War History America

A shocking expos of the covert CIA program of widespread torture, rape, and murder of civilians during America’s war in Vietnam, with a new introduction by the author. In the darkest days of the Vietnam War, America’s Central Intelligence Agency secretly initiated a sweeping program of kidnap, torture, and assassination devised to destabilize the infrastructure of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam, commonly known as the “Viet Cong.”

The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights. Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story, from Joseph Hooker, whose timidity in crisis was exploited by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville, to Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black abolitionists whose critical work in Canada and the United States advanced emancipation and the enrollment of Black soldiers in Union armies.

Based on over a hundred interviews and on secret records of White House-Kremlin contacts, Not One Inch shows how the United States successfully overcame Russian resistance in the 1990s to expand NATO to more than 900 million people. But it also reveals how Washington's hardball tactics transformed the era between the Cold War and the present day, undermining what could have become a lasting partnership.

Originally published in six volumes, which sold more than one million copies, Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln was praised as the most noteworthy historical biography of Sandburg’s generation. He later distilled this monumental work into one volume that critics and readers alike consider his greatest work of nonfiction, as well as the most distinguished, authoritative biography of Lincoln ever published.

Growing up in an Illinois prairie town, Sandburg listened to stories of old-timers who had known Lincoln. By the time this single-volume edition was competed, he had spent a lifetime studying, researching, and writing about our 16th president.

A fascinating look at a neglected Allied front in the Southern hemisphere, Instructions for American Servicemen in Australia, 1942 follows its successful predecessors as a captivating historical document of a pivotal era in history.

A remarkable analysis linking the assassination of JFK and 9/11, and how both events were used to influence war policy. Peter Dale Scott examines the many ways in which war policy has been driven by “accidents” and other events in the field, in some cases despite moves toward peace that were directed by presidents. This book explores the “deep politics” that exerts a profound but too-little-understood effect on national policy outside the control of traditional democratic processes.

A riveting new account of Theodore Roosevelt's impassioned crusade for military preparedness as America fitfully stumbles into World War I, spectacularly punctuated by his unique tongue-lashings of the vacillating Woodrow Wilson, his rousing advocacy of a masculine, pro-Allied "Americanism", a death-defying compulsion for personal front-line combat, a gingerly rapprochement with GOP power brokers - and, yes, perhaps, even another presidential campaign.

Long before the waterboarding controversy exploded in the media, one CIA agent had already gone public. In a groundbreaking 2007 interview with ABC News, John Kiriakou called waterboarding torture - but admitted that it probably worked. This book, at once a confessional, an adventure story, and a chronicle of Kiriakou's life in the CIA, stands as an important, eloquent piece of testimony from a committed American patriot.

Covering a time of great hope and incredible change, Reconstructing America is a dramatic look at life after the Civil War in the newly re-United States. Railroad tycoons were roaring across the country. New cities sprang up across the plains, and a new and different American West came into being: a land of farmers, ranchers, miners, and city dwellers. Back East, large-scale immigration was also going on, but not all Americans wanted newcomers in the country.

The breathtaking latest installment in Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard's mega-best-selling Killing series transports listeners to the most important era in our nation's history, the Revolutionary War. Told through the eyes of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Great Britain's King George III, Killing England chronicles the path to independence in gripping detail, taking the listener from the battlefields of America to the royal courts of Europe.

The creation of the Pentagon in 17 whirlwind months during World War II is one of the great construction feats in American history, involving a tremendous mobilization of manpower, resources, and minds. The Pentagon's post-World War II history is told through its critical moments, including the troubled birth of the Department of Defense during the Cold War, the tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the tumultuous 1967 protest against the Vietnam War. The pivotal attack on September 11 is related with chilling new detail, as is the race to rebuild....

It is astonishing that Simón Bolívar, the great Liberator of South America, is not better known in the United States. He freed six countries from Spanish rule, traveled more than 75,000 miles on horseback to do so, and became the greatest figure in Latin American history. His life is epic, heroic, straight out of Hollywood: he fought battle after battle in punishing terrain, forged uncertain coalitions of competing forces and races, lost his beautiful wife soon after they married and died relatively young, uncertain whether his achievements would endure.

With the end of the Civil War, the nation recommenced its expansion onto traditional Indian tribal lands, setting off a wide-ranging conflict that would last more than three decades. In an exploration of the wars and negotiations that destroyed tribal ways of life even as they made possible the emergence of the modern United States, Peter Cozzens gives us both sides in comprehensive and singularly intimate detail.

After a long pre-history, the actual Cuban revolutionary war itself only lasted, incredibly, a little more than two years, from Dec 2, 1956, to January 1, 1959 - from the disastrous first battle, in which three-quarters of the expeditionary force of 82 revolutionaries that traveled to Cuba on the Granma were killed, to total victory at the beginning of January 1959. And there is no better account of the war than this little book by guerilla leader Che Guevara.

McCullough's John Adams has the sweep and vitality of a great novel. This is history on a grand scale, an audiobook about politics, war, and social issues, but also about human nature, love, religious faith, virtue, ambition, friendship, and betrayal, and the far-reaching consequences of noble ideas. Above all, it is an enthralling, often surprising story of one of the most important and fascinating Americans who ever lived.

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 grew from 45 to 72 years. The Rise and Fall of American Growth provides an in-depth account of this momentous era.

For the Allied armies fighting their way up the Italian boot in early 1944, Rome was the prize that could only be won through a massive offensive. Military historian Mark Zuehlke returns to the Mediterranean theater of World War II with this gripping tribute to the Canadians who opened the way for the Allies to take Rome. The book is a fitting testament to the bravery of soldiers like the badly wounded Captain Pierre Potvin, who survived more than 30 hours alone on the battlefield.

On the sparkling morning of June 25, 1876, 611 men of the US 7th Cavalry rode toward the banks of the Little Bighorn in the Montana Territory, where 3,000 Indians stood waiting for battle. The lives of two great warriors would soon be forever linked throughout history: Crazy Horse, leader of the Oglala Sioux, and General George Armstrong Custer.

Drawing comparisons to empires past, Johnson explores in vivid detail the likely consequences of US dependence on a permanent war economy, and what it will mean when the globe's sole "hyperpower" is no longer capable of paying for the vaulting ambitions of its leaders - and becomes the greatest hyper-debtor of all time. In his stunning conclusion, Johnson suggests that the crisis of a financial breakdown could ultimately prove to be the only path to a renewed nation.

The media often suggest that Russia poses the greatest threat to America's national security, but the real danger lies farther east. While those in power have been distracted and disorderly, China has waged a six-front war on America's economy, military, diplomacy, technology, education, and infrastructure - and they're winning. It's almost too late to undo the shocking, though nearly invisible, victories of the Chinese. In Stealth War, retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spalding reveals China's motives and secret attacks on the West.