American Military History

When the US entered World War I in April 1917, America’s sailors were immediately forced to engage in the utterly new realm of anti-submarine warfare waged on, below and above the seas by a variety of small ships and the new technology of air power. The US Navy substantially contributed to the safe trans-Atlantic passage of a two million man Army that decisively turned the tide of battle on the Western Front even as its battleship division helped the Royal Navy dominate the North Sea.

MacKinlay Kantor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and master storyteller, shows us how the South could have won the Civil War, how two small shifts in history (as we know it) in the summer of 1863 could have turned the tide for the Confederacy. What would have happened: to the Union, to Abraham Lincoln, to the people of the North and South, to the world?

Loss and Redemption at St Vith closes a gap in the record of the Battle of the Bulge by recounting the exploits of the 7th Armored Division in a way that no other study has. Most accounts of the Battle of the Bulge give short-shrift to the interval during which the German forward progress stopped and the American counterattack began. This narrative centers on the 7th Armored Division for the entire length of the campaign, in so doing reconsidering the story of the whole battle through the lens of a single division and accounting for the reconstitution of the Division while in combat.

With the 100th anniversary of his birth on September 7, 2015, Dick Cole has long stood in the powerful spotlight of fame that has followed him since his B-25 was launched from a Navy carrier and flown toward Japan just four months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In recognition the tremendous boost Doolittle’s Raid gave American morale, members of the Tokyo Doolittle Raiders were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in May 2014. Doolittle’s Raid was only the opening act of Cole’s flying career during the war.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the United States Army became the principal agent of American foreign policy. The army designed, implemented, and administered the occupations of the defeated Axis powers Germany and Japan, as well as many other nations. Generals such as Lucius Clay in Germany, Douglas MacArthur in Japan, Mark Clark in Austria, and John Hodge in Korea presided over these territories as proconsuls.

Veteran CIA correspondent Douglas Waller delivers a riveting account of the heroes and misfits who carried out a shadow war of espionage and covert operations behind the Confederate battlefields. Lincoln’s Spies follows four agents from the North - three men and one woman - who informed Lincoln’s generals on the enemy positions for crucial battles and busted up clandestine Rebel networks.

In this extraordinary audiobook, Robert D. Kaplan lets listeners experience up close the American military worldwide in the air, at sea, and on the ground. Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts provides a riveting ground-level portrait of the Global War on Terrorism on several continents.

Plunging deep into midst of some of the hottest conflicts on the globe, Robert D. Kaplan takes us through mud and jungle, desert and dirt to the men and women on the ground who are leading the charge against threats to American security. These soldiers, fighting in thick Colombian jungles or on dusty Afghani plains, are the forefront of the new American foreign policy, a policy being implemented one soldier at a time.

His mission was top secret: deliver mysterious components of some superweapon that would end this awful war to the island of Tinian, then return to the fleet to prepare for the invasion of Japan. Little did Captain Charles McVay III know that he would survive his ship's sinking, shark attacks, starvation, and five days adrift in the Pacific Ocean before being rescued. Discover this untold story of Captain McVay and his amazing men of courage: the crew of the USS Indianapolis.

Amidst the nonstop turmoil of the War of 1812, the decisive First Lady takes action and inspires an anxious nation. Dolley Madison faces a bitterly divided Washington City when her husband, James Madison, becomes our fourth president. The prospect of war against Great Britain threatens to tear our fragile republic apart. The "Presidentess" hosts open parties in the new President's House to unite political foes and cultivate an American identity.

An impeccably researched, character-driven narrative history recounting the fascinating late-Reconstruction Era mission of General Philip Sheridan, a Union hero dispatched to the South 10 years after the Civil War to protect the rights of newly freed black men, who were under siege by violent paramilitary groups like the White league intent on erasing their postwar gains.

Based on the true story of the celebrated Nancy Hart Rifles, The Cotillion Brigade is a sweeping epic of the Civil War’s ravages on family and love, the resilient bonds of sisterhood amid devastation, and the miracle of reconciliation between bitter enemies. 1856. Sixteen-year-old Nannie Colquitt Hill makes her debut in the antebellum society of the Chattahoochee River plantations. A thousand miles to the north, a Wisconsin farm boy, Hugh LaGrange, joins an Abolitionist crusade to ban slavery in Bleeding Kansas.

On December 18, 1867, the Buffalo and Erie Railroad's eastbound New York Express derailed as it approached the high truss bridge over Big Sister Creek, just east of the small settlement of Angola, New York, on the shores of Lake Erie. The last two cars of the express train were pitched completely off the tracks and plummeted into the creek bed below. When they struck bottom, one of the wrecked cars was immediately engulfed in flames as the heating stoves in the coach spilled out coals and ignited its wooden timbers

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.

Much of the history written about the Vietnam War overlooks the US Marine Corps Combined Action Platoons. These CAPs lived in the Vietnamese villages, with the difficult and dangerous mission of defending the villages from both the National Liberation Front guerrillas and the soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army. The CAPs also worked to improve living conditions by helping the people with projects, such as building schools, bridges, and irrigation systems for their fields.

Historian Wiley Sword offers a richly detailed account that captures the vivid personalities behind the battle for Chattanooga. Grant, Thomas, Bragg, William Tecumseh Sherman, Phil Sheridan, William Rosecrans, Pat Cleburne, Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln—all come alive in a narrative that combines furious battle action with behind-the-scenes political maneuvering and astute analysis.

On November 18, 1944, the end of the war in Europe finally in sight, American co-pilot Lieutenant Lee Lamar struggled alongside pilot Randall Darden to keep Bottoms Up, their B-24J Liberator, in the air. They and their crew of eight young men had believed the intelligence officer who, at the pre-dawn briefing at their base in southern Italy, confided that their mission that day would be a milk run. It was not....

In American History, 1877 to the Present, all main events are covered, including Reconstruction, industrialization, U.S. emergence as a world power, World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, Cold War politics, racial and sexual equality issues, Vietnam, Watergate, and threats to America at the start of the 21st century. Also covered are major personages, from George Armstrong Custer to Osama bin Laden, and much more.

You hear them first, the whop whop sound of rotor blades chopping through the humid Vietnam air. Suddenly they appear, screaming toward the landing zone at treetop level. When one helicopter crashes in flames, the pilots in the others maintain formation and push ahead. Nothing deters these warriors, volunteers all, from flying on with the tenaciousness of zealots. Mended Wings is their story. Follow the lives of ten Purple Heart heroes as they relate the Vietnam War experience from the perspective of the helicopter cockpit.

This dramatic account of the War of 1812 fills a surprising gap in the popular literature of the nation's formative years. It is this war, followed closely on the War of Independence, that established the young nation as a permanent power and proved its claim to Manifest Destiny.