Military Nonfiction

World War II was raging, with thousands of American soldiers fighting overseas against the injustices brought on by Hitler. Back on the home front, the injustice of discrimination against African Americans was playing out as much on Main Street as in the military. Enlisted black men were segregated from white soldiers and regularly relegated to service duties. At Fort Benning, Georgia, First Sergeant Walter Morris’s men served as guards at The Parachute School while the white soldiers prepared to be paratroopers.

In 1941, newlyweds William and Rosalie Schiff are forcibly separated and sent on their individual odysseys through a surreal maze of hate. Terror in the Krakow ghetto, sadistic SS death games, cruel human medical experiments, eyewitness accounts of brutal murders of men, women, children, and even infants, and the menace of rape in occupied Poland make William & Rosalie an unusually explicit view of the chaos that World War II unleashed on the Jewish people.

Patton's Shadow by Nathan C. Jones, a leading authority on George S. Patton, offers a definitive account of the creation of the Patton legend and what it illuminates about American culture and the worship of heroes. Jones traces how the persona of Patton, a brash and brilliant general in the European theater of World War II, transcended the individual man and became a cultural icon and byword for triumphal American might.

Understanding the origins of civil wars and their trajectories therefore demands some appreciation of the economic, political, social, cultural, and geographic order of societies. If there is one factor that best predicts why a civil war erupts, it is a prior civil war. That is why knowledge of a country's history of political violence, and associated narratives about who is to blame and why, are critical to understanding where a civil war might next occur.

From the first shot fired by his grandfather on a jungle trail in 1903 to the day his father captured plans for the Chinese invasion of South Korea, William Crawford Woods's family has fought in nearly every American war of the twentieth century.

In February 1942, a reconnaissance party of US Army Air Force officers arrived in England. Firmly wedded to the doctrine of daylight precision bombing, they believed they could help turn the tide of the war in Europe. In the months that followed, they formed the Eighth Air Force—an organization that grew at an astonishing rate. To accommodate it, almost seventy airfields were built across the eastern counties of England. At the heart of the Eighth Air Force was its bombardment groups, each equipped with scores of heavily armed, four-engine bombers. This is the story of just one "Bomb Group".

The only way to truly understand what it was like to fight in the Second World War is to listen to the experiences of those men who were there. And often, there was nowhere more dangerous than on the ground. In Footsloggers, Peter Hart reconstructs one infantry battalion's war in staggering detail. Based on his interviews with members of the 16th Durham Light Infantry, Hart bears witness not only to their comradeship, suffering, dreadful losses, and individual tragedies, but also their courage and self-sacrifice as they fought their way across North Africa, Italy, and Greece.

After the Japanese military bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese Americans became the subject of racism and discrimination within the United States. Many were rounded up and put in concentration camps. But even while this was happening, there were many Japanese American soldiers who fought to ensure that all Americans were safe during the biggest conflict in world history. Facing the Mountain is the story of three Japanese American soldiers: Rudy Tokiwa, Fred Shiosaki, and Kats Miho, who volunteered for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team to fight for their country in World War II.

Americans are more familiar with his signature than with the man himself. In this spirited account of John Hancock's life, Brooke Barbier depicts a patriot of fascinating contradictions—a child of enormous privilege who would nevertheless become a voice of the common folk; a pillar of society uncomfortable with radicalism who yet was crucial to independence. Orphaned young, Hancock was raised by his merchant uncle, whose business and vast wealth he inherited—including household slaves, whom Hancock later freed. By his early thirties, he was one of New England's most prominent politicians.

The remaining US aviation forces, along with the US Air Force and US Navy and Marine aviation assets, would not be easily removed from the battle. For the US forces still in-country, this is an untold story of heroism, dedication, and refusal to yield the battlefield despite being largely considered by US political leaders as "expendable."

Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid.

In the early morning of 20th April 1949, HMS Amethyst was fulfilling orders to travel to Nanking to stand guard for the British Embassy during the height of the Chinese Civil War when she was fired upon by guns from the riverbank. Shells pounded into the ship, killing the commanding officer and destroyed the bridge before the ship grounded on the bank. How did the Amethyst escape the battering of Chinese Communist guns?

In Marshall's Great Captain, author Kathy Wilson details Andrews's extraordinary life and career. The first biography dedicated to the namesake of Joint Base Andrews, this book sheds a light on Andrews's crucial role in orchestrating US involvement in WWII, as well as the professional relationship between Andrews and Marshall. Wilson raises Andrews's legacy to its legitimate place within the annals of both air power and WWII history and posits that there is a high probability that Andrews was Marshall's first choice for the office of Supreme Allied Commander.

Following the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) a decade-long wave of sea-robbery plagued the Atlantic rim—often glamorized as the "Golden Age of Piracy". Boston-based laborer, Edward Low, left his mark on pirate history as the most vicious and sadistic raider of them all.

In Lincoln and California Brian McGinty explains the relationship between Abraham Lincoln and the Golden State, describing important events that took place in California and elsewhere during Lincoln's lifetime. He includes the histories of Lincoln's close friends and personal acquaintances who made history as they went to California, lived there, and helped to keep it part of the imperiled Union.

On July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed in the South Pacific by a Japanese submarine. An estimated 300 men were killed upon impact; close to 900 sailors were cast into the Pacific Ocean, where they remained undetected by the navy for nearly four days and nights. Battered by a savage sea, they struggled to stay alive, fighting off sharks, hypothermia, and hallucinations.

On October 7, 1780, American Patriot and Loyalist soldiers battled each other at Kings Mountain, near the border of North and South Carolina. With over one hundred eyewitness accounts, this collection of participant statements from men of both sides includes letters and statements in their original form—the soldiers' own words—unedited and unabridged.

At All Costs transports you to the battlefront for more than two centuries of astonishing military confrontations. From the Battle of Minden in 1795 to dramatic Second World War stories and the Battle for Goose Green in the Falklands, Bryan Perrett gives astoundingly vivid accounts of international forces in daring actions, achieving victory against the odds.

Daniel Stashower, the two-time Edgar award-winning author of The Beautiful Cigar Girl, uncovers the riveting true story of the "Baltimore Plot", an audacious conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War. In February of 1861, just days before he assumed the presidency, Abraham Lincoln faced a "clear and fully-matured" threat of assassination as he traveled by train from Springfield to Washington for his inauguration. Over a period of 13 days the legendary detective Allan Pinkerton worked feverishly to detect and thwart the plot, assisted by a captivating young widow named Kate Warne.

During the infamous World War II Battle of the Bulge, Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds was captured, along with his infantrymen. The Nazis took him and his men to Stalag IXA, a notorious prisoner of war camp in Germany, where he was the highest-ranking American soldier. He showed great courage in the face of danger, refusing to feed into the cruelty toward his fellow soldiers, many of whom were Jewish. Through his deep spirituality, endurance, ability to lead, and bravery, Roddie saved hundreds of US military men. And his heroism continues to impact thousands of lives today.