United States Military History

In 2000, The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson, captured the nation's attention with the highly dramatized story of an American patriot fighting the British in South Carolina during the American Revolution. As viewers learned that Gibson's character was loosely based on General Francis Marion, nicknamed the "Swamp Fox" by his enemies, people took a new interest in this often forgotten soldier.

Yorktown was a former tobacco trading post now in decline, not much bigger than a large village. But Yorktown was tucked away on the northern edge of the York peninsula in rural Virginia, and in 1781 it became the site of a brief siege between two small armies, fought with all the decorum and formality of 18th century European warfare. About 5,000 British and Germans faced perhaps 18,000 Americans and French. After only three weeks the smaller garrison surrendered, tired and low on ammunition.

The last days of the colonial era in America seemed to spawn a number of Renaissance men, unique individuals who were as comfortable in a log cabin as a ballroom and could write as well as they could hunt. George Rogers Clark was one of these men, and in many ways he was a paler, less-accomplished version of his illustrious neighbor, George Washington.

The airplane changed the course of history. Above all, it changed the history of the United States. When the Wright brothers invented their flying machine, Americans lived in a nation of two dimensions, circumscribed by lines drawn on a conventional map. A century later, their nation existed - in fact, reigned - in three dimensions. Two million Americans slipped the surly bonds of earth daily, carried aloft by aircraft operating in every part of the world.

From the American Revolution to the end of World War II, the United States spent 19 years at war against other nations. But since1950, the total is 22 years and counting. On four occasions, U.S. presidents elected as "peace candidates" have gone on to lead the nation into ferocious armed conflicts. Repeatedly, wars deemed necessary when they began have been seen in retrospect as avoidable, and ill-advised. Americans profess to be a peace-loving people and one wary of "foreign entanglements". Yet we have been drawn into wars in distant lands from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

Between 1819 and 1845, as veterans of the Revolutionary War were filing applications to receive pensions for their service, the government was surprised to learn that many of the soldiers were not men but boys, many of whom were under the age of 16 and some even as young as nine. In Boy Soldiers of the American Revolution, Caroline Cox reconstructs the lives and stories of this young subset of early American soldiers, focusing on how these boys came to join the army and what they actually did in service.

A groundbreaking new study of Anglo-American relations during the Cold War, Diplomacy at the Brink argues for a reevaluation of Dwight D. Eisenhower's foreign policy toward allies and enemies alike. Contrary to his reputation as a level-headed moderate, the Eisenhower who emerges is a conservative ideologue, a leader whose aggressively anti-Communist and anticolonialist foreign policies represented a major shift away from the containment policy of the Truman presidency.

They were fighting for Texas - fighting for the land they called home. For 12 long days the men, women and children inside an old mission known as The Alamo defended it against the soldiers who surrounded them.

This audiobook examines some of the ways in which, beginning very early in their interactions with European-Americans, the Cherokee began to adopt white culture and make it their own. They modeled much of their way of life on the way of life of their white neighbors, so much so that many of them sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Of the three surgeons who accompanied Custer's Seventh Cavalry on June 25, 1876, only the youngest, 28-year-old Henry Porter, survived that day's ordeal, riding through a gauntlet of Indian attackers and up the steep bluffs to Major Marcus Reno's hilltop position. But the story of Dr. Porter's wartime exploits goes far beyond the battle itself.

In 2005, historian Jason Emerson discovered a steamer trunk formerly owned by Robert Todd Lincoln's lawyer and stowed in an attic for 40 years. The trunk contained a rare find: 25 letters pertaining to Mary Todd Lincoln's life and insanity case, letters assumed long destroyed by the Lincoln family. Mary wrote 20 of the letters herself, more than half from the insane asylum to which her son Robert had her committed, and many in the months and years after. The Madness of Mary Lincoln is the first examination of Mary Lincoln's mental illness based on the lost letters in 20 years.

During the first few months of the Revolutionary War, the British tried on several occasions to lift the siege of Boston with force, and the most memorable attempt was what became known as the Battle of Bunker Hill. On June 17, 1775, the British Navy fired on Charlestown from the Charles River and then landed an estimated 3,000 British regulars on the peninsula.

This audiobook describes the design and significance of the Vietnam Memorial located in Washington DC built to honor the American soldiers who served in Vietnam.

Hearing the hoofbeats of 20 horses entering the yard at the front of her house, Mattea pulled the lead rope, releasing the cow she was milking and ran into the house to find five Sioux braves wearing war paint sitting at her table, smoking her husband's tobacco from the humidor on the mantle.

In this impressive, well-researched biography, Phelps separates historical fact from long-standing myth to reveal the life of Nathan Hale, a young man who deserves to be remembered as an original American patriot. Using Hale's own journals and letters as well as testimonies from his friends and contemporaries, Phelps depicts the Revolution as it was seen from the ground.

Before September 11, 2001, one terrorist group had killed more Americans than any other: Hezbollah, the “Party of God.” Today it remains potentially more dangerous than even al Qaeda. Yet little has been known about its inner workings, past successes, and future plans–until now.

This was the American Civil War for many who lived it, overwhelming and ultimately tragic, viewed through the eyes of a courageous youth and an unforgettable young woman.

General Ike is a book that John Eisenhower always knew he had to write, a tribute from an affectionate and admiring son to a great father. John chose to write about the "military Ike", as opposed to the "political Ike", because Ike cared far more about his career in uniform than about his time in the White House. John Eisenhower masterfully uses the backdrop of Ike's key battles to paint a portrait of his father and his relationships with the great men of his time.

Not many have experienced as much of Texas history firsthand as John James Dix. At the age of seven, he came to Texas with his family, arriving in Stephen F. Austin's colony, and listened to the stories of his father, who fought in the early battles of the Texas Revolution under heroes of the Republic -,Austin and Travis. He drove steers, worked under General Zachary Taylor in the Mexican-American War, and, after he married, was a neighbor to Richard King on the Santa Gertrudis Ranch.

The Civil War conjures images of blood-soaked battlefields in the United States. Few are aware of the equally important diplomatic and intelligence contest that raged between the North and South in Europe. While the Confederacy sought Great Britain as a strategic ally, the Union utilized diplomacy and espionage to avert both the construction of a Confederate navy and the threat of war with England.