Showing titles in History

John Keegan, whom the New York Review of Books calls "the best historian of our day", now brings his extraordinary expertise to bear on perhaps the most controversial war of our time. In exclusive interviews with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, John Keegan has gathered information about the war that adds immeasurably to our grasp of its causes, complications, costs, and consequences.

Weihnachten an der Westfront 1914: Inmitten eines erbarmungslosen Stellungskrieges schließen deutsche, französische und britische Soldaten spontan Waffenstillstand auf Ehrenwort. Im Niemandsland feiern sie zusammen Weihnachten.

Herodotus is not only the father of the art and the science of historical writing, but also one of the Western tradition's most compelling storytellers. In tales such as that of Gyges, who murders Candaules, the king of Lydia, and usurps his throne and his marriage bed, thereby bringing on, generations later, war with the Persians, Herodotus laid bare the intricate human entanglements at the core of great historical events.

Award-winning author John Ferling is a leading authority on the American Revolution. His entertaining and enlightening histories have greatly improved our understanding of early America and the Founding Fathers. Now Ferling opens a window to the past and explores the contentious presidential election of 1800.

For more than two thousand years, The Art of War has stood as a cornerstone of Chinese culture, a lucid epigrammatic text that reveals as much about human psychology, politics, and economics as it does about battlefield strategy. The influence of Sun-Tzu's text has grown tremendously in the West in recent years, with military leaders, politicians, and corporate executives alike finding valuable insight in these ancient words.

Since September 11, 2001, Seymour M. Hersh has riveted readers, and outraged the Bush Administration, with his stories in The New Yorker magazine, including his breakthrough pieces on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Now, in Chain of Command, he brings together this reporting, along with new revelations, to answer the critical question of the last three years: how did America get from that clear morning in September to a divisive and dirty war in Iraq?

In a world in which news and information flashes around the globe in an instant, time lags are inconceivable. But they were a fact of life in the 19th century. One of those adept, impressively learned, sometimes impractical 19-century woodshed thinkers and tinkers, Cyrus Field, knew only a little of the hard science behind stringing a submarine telegraph cable that would link the financial markets of London and New York.

For anyone interested in foreign affairs, this book will catalyze debate, and not only for Mr. Huntington's concluding scenario for World War III. He sees how this could happen if the U.S. mishandles an increasingly xenophobic and truculent China. Chinese assertiveness, Huntington argues, rises out of its felt grievances against a relatively weakening West. After China, the gravest challenge to the West is resurgent Islamic identity.

The workshop revolutionaries who made our world have never had the attention afforded the political revolutionaries who founded this nation. But it has been these innovators, in small-town attics and on the Mississippi, in Silicon Valley and the wheat fields of Kansas, in a Black woman's beauty parlor and a Dayton bicycle shop, who set America on a course to attain a standard of living unprecedented in the history of the world.

In America's First Dynasty, Richard Brookhiser tells the story of America's longest and still-greatest dynasty, the Adamses, the only family in our history to play a leading role in American affairs for nearly two centuries.John Adams was only the first of the Adamses to occupy the highest office in the land; his son, John Quincy Adams, ascended to the presidency as an equal champion of liberty.

American soldiers serve willingly. They risk their lives so the rest of us can be safe. The one small thing they ask is that they not be sent into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist William Tuohy follows Richard O'Kane, America's undersea ace of aces, and a few fearless submariners, during the U.S. submarine war in the Pacific. This grueling battle saw 10 million tons of Japanese shipping sunk by U.S. submarines, but the cost to the U.S. Navy was one in five of its boats, the highest casualty rate of the U.S. armed services.

The son of proudly Communist parents, David Horowitz became a major figure in the 1960s New Left. He is by no means the only intellectual and activist to have moved from the Left to the Right in recent decades, but few have done so while maintaining such a high profile and outspoken style. His book therefore becomes not only an important and fascinating memoir of the 1960s but also a devastating analysis of the legacy of that time.

Acclaimed author Joseph J. Ellis penned the National Book Award-winning American Sphinx and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers, a fixture on The New York Times best seller list for an entire year, and one of the most popular history books of all time. Now this master historian turns his attention to the most exalted American hero, Founding Father and first President George Washington.

This brilliantly conceived book is based on a lecture course given by Dr. Leonard Peikoff in 1976 entitled, "The Philosophy of Objectivism". The lectures were attended by Ayn Rand, who helped prepare them and who also joined Peikoff in answering questions.

In the beginning months of World War I, a very strange thing happened. After the fierce trench warfare of November and December, on Christmas Eve, 1914, the fighting spontaneously stopped. Men on both sides laid down their arms and came to celebrate Christmas with each other. They shared food parcels across the lines, sang carols together, and erected Christmas trees with candles. They buried the dead, exchanged presents, and even played soccer together.

Long known as "the world's only private citizen with a foreign policy", George Soros combines his razor-sharp sense of economic trends with his passionate advocacy for open societies and decency in world politics to come up with a workable, and severely critical, analysis of the Bush administration's overreaching, militaristic foreign policy.

The best-selling author of Roosevelt's Secret War traces the last day of World War I, weaving together the experiences of the famous, such as President Wilson, General Pershing, and Douglas MacArthur, and the unsung and unremembered.

This book is an extraordinary day-to-day documentary of the Civil War's most infamous Confederate prison, Camp Sumter, better known as Andersonville.

November 11, 1918. The final hours pulsate with tension as every man in the trenches hopes to escape the melancholy distinction of being the last to die in World War I. The Allied generals knew the fighting would end precisely at 11:00 a.m., yet in the final hours they flung men against an already beaten Germany. The result? Eleven thousand casualties suffered, more than during the D-Day invasion of Normandy.