American Military History

This is a simple story of a battle; such a tale as may be told by a soldier who is no writer to a reader who is no soldier. Ambrose Bierce wrote many fictional short stories about the Civil War. This is his experience at Shiloh.

An introductory military history of the American Civil War, Shades of Blue and Gray places the 1861-1865 conflict within the broad context of evolving warfare. Emphasizing technology and its significant impact, Hattaway includes valuable material on land and sea mines, minesweepers, hand grenades, automatic weapons, the Confederate submarine, and balloons. The evolution of professionalism in the American military serves as an important connective theme throughout.

John Moses Browning was raised in what was at the time the “Wild West” of the Utah Country. His educational upbringing was both sparse and basic, but through the impetus of his father’s gun-making business, he would become the greatest mind of the arms industry’s modern age. Where Colt labored over one solitary concept that eventually led him to the modern repeating revolver, Browning’s instinct proved able to visualize concepts far above his formal training and follow them through to a number of diverse and functional weapons.

Today, Germantown is a busy neighborhood in Philadelphia. On October 4, 1777, it was a small village on the outskirts of the colonial capital whose surrounding fields and streets witnessed one of the largest battles of the American Revolution. The bloody battle represented George Washington's attempt to recapture Philadelphia but has long been overshadowed by better-known events like Brandywine, Saratoga, and Valley Forge.

"A call to arms and to action, for anyone with a conscience, anyone alarmed about the decline of our democracy." — New York Times-bestselling author Wendell Potter "Powerful...His extensively reported tales of individual whistleblowers and their often cruel fates are compelling...They reveal...

Shortly after World War II, Congress' House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began investigating Americans across the country for suspected ties to communism. The most famous victims of these witch hunts were Hollywood actors, such as Charlie Chaplin, whose "un-American activity" was being neutral at the beginning of World War II, but at the beginning of the Cold War, many Americans had the Red Scare.

With a bit of insight into the Native American culture, paired with a larger understanding of how the settlers of the west actually lived, you'll be able to decipher what happened to the Oatman family of your own accord, empowering an honest understanding of this history. In The Captivity of the Oatman Girls, you’ll discover powerful insight into the truth of the relations between the settlers and the Plains Indians of North America, why the actions of the colonists in the late 18th century bordered genocide - and how this shifted the landscape forever, and more.

Dos manuscritos completos en un audiolibro: Historia Afroamericana y Revolución Haitiana. La historia de los Afroamericanos es una larga crónica de eventos trágicos. Aquellos que tuvieron el coraje de rebelarse en contra de esta crueldad del sistema y de esta opresión eran normalmente brutalmente asesinados por este motivo. Este hecho ha creado una larga tradición de atrevidos líderes y seguidores que han sido los verdaderos motores de la evolución del pensamiento en los Estados Unidos de América.

Andrew Marshall is a Pentagon legend. For more than four decades he has served as Director of the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon's internal think tank, under 12 defense secretaries and eight administrations. Yet Marshall has been on the cutting edge of strategic thinking even longer than that. Covering some of the most pivotal episodes of the last half century and peopled with some of the era's most influential figures, The Last Warrior tells Marshall's story for the first time, in the process providing an unparalleled history of the evolution of the American defense establishment.

Stilwell and Mountbatten in Burma explores the relationship between American General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell and British Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten in the China-Burma-India Theater (CBI) and the South East Asia Command (SEAC) between October 1943 and October 1944, within the wider context of Anglo-American relations during World War II. Jonathan Templin Ritter discusses the military, political, and diplomatic aspects of Anglo-American cooperation, the personalities involved, and where British and American policies both converged and diverged over Southeast Asia.

Exploration of the early American West, beginning with Lewis and Clark's transcontinental trek at the behest of President Thomas Jefferson, was not accomplished by standing armies, the era's new steam train technology, or by way of land grabs. These came later, but not until pathways known only to a few of the land's indigenous people were discovered, carved out, and charted in an area stretching from the eastern Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, and the present-day borders of Mexico and Canada.

How did the Vietnam War change the way we think of ourselves as a people and a nation? Christian G. Appy now examines the relationship between the war's realities and myths and its impact on our national identity, conscience, pride, shame, popular culture, and postwar foreign policy.

Bradley Manning perpetrated the biggest breach of military security in American history. While serving as an Army intelligence analyst, he leaked an astounding amount of classified information to WikiLeaks: classified combat videos, plus hundreds of thousands of documents from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and from embassies around the globe. Nearly all of WikiLeaks' headline-making releases of information have come from a single source: Bradley Manning.

Winner of the the 1998 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war--colonists against Indians--that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres...

The focus of this selection concerns both the Federal and Confederate efforts to disable or maintain the railroads within the active theaters of the war. Real railroads of iron and steam and ribbons of steel vanishing into the horizon quickly became a strategic objective of both armies in the Civil War. Raiders and protectors were deployed both North and South. The damage inflicted on roadways and rolling stock was not always easy to accomplish.

The purpose of this selection is to document the military career of Wade Hampton III. Six feet tall and sturdily built, Hampton was no armchair warrior. Noted for his patriarchal and caring manner, Hampton would give all of his own personal fortune for the Confederate cause before the Civil War was over. Wounded five times in battle (severely at Gettysburg), at 42 years of age Hampton was described as the idealized statue of a mounted warrior.

After the start of World War II, a small group of former lighthouse engineers were instrumental in completing a Top Secret mission to develop a brand new technology that would radically improve a ship or plane's ability to navigate with accuracy, called LORAN (Long Range Navigation). This technology is largely credited with turning the tides of battle, and helping secure an Allied victory.

Frazier has made use of previously untapped primary sources, allowing him to present new interpretations of the famous Civil War battles in the Southwest. Using narratives of veterans of the campaign and official Confederate and Union documents, the author explains how this seemingly far-fetched fantasy of building a Confederate empire was an essential part of the Confederate strategy.

Union General Ulysses S. Grant’s Vicksburg campaign was the most outlandish maneuver of the American Civil War and included the largest amphibious military approach until the advent of the Second World War. The Siege of Vicksburg, which happened in tandem with the Battle of Gettysburg that concluded the day before on July 3, 1863, is considered the most pivotal moment in the Civil War, as it was the turning point from which the South could never recover.

Forty years after his first book, David McCullough wrote and presented his speech, The Course of Human Events, in the 2003 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, in which he divulges his philosophy on writing, speaking, and history in his masterful storytelling style. In this Jefferson Lecture in...