their individual family sagas throughout U.S. history, the tragedy of slavery, and their African roots.

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The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal

by Julie Greene
The Path Between the Seas, viewed from a decidedly different angle.Most histories focus on the larger-than-life men who conceived the Panama Canal, particularly President Theodore Roosevelt and chief engineers John Stevens and George Goethals. Greene (History/Univ. of Maryland; Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1917, 1998, etc.) shifts the focus away from those at the top, instead telling the story of rank-and-file workers on the ground. The incredibly diverse labor force assembled between 1904 and 1914, tens of thousands strong, included Americans, West Indians, Mexicans and workers from all over South America and Europe. When they arrived in the Canal Zone, they soon realized that conditions were brutal. The weather was hot, the work was extremely dangerous, the food was barely edible and early on there were outbreaks of yellow fever, bubonic plague, malaria and pneumonia. An estimated 15,000 workers died during the course of the building project, mostly nonwhites. American officials imported segregationist and anti-union policies from home; nonwhite workers, particularly West Indians, received far lower pay. Dissatisfaction eventually flared up into strikes and threats of riots. The author deftly details how hard-line American policy clashed with the reality of managing an army of laborers in a foreign land. Officials were eventually forced to revise their policies and make concessions to workers on many issues. Greene also examines the resentment generated by American colonialism, ably illustrated with the story of a 1912 riot in Panama City between American personnel and Panamanians that caused the death of one U.S. citizen. American imperialism was frequently at odds with American idealism, the author skillfully demonstrates. A telling quote from Secretary of State Elihu Root conveys the essential: "The Constitution follows the flag, but it does not catch up with it."Engaging labor history, and an astute examination of American policies.
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The Mexican Wars for Independence

by Timothy J. Henderson

Mexico’s wars for independence were not fought to achieve political independence. Unlike their neighbors to the north, Mexico’s revolutionaries aimed to overhaul their society. Intending profound social reform, the rebellion’s leaders declared from the onset that their struggle would be incomplete, even meaningless, if it were merely a political event.

Easily navigating through nineteenth-century Mexico’s complex and volatile political environment, Timothy J. Henderson offers a well-rounded treatment of the entire period, but pays particular attention to the early phases of the revolt under the priests Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos. Hidalgo promised an immediate end to slavery and tailored his appeals to the poor, but also sanctioned pillage and shocking acts of violence. This savagery would ultimately cost Hidalgo, Morelos, and the entire country dearly, leading to the revolution’s failure in pursuit of both meaningful social and political reform. While Mexico eventually gained independence from Spain, severe social injustices remained and would fester for another century. Henderson deftly traces the major leaders and conflicts, forcing us to reconsider what “independence” meant and means for Mexico today.
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We Remember With Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945-1962

by Hasia R. Diner

Diner (American Jewish History/New York Univ.; The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000, 2004, etc.) hurls a passionate, well-delineated attack on the conventional view that postwar Jews and survivors wanted to forget the Holocaust rather than memorialize the tragedy.Responding to what she considers the "slipshod scholarship" of works such as Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life (1999) and Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry (2000), the author summons considerable evidence to support her thesis. Scouring the archives of synagogues, schools, Jewish organizations, newspapers, periodicals, radio and TV programs and government agencies, she uncovers a rich and varied history of how Jews have incorporated and made sense of the Holocaust. She marshals her research into two groups. The first is remembrance of the Holocaust internally generated by Jewish sources, including the erection of memorials, additions to the Jewish liturgy and calendar, textbooks, articles, plays and pageants enacting the Warsaw uprising. The second is the commemorative culture driven by global events, such as the creation of Israel and the settlement of Displaced Persons, the Cold War, the publications of The Wall by John Hersey and The Diary of Anne Frank, the clamor for German responsibility and restitution and the trial and execution of Adolph Eichmann. Diner is particularly compelling in her exploration of how the postwar Jewish liberal agenda—transformed by the experience of the Holocaust, immigration discrimination and anti-Semitism in America—boldly embraced the civil-rights crusade.A work of towering research and conviction that will surely enliven academic debates for years to come.
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The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919

by Mark Thompson

With elegance and pathos, historian Mark Thompson relates the saga of the Italian front, the nationalist frenzy and political intrigues that preceded the conflict, and the towering personalities of the statesmen, generals, and writers drawn into the heart of the chaos. A work of epic scale, The White War does full justice to the brutal and heart-wrenching war that inspired Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

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America's hidden history : untold tales of the first pilgrims, fighting women, and forgotten founders who shaped a nation

by Kenneth C. Davis. Relates historical events that significantly impacted the development of the United States in the years prior to Washington's inauguration, considering such subjects as the nation's real first pilgrims and the lesser-known aspects of the first Thanksgiving. (Check Catalog)

The Baltimore Plot: The First Conspiracy to Assassinate Abraham Lincoln

by Michael J. Kline

Was evidence of a plot to murder Abraham Lincoln as he traveled through Baltimore en route to his 1861 inauguration genuine, or was it a product of detective Allan Pinkerton s imagination? Historians have been divided on the issue, but to author Kline, a lawyer by occupation, a conspiracy case based on circumstantial evidence can be made, and he makes it in exacting but fascinating detail. For dramatic support to his legal briefs, Kline recounts Lincoln s train journey, climaxing in a scene in which Lincoln must decide whether to credit Pinkerton s report of having infiltrated a conspiracy and to heed Pinkerton s counsel to alter his travel schedule through Baltimore, then a secessionist hotbed with a reputation for mob violence. It was a second, independent source of intelligence that convinced Lincoln to accede to Pinkerton, which also buttresses Kline s conviction that the plot was real. Gathering inculpatory information, arguing its probative value, and re-creating the tension of the secession crisis, Kline will absorb Lincoln readers with his thorough presentation of Lincoln s surreptitious arrival in Washington, which Lincoln himself subsequently regretted.
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What Shall We Do With the Negro?: Lincoln, White Racism, and Civil War America

by Paul D. Escott

Award-winning historian Escott takes up the persistence of racism in 19th-century America by arguing that Abraham Lincoln especially has been miscast in American memory as an unduly enlightened thinker on matters of racial equality, when in fact he was conflicted at best and complicit too often in the common racial attitudes of his day. In his most assertive sections, Escott argues that, as President, Lincoln had an "overriding devotion to reunion," as well as doubts about changing American racial attitudes and fears of losing political support by endorsing more than emancipation, all of which led to a minimalist policy on race, rights, and proposed reconstruction. At the same time, Escott continues, the Confederacy paradoxically was forced by need to propose arming and freeing some slaves to win independence, preserve slavery, and ensure white men's rule. In sum, Escott insists that events rather than philosophy or principles directed, even dictated, much of American policy on slavery and freedom, and racism remained embedded in American life.
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The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story

by Elliott West

The so-called Nez Perce War of 1877 was one of the most unlikely, heroic, and tragic episodes in the history of the American West. Since encountering and helping to sustain the Lewis and Clark expedition, the several bands of the Nez Perce had maintained harmonious relations with the U.S. government. Then, after the government insisted that all of the bands relocate to a reservation well removed from their homeland, a band led by Chief Joseph resisted, leading the army on a 1,500-mile chase that ended just short of the Canadian border, capturing, in the process, the attention, even sympathy, of the general public. West, a professor of American history at the University of Arkansas, has written a detailed and often moving chronicle of the conflict. He lays the groundwork with an excellent analysis of Nez Perce culture on the eve of their flight. He also asserts provocatively that the effort to relocate the Nez Perce was part of the larger, post Civil War federal strategy to overcome sectional and ethnic divisions. The highlight of the narrative is the flight of the approximately 800 Nez Perce, including the iconic figures Joseph and Looking Glass, as they strive to battle and break free of their pursuers. This is a superb reexamination of a sad but memorable story.
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To live or to perish forever : two tumultuous years in Pakistan

by Nicholas Schmidle. Journalist Schmidle offers a gripping, grim account of his two years as a journalism fellow in Pakistan, where his travels took him into the most isolated and unfriendly provinces, and into the thick of interests and beliefs that impede that nation's peace and progress. The author reports on the murky relationship between the Pakistani intelligence agencies and the Taliban and how American bombings have actually helped the Taliban gain influence in the border regions. While Schmidle amplifies the danger an unstable Pakistan poses to its neighbors and the world, he also turns a constructively critical eye back to American support of mujahideen during the Afghan war against the Soviets and shows how American intervention was both a help and an exacerbation of problems between Pakistan and Afghanistan. --Publisher's Weekly (Check Catalog)

The Hudson-Fulton Celebration : New York's river festival of 1909 and the making of a metropolis

by Kathleen Eagen Johnson. aAn invaluable window on how New York self-consciously and very publicly transformed itself from a city that was merely athe largesta to an undisputed world class metropolis . . . a rich historical record of newspapers, manuscripts, artifacts, photographs, and graphics . . . offers a new lens to examine identity, industry, and environment.aafrom the Foreword by Kenneth T. Jackson, Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences and Director of the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History at Columbia University (Check Catalog)