American Military History

This audiobook is the classic one-volume history of the American Civil War by Pulitzer Prize winner Bruce Catton. Covering events from the prelude of the conflict to the death of Lincoln, Catton blends a gripping narrative with deep, yet unassuming, scholarship to bring the war alive in an almost novelistic way. It is this gift for narrative that led contemporary critics to compare this book to War and Peace, and call it a "modern Iliad." Now over 50 years old, This Hallowed Ground remains one of the best-loved and admired general Civil War books.

The Darkest Year focuses on Americans’ state of mind not only through what they said, but in the day-to-day details of their behavior. William K. Klingaman blends these psychological effects with the changes the war wrought in American society and culture, including shifts in family roles, race relations, economic pursuits, popular entertainment, education, and the arts.

Good Hunting: An American Spymaster's Story is the spellbinding memoir of Devine's time in the CIA, where he served for more than 30 years, rising to become the acting deputy director of operations, responsible for all of the agency's spying operations. This is a story of intrigue and high-stakes maneuvering - all the more gripping when the fate of our geopolitical order hangs in the balance. But this audiobook also sounds a warning to our nation's decision makers.

Kim Wickens, a lawyer and dressage rider, became fascinated by this legendary horse when she learned that twelve of Thoroughbred racing's thirteen Triple Crown winners descended from Lexington. Wickens spent years meticulously researching the horse and his legacy—and with Lexington, she presents an absorbing, exciting account that transports listeners back to the raucous beginning of American horse racing and introduces them to the stallion at its heart.

By the early 19th century, several European nations had banned slavery, but while the United States had banned the international slave trade, slavery was still legal in the country itself. As a result, there was still a strong financial motive for merchants and slave traders to attempt to bring slaves to the Western hemisphere, and a lot of profits to be gained from successfully sneaking slaves into the American South and the Caribbean by way of locations like Havana, Cuba.

Since the Wright brothers made their famed flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, aviation has emerged as the indispensable arm of American military power. In this detailed and informative history, Charles J. Gross traces its development from the technological antecedents of the Wright brothers' triumph through the air war for Kosovo. Drawing on examples from all periods and all service branches, he explains the roles of politics, economics, and technology in shaping air power in the US armed forces and assesses the actual impact of military aviation.

On the North American continent, Native American tribes carried out abductions against the new European settlers from the time they first set foot on eastern shores. Some of the women taken in the colonial to early American period went on to become respected figures in their new environments, while others lived out their lives as slaves.

The first-ever popular history of the RAND Corporation, written with full access to its archives, Soldiers of Reason is a page-turning chronicle of the rise of the secretive think tank that has been the driving force behind American government for 60 years

A biography of William T. Sherman by the military theorist and author of Scipio Africanus: Greater Than Napoleon.

Signed on September 2, 1945 by Japanese and Allied leaders, the instrument of surrender that formally ended the war in the Pacific brought to a close one of the most cataclysmic engagements in history. The surrender fulfilled the commitment that Franklin Roosevelt had made in 1943 at the Casablanca conference that it be "unconditional". Though readily accepted as policy at the time, after Roosevelt's death in April 1945, support for unconditional surrender wavered, particularly among Republicans in Congress.

Karen Abbott illuminates one of the most fascinating yet little-known aspects of the Civil War: The stories of four courageous women - a socialite, a farmgirl, an abolitionist, and a widow - who were spies. After shooting a Union soldier in her front hall with a pocket pistol, Belle Boyd became a courier and spy for the Confederate army, using her charms to seduce men on both sides. Emma Edmonds cut off her hair and assumed the identity of a man to enlist as a Union private, witnessing the bloodiest battles of the Civil War.

This insightful chronicle takes listeners inside the experiences of America's fighter pilots and bomber crews, an incredible assortment of men who, in nearly four years of warfare all over the globe, suffered over 120,000 casualties, with over 40,000 killed. Their stories span the Earth, into every corner of the combat theaters in both Europe and the Pacific. And the aircraft explored are as varied, tough, and legendary as the men who flew them.

As Nazi Germany launched its campaign of racial terror and pushed the world toward war, three misfits banded together to challenge Hitler’s dominance at the apex of motorsport: the Grand Prix. Their quest for redemption culminated in a remarkable race that is still talked about in racing circles to this day - but which, soon after it ended, Hitler attempted to completely erase from history.

This landmark, myth-shattering work chronicles the most powerful institution in America, the people who created it, and the pathologies it has spawned. Carroll proves a controversial thesis: The Pentagon has, since its founding, operated beyond the control of any force in government or society. It is the biggest, loosest cannon in American history, and no institution has changed this country more.

We set out on the James River, March 25, 1865, aboard the paddle steamboat River Queen. President Lincoln is on his way to General Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia, and he’s decided he won’t return to Washington until he’s witnessed, or perhaps even orchestrated, the end of the Civil War. Now, it turns out, more than a century and a half later, historians are still searching for that end.

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.

The name still sends shivers down the spine and has the power to draw in young readers: Geronimo, the legendary Indian who inspired and fought for his people. But who was this man, really? Here is the riveting tale of the last Apache warrior - told by the author of the best-selling Little Britches.

What happens when you lose your freedom and the people who eventually get it back for you are no longer alive to thank? Set during the horrors of World War II, Remember Us by Robert Edsel—#1 New York Times bestselling author of The Monuments Men—opens in Limburg, a small, rural province at the southern tip of the Netherlands. In the pre-dawn hours of May 10, 1940, Hitler’s forces rolled through the city, shattering more than 100 years of peace in the Netherlands. The country fell one week later. The Dutch lived under German occupation for four-and-a-half years, until September 1944.

The heroic story of the founding of the US Navy during the Revolution has been told many times, yet largely missing from maritime histories of America's first war is the ragtag fleet of private vessels that truly revealed the new nation's character. In Rebels at Sea, Eric Jay Dolin corrects that significant omission, and contends that privateers, as they were called, were in fact critical to the American victory. Privateers were privately owned vessels that were granted permission by the new government to seize British merchantmen and men of war.

By early December 1941, war had changed much of the world beyond recognition. Nazi Germany occupied most of the European continent, while in Asia, the Second Sino-Japanese War had turned China into a battleground. But these conflicts were not yet inextricably linked - and the United States remained at peace. Hitler’s American Gamble recounts the five days that upended everything: December 7 to 11.