1812
Jon Latimer
In the first complete history of the War of 1812 written from a British perspective, Latimer offers an authoritative and compelling account that places the conflict in its strategic context within the Napoleonic wars. Drawing on personal letters, diaries, and memoirs, Latimer describes events not merely through the eyes of generals, admirals, and politicians but through those of the soldiers, sailors, and ordinary people who were directly affected.
Hardcover 2007
Above and Beyond
Kostiantyn P. Morozov
Sherman W. Garnett
Morozov provides behind-the-scenes insights on Yeltsin, Kuchma, Dudaev, and other important players still active today. His book will firmly alter our perception of the USSR and its demise, the Soviet military machine, and the rise of a modern, independent Ukraine.
Hardcover 2001
Alamein
Jon Latimer
In this compelling account of the decisive World War II battle of El Alamein, Jon Latimer brings to life the harsh desert conflict in North Africa. This is the story of two of the most intriguing commanders of the war and the story of the infantry soldiers who fought in a scorched wilderness.
Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2004
American Tragedy
David Kaiser
In what will become the classic account, based on newly opened archival sources, David Kaiser rewrites what we know about the Vietnam War. Reviving and expanding a venerable tradition of political, diplomatic, and military history, he shows not only why we entered the war, but also why our efforts were doomed to fail. American Tragedy is the first book to draw on complete official documentation and decisively challenges widely held assumptions about the roles of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson.
Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002
An Instinct for War
Roger Spiller
Spiller combines a mastery of the primary sources with a vibrant historical imagination to locate a dozen turning points in the world's history of warfare that altered our understanding of war and its pursuit. We are conducted through profound moments by the voices of those who witnessed them and are given a graphic understanding of war, the devastating choices, the means by which battles are won and lost, and the enormous price exacted. Spiller's attention to the sights and sounds of battle enables us to feel the sting and menace of past violent conflicts as if they were today's.
Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2007
Beyond Terror and Martyrdom
Gilles Kepel
Kepel urges us to escape the ideological quagmire of terrorism and martyrdom and explore the terms of a new and constructive dialogue between Islam and the West. This book sounds the alarm to the West and to Islam that both of these exhausted narratives are bankrupt—neither productive of democratic change in the Middle East nor of unity in Islam.
Hardcover 2008
The Bomb
Gerard J. DeGroot
The Bomb has killed hundreds of thousands outright, condemned many more to lingering deaths, and made vast tracts of land unfit for life. For decades it dominated the psyches of millions, becoming a touchstone of popular culture, celebrated or decried in mass political movements, films, songs, and books. DeGroot traces the life of the Bomb from its birth in turn-of-the-century physics labs of Europe to a childhood in the New Mexico desert of the 1940s, from adolescence and early adulthood in Nagasaki and Bikini, Australia and Kazakhstan to maturity in test sites and missile silos around the globe.
Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006
British Military Spectacle
Scott Myerly
In the theater of war, how important is costume? And in peacetime, what purpose does military spectacle serve? This book takes us behind the scenes of the British military at the height of its brilliance to show us the role of dress in war and peace.
Hardcover 1996
Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates
Robert Ritchie
It is disconcerting to think of dashing scoundrels as slaves to economic forces, but so they were--as Ritchie demonstrates in this lively history of piracy. He focuses on the shadowy figure of William Kidd, whose career in the late seventeenth century swept him from the Caribbean to New York, to London, to the Indian Ocean before he ended in Newgate prison and on the gallows.
Hardcover 1986 / Paperback
The Chinese Army After Mao
Ellis Joffe
Hardcover 1987
The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction
Mark E. Neely
The Civil War is often portrayed as the most brutal war in America's history, a premonition of twentieth-century carnage. In challenging this view, Neely considers the war's destructiveness in a comparative context, revealing the sense of limit that guided the conduct of American soldiers and statesmen. The modern overemphasis on violence in Civil War literature has led many scholars to go too far in drawing close analogies with the twentieth century's "total war" and the grim guerrilla struggles of Vietnam.
Hardcover 2007
Collaboration
Timothy Brook
Studies of collaboration have changed how the history of World War II in Europe is written, but for China and Japan this aspect of wartime conduct has remained largely unacknowledged. In a bold new work, Timothy Brook breaks the silence surrounding the sensitive topic of wartime collaboration between the Chinese and their Japanese occupiers.
Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2007
Command at Sea
Michael A. Palmer
In this grand history of naval warfare, Palmer observes five centuries of dramatic encounters under sail and steam. From reliance on signal flags in the seventeenth century to satellite communications in the twenty-first, admirals looked to the next advance in technology as the one that would allow them to control their forces. But while abilities to communicate improved, Palmer shows how other technologies simultaneously shrank admirals' windows of decision. The result was simple, if not obvious: naval commanders have never had sufficient means or time to direct subordinates in battle.
Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2007
Command in War
Martin Van Creveld
Many books have been written about strategy, tactics, and great commanders. This is the first book to deal exclusively with the nature of command itself, and to trace its development over two thousand years from ancient Greece to Vietnam. It treats historically the whole variety of problems involved in commanding armies, including staff organization and administration, communications methods and technologies, weaponry, and logistics. And it analyzes the relationship between these problems and military strategy.
Paperback 1987
Commander of All Lincoln’s Armies
John F. Marszalek
In the first comprehensive biography of Halleck, Marszalek recreates the life of a man of enormous achievement who bungled his most important mission. When Lincoln summoned him to the nation's capital, Halleck boasted outstanding qualifications as a military theorist, a legal scholar, a brave soldier, and a California entrepreneur. Yet in the thick of battle, he couldn't make essential decisions. Unable to produce victory for the Union forces, he saw his power become subsumed by Grant's emergent leadership, a loss that paved the way for Halleck's path to obscurity.
Hardcover 2004
The Confederate Battle Flag
John M. Coski
Pursuing the flag's conflicting meanings, Coski suggests how this provocative artifact, which has been viewed with pride, fear, anger, nostalgia, and disgust, might ultimately provide Americans with the common ground of a shared and complex history. He reveals the flag's origins as one of many banners unfurled on the battlefields of the Civil War and shows how it emerged as the preeminent representation of the Confederacy and was transformed into a cultural icon from Reconstruction on, becoming an aggressively racist symbol only after World War II and during the Civil Rights movement.
Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006
The Confederate War
Gary W. Gallagher
If one is to believe contemporary historians, the South never had a chance. Many allege that the Confederacy lost the Civil War because of internal division or civilian disaffection; others point to flawed military strategy or ambivalence over slavery. But, argues distinguished historian Gary Gallagher, we should not ask why the Confederacy collapsed so soon but rather how it lasted so long. In The Confederate War he reexamines the Confederate experience through the actions and words of the people who lived it to show how the home front responded to the war, endured great hardships, and assembled armies that fought with tremendous spirit and determination.
Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1999
Coup d'État
Edward N. Luttwak
Hardcover 1979 / Paperback
Crises of Memory and the Second World War
Susan Rubin Suleiman
In Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Susan Suleiman conducts a profound exploration of where individual memories converge with public remembrance of traumatic events. In this book she argues that memories of World War II transcend national boundaries, due not only to the global nature of the war but also to the increasingly global presence of the Holocaust as a site of collective memory.
Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008
Deadly Cultures
Edited by Mark Wheelis
Edited by Lajos Rózsa
Edited by Malcolm Dando
The threat of biological weapons has never attracted as much public attention as in the past five years. Yet there has been little historical analysis of such weapons over the past half-century. Deadly Cultures sets out to fill this gap by analyzing the historical developments since 1945 and addressing three central issues: why states have continued or begun programs for acquiring biological weapons, why states have terminated biological weapons programs, and how states have demonstrated that they have truly terminated their biological weapons programs.
Hardcover 2006
A Democracy at War
William O'Neill
As America fought to defend democracy in Europe and Asia during World War II, its own democratic politics both aided and impeded the war effort at home and the military campaigns abroad. Now, in a broad-ranging social, political, military, and diplomatic history, William O'Neill reveals how the United States won its victory despite its reluctance to enter the war, and despite proceeding by costly half-measures even after committing to battle.
Paperback 1998
Democracy's Prisoner
Ernest Freeberg
In 1920, socialist leader Eugene V. Debs ran for president while serving a ten-year jail term for speaking against America's role in World War I. In this book, Freeberg shows that the campaign to send Debs from an Atlanta jailhouse to the White House was part of a wider national debate over the right to free speech in wartime. In this story of democracy on trial, Freeberg excavates an extraordinary episode in the history of one of America's most prized ideals.
Hardcover 2008
Disarmament and Peace in British Politics, 1914-1919
Gerda Richards Crosby
Since the beginning of modern warfare, one of the favorite crusades of the international peacemakers has been toward disarmament. Crosby investigates the British origin of the disarmament idea--from World War I through the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.
Hardcover 1957
Dunkirk
Hugh Sebag-Montefiore
Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008
The Echo of Battle
Brian McAllister Linn
From Lexington and Gettysburg to Normandy and Iraq, wars have defined the United States. But after the guns fall silent, the army searches the lessons of past conflicts, developing the strategies, weapons, doctrines, and commanders that it hopes will guarantee future victory. Linn surveys the past assumptions--and errors--that underlie the army's many visions of warfare up to the present day.
Hardcover 2007
Failing to Win
Dominic D. P. Johnson
Dominic Tierney
How do people decide which country came out ahead in a war or a crisis? In Failing to Win, Dominic Johnson and Dominic Tierney dissect the psychological factors that predispose leaders, media, and the public to perceive outcomes as victories or defeats--often creating wide gaps between perceptions and reality.
Hardcover 2006
Fighting the Great War
Michael S. Neiberg
Despair at Gallipoli. Victory at Vimy Ridge. A European generation lost, an American spirit found. The First World War, the deadly herald of a new era, continues to captivate readers. In this lively book, Neiberg offers a concise history based on the latest research and insights into the soldiers, commanders, battles, and legacies of the Great War.
Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006
The First Vietnam War
Edited by Mark Atwood Lawrence
Edited by Fredrik Logevall
How did the conflict between Vietnamese nationalists and French colonial rulers erupt into a major Cold War struggle between communism and Western liberalism? In this illuminating work, leading scholars examine various dimensions of the struggle between France and Vietnamese revolutionaries that began in 1945 and reached its climax at Dien Bien Phu. Taken together, the essays enable us to understand the origins of the later American war in Indochina by positioning Vietnam at the center of the clash between East and West and North and South in the twentieth century.
Hardcover 2007 / Paperback
Foch versus Clemenceau
Jere Clemens King
When, at the end of the First World War, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, soldier and popular hero, assumed the role of self-appointed peacemaker, he proved himself a source of embarrassment and irritation. Foch versus Clemenceau gives a vivid account of the diplomatic maneuvers among France, its allies, and Germany during the period of the Conference.
Hardcover 1960
Forgotten Armies
Christopher Bayly
Tim Harper
In the early stages of the Second World War, the vast crescent of British-ruled territories stretching from India to Singapore appeared as a massive Allied asset. Yet, within a few weeks in 1941-42, a Japanese invasion had destroyed all this, sweeping suddenly and decisively through south and southeast Asia to the Indian frontier, and provoking the extraordinary revolutionary struggles which would mark the beginning of the end of British dominion in the East. Drawing upon a vast range of Indian, Burmese, Chinese, and Malay as well as British, American, and Japanese voices, the authors make vivid one of the central dramas of the twentieth century: the birth of modern south and southeast Asia and the death of British rule.
Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006
Forgotten Wars
Christopher Bayly
Tim Harper
Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper show how World War II never really ended in the ravaged Asian lands but continued in bloody civil wars, anti-colonial insurrections, and inter-communal massacres.Forgotten Wars, a sequel to the authors' acclaimed Forgotten Armies, is an account of the bitter wars of the end of empire. This period became the most formative in modern Asian history, as Western imperialism vied with nascent nationalist and communist revolutionaries for political control.
Hardcover 2007
GI Jews
Deborah Dash Moore
Whether they came from Sioux Falls or the Bronx, over half a million Jews entered the U.S. armed forces during the Second World War. Deborah Dash Moore offers an unprecedented view of the struggles they faced, having to battle not only the enemy but also the prejudices of their fellow soldiers.
Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2006
The Generation of 1914
Robert Wohl
Hardcover 1979 / Paperback
German Resistance to Hitler
Peter Hoffmann
Hoffmann examines the growing recognition by some Germans in the 1930s of the malign nature of the Nazi regime, the ways in which these people became involved in the resistance, and the views of those who staked their lives in the struggle against tyranny and murder. The resisters, he concludes, acted not so much in the hope of personal gain as from a moral obligation to challenge the evils they saw before them.
Hardcover 1988 / Paperback
Germany and the Two World Wars
Andreas Hillgruber
Translated by William C. Kirby
Hardcover 1981 / Paperback
Ghettostadt
Gordon J. Horwitz
Ghettostadt is the terrifying examination of the Jewish ghetto’s place in the Nazi worldview. Exploring ghetto life in its broadest context, it deftly maneuvers between the perspectives and actions of Łódź’s beleaguered Jewish community, the Germans who oversaw and administered the ghetto’s affairs, and the “ordinary” inhabitants of the once Polish city.
Hardcover 2008
God's War
Christopher Tyerman
The Crusades are perhaps both the most familiar and most misunderstood phenomena of the medieval world, and here Christopher Tyerman explores the centuries of violence committed in the name of religious devotion Tyerman uncovers a system of belief bound by paranoia and wishful thinking, and a culture founded on war as an expression of worship, social discipline, and Christian charity. Drawing on the most recent scholarship, and told with great authority, God's War is the definitive account of a fascinating story that continues to haunt our contemporary world.
Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008
Harvest of Despair
Karel C. Berkhoff
Berkhoff provides a searing portrait of life in the Third Reich's largest colony. Under the Nazis, a blend of German nationalism, anti-Semitism, and racist notions about the Slavs produced a reign of terror and genocide. Berkhoff also shows how a pervasive Soviet mentality worked against solidarity, which helps explain why the vast majority of the population did not resist the Germans.
Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2008
Heavenly Warriors
William Wayne Farris
Heavenly Warriors traces in detail the evolutionary development of weaponry, horsemanship, military organization, and tactics from Japan's early conflicts with Korea up to the full-blown system of the samurai.
Paperback 1996 / Hardcover
Hitler Youth
Michael H. Kater
In modern times, the recruitment of children into a political organization and ideology reached its boldest embodiment in the Hitler Youth, founded in 1933 soon after the Nazi Party assumed power in Germany.Drawing on original reports, letters, diaries, and memoirs, Kater traces the history of the Hitler Youth, examining the means, degree, and impact of conversion, and the subsequent fate of young recruits.
Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2006
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Bernard Bailyn
To the original text of what has become a classic of American historical literature, Bernard Bailyn adds a substantial essay, "Fulfillment," as a Postscript. Here he discusses the intense, nation-wide debate on the ratification of the Constitution, stressing the continuities between that struggle over the foundations of the national government and the original principles of the Revolution. This detailed study of the persistence of the nation's ideological origins adds a new dimension to the book and projects its meaning forward into vital current concerns.
Paperback 1992
The Intellectual Resistance in Europe
James D. Wilkinson
Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir in France; Eich, Richter, and Böll in Germany; Pavese, Levi, and Silone in Italy: These are among the defenders of human dignity whose lives and work are explored in this widely encompassing work. James D. Wilkinson examines for the first time the cultural impact of the anti-Fascist literary movements in Europe and the search of intellectuals for renewal--for social change through moral endeavor--during World War II and its immediate aftermath.
Hardcover 1981 / Paperback
The Iraq War
Williamson Murray
Robert H. Scales
In this unprecedented account of the intensive air and ground operations in Iraq, two of America's most distinguished military historians bring clarity and depth to the first major war of the new millennium. Reaching beyond the blaring headlines, embedded videophone reports, and daily Centcom briefings, Williamson Murray and Robert Scales analyze events in light of past military experiences, present battleground realities, and future expectations.
Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2005
Iron Kingdom
Christopher Clark
Clark demonstrates how a state deemed the bane of twentieth-century Europe has played an incalculable role in Western civilization’s fortunes. Iron Kingdom is a definitive, gripping account of Prussia’s fascinating, influential, and critical role in modern times.
Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008
Keeping Together in Time
William H. McNeill
One of the most widely read and respected historians in America pursues the possibility that coordinated rhythmic movement--and the shared feelings it evokes--has been a powerful force in holding human groups together. As he has done for historical phenomena as diverse as warfare, plague, and the pursuit of power, William H. McNeill brings a dazzling breadth and depth of knowledge to his study.
Hardcover 1995 / Paperback 1997
King Alfred
David Horspool
Horspool sees Alfred as inextricably linked to the legends and stories that surround him, and rather than attempting to separate the myth from the "reality," he explores how both came together to provide a historical figure that was all things to all men.
Hardcover 2006
Klaus Fuchs, Atom Spy
Robert Chadwell Williams
Hardcover 1987 / Paperback
Life and Death in the Third Reich
Peter Fritzsche
Fritzsche deciphers the puzzle of Nazism’s ideological grip. Its basic appeal lay in the Volksgemeinschaft—a “people’s community” that appealed to Germans to be part of a great project to redress the wrongs of the Versailles treaty, make the country strong and vital, and rid the body politic of unhealthy elements. Diaries and letters reveal Germans’ fears, desires, and reservations, while showing how Nazi concepts saturated everyday life.
Hardcover 2008
Lyndon Johnson and Europe
Thomas Alan Schwartz
In the first comprehensive study of Johnson's policy toward Europe--the most important theater of the Cold War--Schwartz shows a president who guided the United States with a policy that balanced the solidarity of the Western alliance with the need to stabilize the Cold War and reduce the nuclear danger. Impressively researched and engagingly written, Lyndon Johnson and Europe shows a fascinating new side to this giant of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that Johnson's diplomacy toward Europe deserves recognition as one of the most important achievements of his presidency.
Hardcover 2003
Making Citizen-Soldiers
Michael S. Neiberg
While most modern military systems educate and train junior officers at insular academies like West Point, only the United States has relied heavily on the active cooperation of its civilian colleges. In his examination of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), Michael Neiberg argues that the creation of officer education programs on civilian campuses emanates from a traditional American belief (which he traces to the colonial period) in the active participation of civilians in military affairs.
Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2001
Maxime Weygand and Cicil-Military Relations in Modern France
Philip Charles Farwell Bankwitz
Hardcover
The Mediterranean Naval Situation, 1908-1914
Paul G. Halpern
During the early part of the twentieth century all the Mediterranean powers were transforming or at least expanding their navies from mere coastal defense forces to modern war machines. This study demonstrates that the Mediterranean situation had great influence on the plans and estimates of the British Admiralty. Halpern has uncovered new material in London, Paris, Rome, and Vienna that helps to explain the plans and dispositions of Entente and Triple Alliance forces at the outbreak of the war.
Hardcover 1971
The Mililtary Establishment of the Yuan Dynasty
Ch'i-Ch'ing Hsiao
Hardcover 1978
Military Culture in Imperial China
Edited by Nicola Di Cosmo
These original essays explore the relationship between culture and the military in Chinese society from early China to the Qing empire, with contributions by eminent scholars aiming to reexamine the relationship between military matters and law, government, historiography, art, philosophy, literature, and politics.
Hardcover 2009
The Military Tradition in Ukrainian History
Kostiantyn P. Morozov
This booklet contains the proceedings of the first Annual Conference sponsored by the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, and the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University at Harvard University, May 12-13, 1994.
Paperback
The Mobilization of Intellect
Martha Hanna
France went to war in 1914 not only in the trenches but also in the mind. When President Poincaré called upon the intellectual elite to contribute to the war effort with "their pens and their words," the union sacrée of scholars and writers--including Henri Bergson, Pierre Duhem, Ernest Lavisse, and Emile Durkheim--united French intellect against German Kultur. This is the first study of the power of French pens and words during and after the Great War.
Hardcover 1996
The Mystery of Courage
William Ian Miller
Few of us spend much time thinking about courage, but we know it when we see it--or do we? Is it best displayed by marching into danger, making the charge, or by resisting, enduring without complaint? Is it physical or moral, or both? Is it fearless, or does it involve subduing fear? Miller culls sources as varied as soldiers' memoirs, heroic and romantic literature, and philosophical discussions to get to the heart of courage--and to expose its role in generating the central anxieties of masculinity and manhood.
Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002
The Netherlands and Nazi Germany
Louis de Jong
Simon Schama
Hardcover 1990
Nexus
Jonathan Reed Winkler
In an illuminating study that blends diplomatic, military, technology, and business history, Winkler shows how U.S. officials during World War I discovered the enormous value of global communications. In this absorbing history, Winkler sheds light on the early stages of the global infrastructure that helped launch the United States as the predominant power of the century.
Hardcover 2008
Normandy
Olivier Wieviorka
Translated by M. B. DeBevoise
The Allied landings on the coast of Normandy on June 6, 1944, have assumed legendary status in the annals of World War II. But in overly romanticizing D-day, Wieviorka argues, we have lost sight of the full picture. Normandy offers a balanced, complete account that reveals the successes and weaknesses of the titanic enterprise.
Hardcover 2008
Northern Passage
John Hagan
More than 50,000 American men and women migrated to Canada during the Vietnam War. John Hagan, himself a member of the exodus, searched declassified government files, consulted previously unopened resistance organization archives and contemporary oral histories, and interviewed American war resisters settled in Toronto to learn how they made the momentous decision.
Hardcover 2001
Old Hatreds and Young Hopes
Alan B. Spitzer
Spitzer demonstrates that the secrets of a conspiracy and its place in the broader history of a nation can nevertheless be brought to light by evaluating one kind of evidence against another. His book is much more than the story of the conspirators. In showing why the conspiracy developed and how it was handled, the author has illuminated the workings of the political system of the Restoration--the structure and organization of its administration and political police and the operation of political justice in its courts.
Hardcover 1971
Pattern and Repertoire in History
Bertrand M. Roehner
Tony Syme
The aim of this book is to analyze clusters of similar "elementary" occurrences that serve as the building blocks of more global events. Making connections between seemingly unrelated case studies, Roehner and Syme apply scientific methodology to the analysis of history. Their book identifies the recurring patterns of behavior that shape the histories of different countries separated by vast stretches of time and space. Taking advantage of a broad wealth of historical evidence, the authors decipher what may be seen as a kind of genetic code of history.
Hardcover 2002
Politics and War
Enlarged Edition
David Kaiser
David Kaiser looks at four hundred years of modern European history to find the political causes of general war in four distinct periods. He shows how war became a natural function of politics, a logical consequence of contemporary political behavior. In a provocative and original new preface and chapter, Kaiser shows which aspects of four past areas of conflict do, and do not, seem relevant to the immediate future, and he sketches out some new possibilities for Europe.
Paperback 2000
Politics of Progressive Education
Dennis Shirley
In March 1933, Nazi storm troopers seized control of the Odenwaldschule, a small German boarding school founded in 1910 by educational reformer Paul Geheeb. Shirley explores how Nazi school reforms catalyzed Geheeb's alienation from the regime and galvanized his determination to close the school and leave Germany. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished documents, such as Geheeb's exhaustive correspondence with government officials and transcripts of combative faculty meetings, Shirley is able to reconstruct in detail the entire drama as it unfolded.
Hardcover 1992
Power and Culture
Akira Iriye
Paperback
Powerful and Brutal Weapons
Stephen P. Randolph
As America confronts an unpredictable war in Iraq, Randolph returns to an earlier conflict that severely tested our civilian and military leaders. In 1972, America sought to withdraw from Vietnam with its credibility intact, with President Nixon and National Security Advisor Kissinger hoping that gains on the battlefield would strengthen their position at the negotiating table. Randolph's intimate chronicle of the commander-in-chief gains us unprecedented access to how these strategic assessments were made and played out.
Hardcover 2007
Pyrrhic Victory
Robert A. Doughty
As the driving force behind the Allied effort in World War I, France willingly shouldered the heaviest burden. In this masterful book, Robert Doughty explains how and why France assumed this role and offers new insights into French strategy and operational methods.
Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2008
RKFDV
Robert L. Koehl
Hardcover 1957
Race to Pearl Harbor
Stephen E. Pelz
Hardcover 1974
Racing the Enemy
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa
Hasegawa rewrites the standard history of the end of World War II in the Pacific by fully integrating the three key actors in the story--the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan. From April 1945, when Stalin broke the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact and Harry Truman assumed the presidency, to the final Soviet military actions against Japan, he brings to light the real reasons Japan surrendered.
Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006
The Regulars
Edward M. Coffman
In 1898 the American Regular Army was a small frontier constabulary engaged in skirmishes with Indians and protesting workers. Forty-three years later, in 1941, it was a large modern army ready to wage global war against the Germans and the Japanese. In this definitive social history of America's standing army, military historian Coffman tells how that critical transformation was accomplished.
Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2007
Riding for Caesar
Michael P. Speidel
Written by one of the world's leading authorities on the Roman army, this history reveals the remarkable part the horse guard played in the fate of the Roman empire. Riding for Caesar follows the horsemen in political maneuvers and on the battlefield, from Caesar to Constantine. It offers a colorful picture of these horsemen in all their changing guises and duties--as the emperor's bodyguard or his parade troops, as a training school and officer's academy for the Roman army, or as a shock force in the endless wars of the second and third centuries.
Hardcover 1994 / Paperback 1997
The Roman Triumph
Mary Beard
A radical reexamination of the most extraordinary of ancient ceremonies, this book explores the magnificence of the Roman Triumph--but also its darker side. The Triumph, Beard contends, prompted the Romans to question as well as celebrate military glory. Her richly illustrated work is a testament to the profound importance of the triumph in Roman culture--and for monarchs, dynasts and generals ever since.
Hardcover 2007
Rulers, Guns, and Money
Jonathan A. Grant
The explosion of the industrial revolution and the rise of imperialism served to dramatically increase the supply and demand for weapons on a global scale. Challenging the traditional view of arms dealers as agents of their own countries, Grant asserts that these firms pursued their own economic interests while convincing their homeland governments that weapon sales meant national prestige and influence. In this book, Grant vividly chronicles how the resulting arms trade eventually led to an all-out arms race, and ultimately to war.
Hardcover 2007
The Russians in Germany
Norman M. Naimark
In 1945, when the Red Army marched in, eastern Germany was not "occupied" but "liberated." This, until the recent collapse of the Soviet Bloc, is what passed for history in the German Democratic Republic. Now, making use of newly opened archives in Russia and Germany, Norman Naimark reveals what happened during the Soviet occupation of eastern Germany from 1945 through 1949.
Hardcover 1995 / Paperback 1997
Shook over Hell
Eric T. Dean
Vietnam still haunts the American conscience. Not only did nearly 58,000 Americans die there, but--by some estimates--1.5 million veterans returned with war-induced Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This psychological syndrome of social pathology is now placed in historical context by Eric Dean in this remarkable book on Civil War veterans.
Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1999
Sowing the Dragon's Teeth
Eric McGeer
The military achievements of the emperors Nikephoros Phokas, John Tzimiskes, and Basil II brought the Byzantine Empire to the height of its power by the early eleventh century. This volume presents new editions and translations of two military treatises–the Praecepta militaria of Nikephoros Phokas and the revised version included in the Taktika of Nikephoros Ouranos.
Paperback 2008
Strategy
Edward N. Luttwak
In this widely acclaimed work, now revised and expanded, Luttwak unveils the peculiar logic of strategy level by level, from grand strategy down to combat tactics. In the tradition of Carl von Clausewitz, Strategy goes beyond paradox to expose the dynamics of reversal at work in the crucible of conflict.
Paperback 2002 / Hardcover 2002
Surprise Attack
With a New Preface
Ephraim Kam
Kam observes surprise attack through the eyes of its victim in order to understand the causes of the victim's failure to anticipate the coming of war. Emphasing the psychological aspect of warfare, Kam traces the behavior of the victim at various functional levels and from several points of view in order to examine the difficulties and mistakes that permit a nation to be taken by surprise. He argues that anticipation and prediction of a coming war are more complicated than any other issue of strategic estimation.
Paperback 2004
Surviving the Holocaust
Avraham Tory
Edited by Martin Gilbert
Dina Porat, Textual and Historical Notes
Jerzy Michalowicz, Translator
This remarkable chronicle of life and death in the Jewish Ghetto of Kovno, Lithuania, incorporates Avraham Tory's collections of official documents, Jewish Council reports, and original photographs and drawings made in the Ghetto. Martin Gilbert's masterly introduction establishes the authenticity of the diary, presents its events against the backdrop of the war in Europe, and considers the crucial questions of collaboration and resistance.
Hardcover 1990 / Paperback 1991
Titu Cusi
Introduction, Spanish Modernization, English Translation, and Notes by Nicole Delia Legnani
Prologue by Frank Salomon
Foreword by José Antonio Mazzotti
First written in 1570, this work now published in modern Spanish with an English translation sheds light on the Inqa (Inca) world. These writings followed more than a decade of negotiations and skirmishes between Inqa rebels and Spanish officials who were receiving their orders from Spain to find a diplomatic, or alternatively violent, solution to integrate these independently governed territories under Spanish colonial rule.
Paperback 2006
To the Maginot Line
Judith M. Hughes
The decision to fortify northeastern France has usually been considered a tragic mistake, an example of bad planning and missed opportunities. Not so, says Judith M. Hughes, who provides a convincing view of how France's military and political leaders tried to safeguard their nation and why they failed. As critic Michael Hurst writes in The American Historical Review, " The trends of French interwar history are deftly carried through onto these pages with an unobtrusive lucidity and persuasiveness."
Hardcover 1971 / Paperback 2006
The Tokyo War Crimes Trial
Yuma Totani
This book assesses the historical significance of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE)—commonly called the Tokyo trial—established as the eastern counterpart of the Nuremberg trial in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
Hardcover 2008
Twice a Stranger
Bruce Clark
In the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, nearly two million citizens in Turkey and Greece were expelled from homelands. In this evocative book, Bruce Clark draws on new archival research in Turkey and Greece as well as interviews with surviving participants to examine this unprecedented exercise in ethnic engineering.
Hardcover 2006
Vanguard of Nazism
Robert G. L. Waite
The newly established Weimar Republic, defenseless against the Communists, hired groups of volunteer soldiers (the Free Corps) to fight for it. When it, in fear, tried to disband them, these volunteers went underground until they reappeared in the brown shirts of the Nazis. The savage spirit, brutal acts, and perverted ideology of the men whom Hermann Goering called "the first soldiers of the Third Reich" stand out in glaring relief in this record.
Hardcover 1952
The Vichy Syndrome
Henry Rousso
Arthur Goldhammer, Translator
Foreword by Stanley Hoffman
From the Liberation purges to the Barbie trial, France has struggled with the memory of the Vichy experience: a memory of defeat, occupation, and repression. In this provocative study, Henry Rousso examines how this proud nation--a nation where reality and myth commingle to confound understanding--has dealt with les années noires. Specifally, he studies what the French have chosen to remember and what have chosen to conceal.
Hardcover 1991 / Paperback
The War Council
Andrew Preston
By examining the role of McGeorge Bundy and the National Security Council, Andrew Preston demonstrates that policymakers escalated the conflict in Vietnam in the face of internal opposition, external pressures, and a continually failing strategy. The War Council is an illuminating and compelling story with two inseparable themes: the acquisition and consolidation of power; and how that power is exercised.
Hardcover 2006
A War To Be Won
Williamson Murray
Allan R. Millett
The culmination of decades of research by premier military historians, A War To Be Won is the first comprehensive, single-volume account of how and why World War II evolved as it did. Moving between the war room and the battlefield, we see how strategies were crafted and revised, and how the multitudes of combat troops struggled to discharge their orders. It is the essential military history of World War II--from the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 to the surrender of Japan in 1945.
Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2001
War in the Wild East
Ben Shepherd
Shepherdenters the heated debate over the wartime behavior of the Wehrmacht in a detailed study of the motivation and conduct of its anti-partisan campaign in the Soviet Union. This valuable study offers a nuanced discussion of the diversity of behaviors within the German army, as well as providing a compelling exploration of the war and counterinsurgency operations on the eastern front.
Hardcover 2004
A War of Nerves
Ben Shephard
This is a history of military psychiatry in the twentieth century. Both absorbing historical narrative and intellectual detective story, it weaves literary, medical, and military lore to give us a fascinating history of war neuroses and their treatment, from the World Wars through Vietnam and up to the Gulf War.
Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2003
The Wehrmacht
Wolfram Wette
Translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider
This book is a profound reexamination of the role of the German army, the Wehrmacht, in World War II. Until very recently, the standard story avowed that the ordinary German soldier in World War II was a good soldier, distinct from Hitler's rapacious SS troops, and not an accomplice to the massacres of civilians. Wolfram Wette, a preeminent German military historian, explodes the myth of a "clean" Wehrmacht with devastating clarity.
Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2007
Why Hitler Came into Power
Theodore Abel
Thomas Childers
In 1934 Theodore Abel went to Germany and offered a prize, under the auspices of Columbia University, for autobiographies of members of the National Socialist movement. The six hundred essays he received constitute the single best source on grassroots opinion within the Nazi Party, and they form the empirical foundation for Abel's fascinating yet curiously neglected 1938 book.
Paperback 1986
Women at War with America
D'Ann Campbell
Hardcover 1984
The World within War
Gerald F. Linderman
Gerald Linderman has created a seamless and highly original social history, authoritatively recapturing the full experience of combat in World War II. Drawing on letters and diaries, memoirs and surveys, Linderman explores how ordinary frontline American soldiers prepared for battle, related to one another, conceived of the enemy, thought of home, and reacted to battle itself.
Paperback 1999
Xenophon's Retreat
Robin Waterfield
In The Expedition of Cyrus, Xenophon told how, in 401 b.c., a band of unruly Greek mercenaries traveled east to fight for the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger in his attempt to wrest the throne from his brother. With this first masterpiece of Western history forming the backbone of his book, Robin Waterfield explores what remains unsaid and assumed in Xenophon's account. The result is a nuanced and dramatic perspective on a critical moment in history that may tell us as much about our present-day adventures in the Middle East.
Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008
Your Death Would Be Mine
Martha Hanna
Paul and Marie Pireaud, a young peasant couple from southwest France, were newlyweds when World War I erupted. Drawing upon the hundreds of letters they wrote, Martha Hanna tells their moving story and reveals a powerful and personal perspective on war.
Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008