American Military

At the beginning of 1864, the Civil War was far from won; terrible and bloody Union setbacks and casualties lay ahead. Abraham Lincoln was facing a re-election battle as some northern Democrats were ready to start peace talks that could leave the Confederacy a separate slaveholding American nation and as his secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase, challenged him for the Republican nomination. But by the end of the year, the war's end was in sight, and slavery was on the verge of extinction.

After finding themselves outflown over Vietnam, the American military launched top-secret Operation Constant Peg, using illicitly obtained Russian Fighters pitted against star US fighter pilots in simulated combat exercises. This book describes what it was like to be there day in and day out at one of the most access-restricted airfields in the entire USAF, flying MiGs alongside some of the very best fighter pilots hand-picked from the ranks of the USAF, US Navy and US Marine Corps.

For 16 days the armies had grappled — a grueling horror-show of nonstop battle, march, and maneuver that stretched through May of 1864. Federal commander Ulysses S. Grant had resolved to destroy his Confederate adversaries through attrition if by no other means. He would just keep at them until I used them up. Meanwhile, Grant's Confederate counterpart, Robert E. Lee, looked for an opportunity to regain the offensive initiative. "We must strike them a blow," he told his lieutenants.

The novel and fiery thesis of Break It Up is simple: the United States has never lived up to its name - and never will. The disunionist impulse may have found its greatest expression in the Civil War, but as Break It Up shows, the seduction of secession wasn't limited to the South or the 19th century. With a scholar's command and a journalist's curiosity, Kreitner takes readers on a revolutionary journey through American history, revealing the power and persistence of disunion movements in every era and region.

When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, America faced a crisis. The new nation was deeply in debt and needed its economy to grow quickly, but its merchant ships were under attack. Pirates from North Africa's Barbary coast routinely captured American sailors and held them as slaves, demanding ransom and tribute payments far beyond what the new country could afford.

A top negotiator in countless high-stakes missions to free Americans captured abroad and held in the world's scariest prisons takes listeners inside the dramatic and shadowy world of international hostage rescue.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar, a timely history of the constitutional changes that built equality into the nation's foundation and how those guarantees have been shaken over time.

In these moving stories of Angelina Grimke Weld, wife of abolitionist Theodore Weld; Varina Howell Davis, wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis; and Julia Dent Grant, wife of Ulysses S. Grant, Carol Berkin reveals how women understood the cataclysmic events of their day. Their stories, taken together, help reconstruct the era of the Civil War with a greater depth and complexity by adding women's experiences and voices to their male counterparts.

One hundred and fifty years after Abraham Lincoln's death, the full story of his extraordinary relationship with Jews is told here for the first time. Lincoln and the Jews: A History provides listeners both with a captivating narrative of his interactions with Jews and the opportunity to immerse themselves in rare manuscripts. Lincoln's lifetime coincided with the emergence of Jews on the national scene in the United States.

A powerful wartime saga in the best-selling tradition of Flags of Our Fathers, Brothers in Arms recounts the extraordinary story of the 761st Tank Battalion, the first all-Black armored unit to see combat in World War II.

P.G.T. Beauregard Saves Richmond: The First and Second Battles of Petersburg comprehensively covers the campaign and the events that led up to the crucial battles, the fighting itself, and the aftermath of the campaign. Accounts of the fighting by important participants are also included. You will learn about the first battles for Petersburg like you never have before in no time at all.

Despite the fact that the Civil War was fought nearly 150 years ago, it remains a polarizing topic for the country to this day, and Americans continue to debate who the greatest generals of the war were, arguing the pros and cons and battle records of the men who fought. Although Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and JEB Stuart have long been the most celebrated men of the South, in April 1861, the man of the hour was P.G.T. Beauregard, the South’s hero of Fort Sumter.

A collection of 10 new essays from some of our finest Civil War historians working today, Gateway to the Confederacy offers a reexamination of the campaigns fought to gain possession of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Each essay addresses how Americans have misconstrued the legacy of these struggles and why scholars feel it necessary to reconsider one of the most critical turning points of the American Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln's determination to hold the North and South together would ultimately lead to the bloodiest war in American history, the abolition of slavery, and his own untimely death from an assassin’s bullet. But to see Lincoln solely as a tragic figure consumed with the strife of mid-19th century America is to miss meeting him as a man who never allowed himself to be defeated by adversity, grief, or turmoil.

Following the events of the “fast, hard-hitting, and impossible to put down” (The Real Book Spy) Field of Valor, Logan West continues his mission to bring America’s traitorous vice president to justice, even as the clandestine group pulling all the strings makes one last deadly bid to...

By early 1951, American forces and their UN allies had been driven more than 100 miles down the Korean peninsula by the Chinese. The situation was bleak when Gen. Matthew Ridgway ordered a last stand at the village of Chipyong-ni. There a single regiment (the 23rd Infantry) of fewer than 5,000 U.S. soldiers defeated a Chinese division of 25,000 men in what has been called the Gettysburg of the Korean War.

In the last decades, America has gone to war as supposed defenders of democracy. The War on Terror was waged to protect the West from the dangers of Islamists. US soldiers are stationed in more than 800 locations across the world to act as the righteous arbiters of the rule of law. In this book, Andrew Cockburn brilliantly dissects the intentions behind Washington's martial appetites.

When Florence Finch died at the age of 101, few of her Ithaca, NY, neighbors knew that this unassuming Filipina native was a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, whose courage and sacrifice were unsurpassed in the Pacific War against Japan. Long accustomed to keeping her secrets close in service of the Allies, she waited 50 years to reveal the story of those dramatic and harrowing days to her own children.

Dillard Johnson was at the forefront of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But surviving the enemy was only the beginning. Johnson would use the intensity, focus, and humor that kept him alive on the battlefield to fight stage three Hodgkin's Lymphoma. A man determined not to die, Johnson made a miraculous recovery - and then returned to Iraq for a second combat tour as an Army sniper. Funny and exciting, Carnivore offers fresh insight into the mind and heart of a warrior and offers a look at the lives of troops on the ground not seen before.

Salmon P. Chase is best remembered as a rival of Lincoln’s for the Republican nomination in 1860—but there would not have been a national Republican Party, and Lincoln could not have won the presidency, were it not for the groundwork Chase laid over the previous two decades. Starting in the early 1840s, long before Lincoln was speaking out against slavery, Chase was forming and leading antislavery parties. He represented fugitive slaves so often in his law practice that he was known as the attorney general for runaway negroes.