Social Military History

In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to 19th-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as former slaves move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that rules the rest of the nation begins to intrude.

In Inventing a Christian America, Green, a leading historian of religion and politics, explores the historical record that is purported to support the popular belief in America's religious founding and status as a Christian nation.

Americans are deeply divided over the Second Amendment. Some passionately assert that the Amendment protects an individual's right to own guns. Others, that it does no more than protect the right of states to maintain militias. Now, in the first and only comprehensive history of this bitter controversy, Saul Cornell proves conclusively that both sides are wrong. Cornell, a leading constitutional historian, shows that the Founders understood the right to bear arms as neither an individual nor a collective right, but as a civic right.

On July 19, 1924, Eric Liddell was on top of the world. He was the most famous Briton at the time, having just won the gold in the Olympic 400-meter race. The story of that race - and the one he didn't run - was told in the popular movie classic Chariots of Fire. But what most of us don't know is what became of Eric Liddell in the years after the credits rolled. As the storm clouds of World War II rolled in, Liddell's strength of character led him to choose an uncertain future in China during World War II to continue helping the Chinese.

Two weeks before the U.S. entered World War I, a Chicago advertising executive visited the Department of Justice with a proposal - organize the country’s businessmen into a secret force of volunteer agents to ferret out and investigate enemy activities within the United States. The country, overcome by a wave of patriotic fervor, had also become gripped with fear and uncertainty of the influx of immigrants from the very countries with which the country was now at war.

In a book that will shatter the complacency of establishment conservatives, David Horowitz shows how Bill Clinton's generation, having mastered the art of political war, has spent the last 10 years clobbering the conservatives in and out of government. The best-selling author of Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes has the strategy to fight back.

The breathtaking memoir by a member of "Nicky's family", a group of 669 Czechoslovakian children who escaped the Holocaust through Sir Nicholas Winton's Kindertransport project. My Train to Freedom relates the trials and achievements of award-winning humanitarian and former Episcopal priest Ivan Backer.

Less than three months after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and inflamed the nation, President Roosevelt signed an executive order declaring parts of four western states to be a war zone operating under military rule. The US Army immediately began rounding up thousands of Japanese-Americans, sometimes giving them less than 24 hours to vacate their houses and farms. For the rest of the war, these victims of war hysteria were imprisoned in primitive camps.

Andrew Marshall is a Pentagon legend. For more than four decades he has served as Director of the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon's internal think tank, under 12 defense secretaries and eight administrations. Yet Marshall has been on the cutting edge of strategic thinking even longer than that. Covering some of the most pivotal episodes of the last half century and peopled with some of the era's most influential figures, The Last Warrior tells Marshall's story for the first time, in the process providing an unparalleled history of the evolution of the American defense establishment.

Given how quickly its operations have achieved global impact, it may seem that the Islamic State materialized suddenly. In fact, al-Qaeda's operations chief, Sayf al-Adl, devised a seven-stage plan for jihadis to conquer the world by 2020 that included reestablishing the Caliphate in Syria between 2013 and 2016. Despite a massive schism between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, al-Adl's plan has proved remarkably prescient. In summer 2014, ISIS declared itself the Caliphate after capturing Mosul, Iraq - part of stage five in al-Adl's plan.

Thousands of American soldiers are returning from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan with severe wounds from chemical war. They are not the victims of ruthless enemy warfare, but of their own military commanders. These soldiers, afflicted with rare cancers and respiratory diseases, were sickened from the smoke and ash swirling out of the "burn pits" where military contractors incinerated mountains of trash, including old stockpiles of mustard and sarin gas, medical waste, and other toxic material.

Lev Davidovich Trotsky burst onto the world stage in November 1917 as coleader of a Marxist Revolution seizing power in Russia. It made him one of the most recognized personalities of the 20th century, a global icon of radical change. Yet just months earlier, this same Lev Trotsky was a nobody, a refugee expelled from Europe, writing obscure pamphlets and speeches, barely noticed outside a small circle of fellow travelers. Where had he come from to topple Russia and change the world? Where else? New York.

As the Civil War swirls closer to her home in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, 13-year-old India Moody is tutored by a young scholar who sparks her interest in biology, chemistry, and college. But when India's father goes missing, she searches for him on the ghastly Antietam battlefield in Sharpsburg, Maryland.

By the end of the Civil War, nearly half a million slaves had taken refuge behind Union lines in what became known as "contraband camps". These were crowded, dangerous places, yet some 12 to 15 percent of the Confederacy's slave population took almost unimaginable risks to reach them, and they became the first places Northerners came to know former slaves en masse.

On December 7, 1941, the nation of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and prompted the United States’ entry into the bloodiest war in human history. Americans have long debated the cause of the bombing; many have argued that the attack was a brilliant Japanese military coup or a failure of US intelligence agencies or even a conspiracy of the Roosevelt administration. But despite the attention historians have paid to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the truth about that fateful day has remained a mystery - until now.

When terrorists crashed a plane into the Pentagon, he was there, helping carry the wounded to safety. And he's been there, leading the war on terror, directing its operations around the world in both open and covert missions, and bluntly focusing on one primary goal: killing terrorists. He is Donald Rumsfeld. His great fear was a second Pearl Harbor. When it happened on September 11, 2001, he led the charge to make sure it never happens again.

Thomas B. Allen’s expertise in military history and strategy is combined with Roger MacBride Allen’s knowledge of technology to reveal a lesser-known yet fascinating side of the 16th president of the United States. Their authoritative narrative reveals Lincoln as our nation’s first hands-on commander in chief, whose appreciation for the power of technology plays a critical role in the North’s Civil War victory over the less-developed South.

America's fight against radical Islam could soon be over, and a top secret plan from the Cold War is the key to our victory. Dr. Sebastian Gorka, counterinsurgency expert and Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at Marine Corps University, explains how America can win the war on terror quickly and decisively by delegitimizing the enemy in the eyes of its followers - a strategy that won the Cold War and would end the era of Jihad forever.

In the South of the 1890s, Booker T. Washington stood as the often controversial personification of the aspirations of the Black masses. The Civil War had ended, casting uneducated Blacks adrift or, equally tenuous, creating a class of sharecroppers still dependent on the whims of their former owners. Black Reconstruction, for all its outward trimming, had failed to deliver its promised economic and political empowerment.

Operation Iraqi Freedom Veteran and former host of All Access, DC Comics' web show, Jason Inman, discusses the influence war has had on some of the most memorable superheroes in comics.