United States Military

Before he grew up and became one of Washington's most respected reporters and editors, Andrew Ferguson was, of all things, a Lincoln buff, with the photos hung on his bedroom wall to prove it. Decades later, Ferguson's latent buffdom is reignited. In Land of Lincoln, he embarks on a curiosity-fueled coast-to-coast journey through contemporary Lincoln Nation, encountering everything from hatred to adoration to opportunism and all manner of reaction in between.

The D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, launched on June 6, 1944, is widely referred to as the longest day of World War Two. Historian Victor Brooks argues that 1944 was, in effect, the longest year for Americans of that era both in terms of United States casualties and in deciding the outcome of war itself.

For the first time ever, the intimate thoughts and political decisions of Abraham Lincoln’s entire presidency - day by day. In a startlingly innovative format, journalist Stephen A. Wynalda has constructed a painstakingly detailed day-by-day breakdown of president Abraham Lincoln’s decisions in office - including his signing of the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862; his signing of the legislation enacting the first federal income tax on August 5, 1861; and more personal incidents like the day his 11-year-old son, Willie, died.

Historian Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical - to ban torture and limit civilian casualties - have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force - from the 19th-century struggle to make war less lethal to the eventual shift from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes, with fateful consequences.

Theirs is a fight to right the wrongs inflicted on them by "the white settlers." They know they are too small to take on the entire country, but they don't need to. Over a few tension-filled days as the battles rages over abundant energy resources, the frantic prime minister can only watch as the insurrection paralyzes the country. But when energy-dependent Americans discover the southward flow of Canadian hydroelectricity, oil, and natural gas is halted, they do not remain passive.

American History, Volume 1 surveys the broad sweep of American history from the first Native American societies to the end of the Reconstruction period, following the Civil War. Drawing on a deep range of research and years of classroom teaching experience, Thomas S. Kidd offers students an engaging overview of the first half of American history. The volume features illuminating stories of people from well known presidents and generals, to lesser-known men and women who struggled under slavery and other forms of oppression to make their place in American life.

Americans have always loved guns. This special bond was forged during the American Revolution and sanctified by the Second Amendment. It is because of this exceptional relationship that American civilians are more heavily armed than the citizens of any other nation. Or so we're told. In The Gunning of America, historian Pamela Haag overturns this conventional wisdom. American gun culture, she argues, developed not because the gun was exceptional but precisely because it was not.

The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman's most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants: Edda L. Fields-Black shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats.

When was the first special forces unit established? What daring feats have taken place throughout history? This unique timeline of the US Army Ranger missions seizes the courage and drama these soldiers experienced. Follow along to learn more!

The fighting prowess of United States Marines is second to none, but few know of the Corps' humble beginnings and what it achieved during the early years of the American Revolution. That oversight is fully rectified by Jason Bohm's eye-opening Washington's Marines: The Origins of the Corps and the American Revolution, 1775-1777.

For a person seeking a single volume to serve as a captivating introduction and a dependable guide through all the maze of battles and issues of the Civil War, this is an audiobook without parallel. Bruce Catton understood the Civil War - its participants and battles - and he unfolds it with skill and simplicity.

As the fledgling nation looked west to the land beyond the Appalachian Mountains, it turned to the Army to advance and defend its national interests. Clashing with Spain, Britain, France, Mexico, the Confederacy, and Indians in this pursuit of expansion, the army's failures and successes alternately delayed and hastened western migration.

In October 1962, when the United States confronted the Soviet Union over its installation of missiles in Cuba, few people shared the behind-the-scenes story as it is told here by the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In this unique account, he describes the hour-by-hour negotiations, with particular attention to the actions and views of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. In a foreword to this edition, the distinguished historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., discusses the book's enduring importance and the significance of new information about the crisis that has come to light from the former Soviet Union.

In The Safety of the Kingdom, J. Michael Martinez takes up the question of how the United States government has responded to terrorist attacks and, in the absence of an attack, the fear of foreign and subversive elements that may harm the nation. In some cases the government “overreaction” led to a series of abuses that amplified the severity of the original threat.

In I Saw Death Coming, Kidada E. Williams offers a breakthrough account of the much-debated Reconstruction period, transporting listeners into the daily existence of formerly enslaved people building hope-filled new lives.

Captain Kidd has gone down in history as America's most ruthless buccaneer. However, Captain William Kidd was no career cut-throat; he was a tough, successful New York sea captain who was hired to chase pirates. Across the oceans of the world, the pirate hunter, Kidd, pursued the pirate, Culliford. One man would hang in the harbor; the other would walk away with the treasure. The Pirate Hunter is both a masterpiece of historical detective work and a page-turner.

Today the Glock pistol has been embraced by two-thirds of all U.S. police departments, glamorized in countless Hollywood movies, and featured as a ubiquitous presence on prime-time TV. It has been rhapsodized by hip-hop artists, and coveted by cops and crooks alike. Created in 1982 by Gaston Glock, an obscure Austrian curtain-rod manufacturer, and swiftly adopted by the Austrian army, the Glock pistol, with its lightweight plastic frame and large-capacity spring-action magazine, arrived in America at a fortuitous time.

A history of the Crusades. Out of the chaos of Muslim tribal warfare and regional animosity arose a military genius such as Islam had never known: Saladin. Uniting the sultanates of Cairo and Damascus, Saladin created a single powerful state. Luring the crusaders into an ill-considered confrontation, he destroyed their army at the Battle of Hattin in 1187, leaving the few remaining crusaders clinging perilously to a series of towns and forts along the Levantine coast. Into this desperate situation stepped the most formidable warrior of the age, Richard the Lion-Hearted.

Just days after the United States decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally. But even before the surrender, the US government and military had begun a secret propaganda and information suppression campaign to hide the devastating nature of these experimental weapons. The cover-up intensified as Occupation forces closed the atomic cities to Allied reporters, preventing leaks about the horrific long-term effects of radiation that would kill thousands during the months after the blast.

On January 17, 1781, at Cowpens, South Carolina, the notorious British cavalry officer Banastre Tarleton and his legion had been destroyed along with the cream of Lord Cornwallis’s troops. The man who planned and executed this stunning American victory was Daniel Morgan. Once a barely literate backcountry laborer, Morgan now stood at the pinnacle of American martial success. When George Washington called for troops to join him at the siege of Boston in 1775, Morgan organized a select group of riflemen and headed north.