American Military

The entire vast modern American intelligence system—the amalgam of three-letter spy services of many stripes—can be traced back to the dire straits that Britain faced at the end of June 1940. Before World War II, the US had no organization to recruit spies and steal secrets or launch secret campaigns against enemies overseas. It was only through Winston Churchill’s determination to mobilize the US to help in their fight against Hitler that the first American spy service was born, one that was built by scratch in the background of WWII.

From 1845 to 1865 the Gulf of Mexico was at the center of American expansion and southern imperialism. A Continuous State of War tells the story of several communities as well as countries such as Mexico and Cuba, to uncover the way that wars within the upper rim of the Gulf of Mexico facilitated American and southern attempts to conquer Latin American nations. In the push for westward expansion that preceded the Civil War, white southerners along with other Americans engaged in violent conquest in Latin America and the American West.

In June of 1861, 46-year-old Harriet Patience Dame joined the Second New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry Regiment as a matron. No Place for a Woman recounts her dedicated service throughout the Civil War. She camped with the regiment on campaign, nursed its wounded after many major battles, and carried out important wartime missions for her state and the Union cause. Late in the 19th century, she battled alongside her friend Dorothea Dix to overcome prejudice against bestowing pensions on women who nursed during the war.

In American Brutus, popular historian Michael W. Kauffman delivers a history that reads more like a best-selling novel. This definitive masterwork dispels commonly held myths and reveals the truth about John Wilkes Booth. Luring Southern sympathizers into a “noble” presidential kidnapping, Booth stunned his puzzled pawns by murdering Lincoln. From Booth’s early life and acting career to his escape and death, this meticulously researched book re-examines it all using a wealth of primary sources.

Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story is the spellbinding memoir of Devine's time in the CIA, where he served for more than 30 years, rising to become the acting deputy director of operations, responsible for all of the agency's spying operations. This is a story of intrigue and high-stakes maneuvering - all the more gripping when the fate of our geopolitical order hangs in the balance. But this audiobook also sounds a warning to our nation's decision makers.

Before the night of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth was one of the most famous actors of his time; President Abraham Lincoln had even watched him perform. But his most significant performance at a theater did not take place on the stage. That night Booth became one of history's most infamous assassins when he shot President Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC.

In the near future, the United States has fought a short, bloody war with China in the Pacific. The fighting is over, but the US Navy maintains a blockade. Some call it the First Sino-American War. Others worry it is the start of World War III. In a prison cell in Beijing, Navy fighter pilot Jack Knapp tells his story about the victory in the Battle of Taiwan and how he ended up in a Chinese show trial, accused of crimes against humanity. With his life in the balance, Jack will have to choose between survival and participating in his captors’ lies.

In Why Veterans Run, Jeremy Teigen explains the tendency of parties to elevate those with armed forces experience to run for high office. He describes the veteran candidate phenomenon by examining the related factors and patterns, showing why different eras have more former generals running and why the number of veterans in election cycles varies. With both quantitative and qualitative analysis, Why Veterans Run investigates each postwar era in US electoral history and elaborates why so many veterans run for office.

Hard Tack and Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life (1887) is a memoir by John D. Billings, who was a veteran of the 10th Massachusetts Volunteer Light Artillery Battery in the American Civil War. Originally published in 1888, the book quickly became a best seller, and is today considered one of the most important books written by a Civil War veteran. The subject matter of Hard Tack and Coffee is about the details of army life - how the common Union soldiers of the Civil War lived.

In the 1850s, Harriet Tubman, strategically brilliant and uncannily prescient, rescued some seventy enslaved people from Maryland’s Eastern Shore and shepherded them north along the underground railroad. One of her regular stops was Auburn, New York, where she entrusted passengers to Martha Coffin Wright, a Quaker mother of seven, and Frances A. Seward, the wife of William H. Seward. Through exhaustive research, Wickenden traces the second American revolution these women fought to bring about, the toll it took on their families, and its lasting effects on the country.

With Abraham Lincoln's assassination, his "team of rivals" was left adrift. President Andrew Johnson, a former slave owner from Tennessee, was challenged by Northern Congressmen, Radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stephens and Charles Sumner, who wanted to punish the defeated South. When Johnson's policies placated the rebels at the expense of the freed black men, radicals in the House impeached him for trying to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.

This audiobook exposes the misconceptions, half-truths, and outright lies that have shaped the still dominant but largely mythical version of what happened in the White House during those harrowing two weeks of secret Cuban missile crisis deliberations. A half-century after the event it is surely time to demonstrate, once and for all, that RFK's Thirteen Days and the personal memoirs of other ExComm members cannot be taken seriously.

When his father is killed by rebel vigilantes, Noah flees with his family to Boston. Intent on avenging his father, Noah becomes a spy for the British and firsthand witness to the power of partisan rumor to distort facts, the hypocrisy of men who demand freedom while enslaving others, and the human connections that bind people together regardless of stated allegiances.

The discovery of Robert E. Lee's Special Orders No. 191 outside of Frederick, Maryland, on September 13, 1862, is one of the most hotly disputed events of the American Civil War. For more than 150 years, historians have debated if George McClellan, commander of the Union Army of the Potomac, dawdled after receiving a copy of the orders before advancing to challenge Lee's forces. Authors Gene Thorp and Alexander Rossino document in exhaustive fashion how "Little Mac" in fact moved with uncharacteristic energy to counter the Confederate threat and take advantage of Lee's divided forces.

In the years immediately after the Civil War, tens of thousands of former slaves deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman's Bank. African Americans envisioned this new bank as a launching pad for economic growth and self-determination. But only nine years after it opened, their trust was betrayed and the Freedman's Bank collapsed. Fully informed by new archival findings, historian Justene Hill Edwards unearths a major turning point in American history in this comprehensive account of the Freedman's Bank and its depositors

As a divided nation plunges into the deepest crisis in its history, Abraham Lincoln boards a train for Washington and his inauguration - an inauguration Southerners have vowed to prevent by any means necessary. Drawing on new research, this account reveals the president-elect as a work in progress, showing him on the verge of greatness, foiling an assassination attempt, and forging an unbreakable bond with the American people.

John Crawford joined the Florida National Guard to pay for his college tuition; it had seemed a small sacrifice to give up one weekend a month and two weeks a year in exchange for a free education. But one semester short of graduating, and newly married, he was called to active duty, to serve in Kuwait, then on the front lines of the invasion of Iraq, and ultimately in Baghdad. While serving in Iraq, Crawford began writing short nonfiction stories, his account of what he and his fellow soldiers experienced.

The year was 1862. The Union’s first large scale offensive, the Peninsula campaign led by Major General George B. McClellan, had been disastrous. Doubt in Congress grew that President Lincoln and his generals could win the war. In Saving the Union, Joe Scarborough analyzes the hard choice Lincoln faced—the debate raging inside him over how quickly to move toward emancipation, if at all.

“In this brief sketch of our great Southern hero, I have endeavored to portray, amid the blaze of his matchless military genius, the unchanging rectitude of his conduct, the stern will-power by which he conquered all difficulties, his firm belief in an overruling Providence, and his entire submission to the Divine Will. These traits of character were the cornerstones upon which he reared the edifice of his greatness, and upon which the young people of our day will do well to build."

At the beginning of 1864, the Civil War was far from won; terrible and bloody Union setbacks and casualties lay ahead. Abraham Lincoln was facing a re-election battle as some northern Democrats were ready to start peace talks that could leave the Confederacy a separate slaveholding American nation and as his secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase, challenged him for the Republican nomination. But by the end of the year, the war's end was in sight, and slavery was on the verge of extinction.