Search results for ""Potomac Books""

Jeffrey Record has specialised in investigating the causes of war. In The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (Potomac Books, Inc., 2006), he contended that Hitler could not have been deterred from going to war by any action the Allies could plausibly have taken.

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The most successful film franchise of all time, Star Wars thrillingly depicts an epic multigenerational conflict fought a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. But the Star Wars saga has as much to say about successful strategies and real-life warfare waged in our own time and place. Strategy Strikes Back brings together more than thirty of today’s top military and strategic experts, including generals, policy advisors, seasoned diplomats, counterinsurgency strategists, science fiction writers, war journalists, and ground-level military officers, to explain the strategy and the art of war by way of the Star Wars films. Each chapter of Strategy Strikes Back provides a relatable, outside-the-box way to simplify and clarify the complexities of modern military conflict. Strategy Strikes Back gives Star Wars fans and aspiring military minds alike an inspiring and entertaining means of understanding many facets of modern warfare in a book as captivating as Star Wars itself.

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Why do Americans go to the grocery store to buy wine from California, Italy, or New Zealand, when many of us can find an independent winery thirty minutes down the road? Why are locally grown and produced wines so often disdained when locally grown food is upheld as the gold standard? The U.S. wine industry has lagged behind Europe’s for far too long for reasons that have little to do with taste or quality, and Prohibition’s disruption of domestic wine production provides only part of the explanation. In Chasing Cynthiana Lynn Hamilton reveals that Americans have far more wine options than they realize. One of those options, made from Norton grapes, has a rich but mostly forgotten history, entwined with the pioneering of America’s western states. But Norton (also known as Cynthiana) is often pushed aside to make way for wine varietals from France and Italy. Is the wine drinker’s preference for certain grapes rooted in necessity or

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When the United States officially entered World War I in 1917, it was woefully underprepared for chemical warfare, in which the British, French, and Germans had been engaged since 1915. In response, the U.S. Army created an entirely new branch: the Chemical Warfare Service. The army turned to trained chemists and engineers to lead the charge—and called on an array of others, including baseball players, to fill out the ranks.The Gas and Flame Men is the first full account of Major League ballplayers who served in the Chemical Warfare Service during World War I. Four players, two club executives, and a manager served in the small and hastily formed branch, six of them as gas officers. Remarkably, five of the seven—Christy Mathewson, Branch Rickey, Ty Cobb, George Sisler, and Eppa “Jeptha” Rixey—are now enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York. The son of a sixth Hall of Famer, player and manager Ned Hanlon, was a young officer killed in action in France with the First Gas Regiment. Prominent chemical soldiers also included veteran Major League catcher and future manager George “Gabby” Street and Boston Braves president and former Harvard football coach Percy D. Haughton.The Gas and Flame Men explores how these famous baseball men, along with an eclectic mix of polo players, collegiate baseball and football stars, professors, architects, and prominent social figures all came together in the Chemical Warfare Service. Jim Leeke examines their service and its long-term effects on their physical and mental health—and on Major League Baseball and the world of sports. The Gas and Flame Men also addresses historical inaccuracies and misperceptions surrounding Christy Mathewson’s early death from tuberculosis in 1925, long attributed to wartime gas exposure.

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Pakistan and American Diplomacy offers an insightful, fast-moving tour through Pakistan-U.S. relations, from 9/11 to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, as told from the perspective of a former U.S. diplomat who served twice in Pakistan. Ted Craig frames his narrative around the 2019 Cricket World Cup, a contest that saw Pakistan square off against key neighbors and cricketing powers Afghanistan, India, and Bangladesh, and its former colonial ruler, Britain. Craig provides perceptive analysis of Pakistan’s diplomacy since its independence in 1947, shedding light on the country’s contemporary relations with the United States, China, India, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan. With insights from the field and from Washington, Craig reflects on the chain of policy decisions that led to the fall of the Kabul government in 2021 and offers a sober and balanced view of the consequences of that policy failure. Drawing on his post–Cold War diplomatic career, Craig

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After World War II, when a new German democracy was born in the western region of the vanquished Third Reich, tens of thousands of civil servants were hired to work for newly formed government agencies to get the new republic quickly on its feet. But there was an enormous flaw in the plan: no serious vetting system was put in place to keep war criminals out of government positions. Ex-Nazis—people who had been involved in mass murder, drafting antisemitic laws, and the persecution of Hitler’s opponents, as well as other depravities—resumed their careers without consequence in the newly created Federal Republic of Germany. Former Nazis who had established an early foothold in postwar government agencies helped each other get government work by writing letters of recommendation called Persilscheine. These “Persil Certificates,” named after a popular detergent, made an ex-Nazi’s recorded past just as clean as fresh laundry, and a whol

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Young American Foreign Service officers are accustomed to being teased by friends and relatives as to what they do in the “Foreign Legion” or the “Forest Service.” In the United States, unlike in many countries, the role of a professional diplomat is little known or understood. In A Professional Foreigner Edward Marks describes his life as an American diplomat who served during the last four decades of the twentieth century, from 1959 to 2001. Serving primarily in Africa and Asia, Marks was present during the era of decolonization in Africa (but always seemed to be at the opposite end of the continent from the hottest developments), was intimately involved in the early days of the U.S. government’s antiterrorism programs, observed the unfolding of a nasty and tragic ethnic conflict in one of the most charming countries in the world, and saw the end of the Cold War at UN headquarters in New York. Along the way Marks served as the U.S. ambassador to two African nations. In this memoir Marks depicts a Foreign Service officer’s daily life, providing insight into the profession itself and what it was like to play a role in the steady stream of history, in a world of quotidian events often out of the view of the media and the attention of the world. Marks’s stories—such as rescuing an American citizen from a house of ill repute in Mexico and the attempt to recruit mongooses for drug intervention in Sri Lanka—are both entertaining and instructive on the work of diplomats and their contributions to the American story.

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2020 Gourmand Award in Spirits China is one of the world’s leading producers and consumers of liquor, with alcohol infusing all aspects of its culture, from religion and literature to business and warfare. Yet to the outside world, China’s most famous spirit, baijiu, remains a mystery. This is about to change, as baijiu is now being served in cocktail bars beyond its borders.Drunk in China follows Derek Sandhaus’s journey of discovery into the world’s oldest drinking culture. He travels throughout the country and around the globe to meet with distillers, brewers, snake-oil salesmen, archaeologists, and ordinary drinkers. He examines the many ways alcohol has shaped Chinese society and its rituals. He visits production floors, karaoke parlors, hotpot joints, and speakeasies. Along the way he uncovers a tradition spanning more than nine thousand years and explores how recent economic and political developments have conspired t

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Almost from the first days of seafaring, men have used ships for “spying” and intelligence collection. Since early in the twentieth century, with the technological advancements of radio and radar, the U.S. Navy and other government agencies and many other navies have used increasingly specialized ships and submarines to ferret out the secrets of other nations. The United States and the Soviet Union/Russia have been the leaders in those efforts, especially during the forty-five years of the Cold War. But, as Norman Polmar and Lee J. Mathers reveal, so has China, which has become a major maritime power in the twenty-first century, with special interests in the South China Sea and with increasing hostility toward the United States. Through extensive, meticulous research and through the lens of such notorious spy ship events as the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, the North Korean capture of the USS Pueblo, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s success in clandestinely salvaging part of a Soviet submarine with the Hughes Glomar Explorer, Spy Ships is a fascinating and valuable resource for understanding maritime intelligence collection and what we have learned from it.

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Cartography is the story of Katherine Schifani's experience as a gay woman serving as a counterterrorism advisor in Iraq in 2011, surrounded by strangers and strangeness amid the repeal of the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.

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The Vietnam War aircraft carrier USS Oriskany and its aviators come to life in this memorial to the fallen of Carrier Air Wing 16 (CVW-16), which experienced the highest loss rate of any carrier air wing during the war.

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In The Forgotten Terrorist Mel Ayton profiles Sirhan Sirhan and presents a wealth of evidence about his fanatical Palestinian nationalism and hatred for Robert F. Kennedy, which motivated him to assassinate RFK in 1968. Now with a new introduction containing interviews and new evidence.

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From Sadat to Saddam: The Decline of American Diplomacy in the Middle East is a first-hand account of 30 years in the diplomatic trenches of US Middle East policy.

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The Disappeared tells the extraordinary saga of Argentina’s attempt to right the wrongs of an unspeakably dark past. Using a recent human rights trial as his lens, Sam Ferguson addresses two central questions of our age: How is mass atrocity possible, and What should be done in its wake? From 1976 to 1983 thousands of people were the victims of state terrorism during Argentina’s so-called Dirty War. Ferguson recounts a twenty-two-month trial of the most notorious perpetrators of this atrocity, who ran a secret prison from the Naval Mechanics School in Buenos Aires. The navy executed as many as five thousand political “subversives,” most of whom were sedated and thrown alive out of airplanes into the South Atlantic. The victims of these secret death flights and others who went missing during the regime are known as los desaparecidos—“the disappeared.” Ferguson explores Argentina’s novel response to mass atrocity: the country’s remarkable and controversial decisions in 2003 to repeal a series of amnesty laws passed in the 1980s and to prosecute anew the perpetrators of the Dirty War a generation after the collapse of the country's last dictatorship. As of 2022 more than one thousand aging military officers have been indicted for their involvement in the Dirty War and hundreds of trials have commenced in the country’s civilian courts. Among the many facets of the book, Ferguson takes an in-depth look at allegations that Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, was involved in the disappearance of two Jesuit priests under his supervision in 1976. Bergoglio was called to testify in a closed-chambers session. Ferguson reviewed those secret proceedings and uses them as a springboard to explore the Argentine Catholic Church and its broader role in the Dirty War. The lingering but acute trauma of the victims who testified at the trial underscores the moral urgency of accountability. When a state strips its citizens of all their rights, the only response that approximates reparation is to restore the rule of law and punish the perpetrators. Yet the trial also revealed the limits of using criminal law to respond to mass atrocity. Justice demands a laser-like focus on evidence relevant to a crime, but atrocity begs for social understanding. Can the law ever bring full justice?

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Imprisoned in luxurious surroundings immediately after Pearl Harbor, Axis diplomats in America anxiously awaited forced repatriation and uncertain futures in a world at war.

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The principal suspect of a mysterious triple murder is pressured into a confession and convicted of first-degree murder, which sets off a chain of events that changes the course of American legal history.

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In the 1990s, Russia's involvement in Kosovo escalated an already heated political situation. The threat of nuclear forces prompted the Canadian Army to step in with Operation KINETIC, part of NATO's Kosovo Force (KFOR), to help establish a stable environment that would keep foreign threats at bay.

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Robert S. Kim contributes to a fuller understanding of Asia in World War II by revealing the role of American Christian missionary families in the development of the Korean independence movement and the creation of Project Eagle, the forgotten alliance between that movement and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), called Project Eagle.Project Eagle tells the story of American missionaries in Korea from 1884 to 1942. They brought a new religion, modern education, and American political ideals to a nation conquered and ruled by the Japanese Empire. The missionaries’ influence inextricably linked Christianity and American-style democracy to Korean nationalism and independence, meanwhile establishing an especially strong presence in Pyongyang. Project Eagle connects this era for the first time to OSS-Korean cooperation during the war through the story of its central figures: American missionary sons George McCune and Clarence Weems and one of Kore

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Over the last five centuries, the development of modern weapons and warfare has created an entirely new set of challenges for practitioners in the field of military medicine. Between Flesh and Steel traces the development of military medicine from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century.

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Between the First and the Second World War, the US Navy used theexperience it had gained in battle to prepare for future wars through simulated conflicts at the Naval War College. John M. Lillard analyses individual war games in detail, showing how players tested new tactics and doctrines, experimented with advanced technology, and transformed approaches.

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The Lavi fighter program, the largest weapons-development effort ever undertaken by the State of Israel, envisioned a new generation of high-performance aircraft. In a controversial strategy, Israel Aircraft Industries intended to develop and manufacture the fighters in Israel with American financial support. The sophisticated planes, developed in the mid-1980s, were unique in design and intended to make up the majority of the Israeli air force. Though considerable prestige and money were at stake, developmental costs increased and doubts arose as to whether the Lavi could indeed be the warplane it was meant to be. Eventually the program became a microcosm for the ambitions, fears, and internal divisions that shaped both the U.S.-Israeli relationship and Israeli society itself. But the fighter never made it to operational service, and until now, the full breadth and significance of the Lavi story have never been examined and presented.Lavi: The United Stat

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Brian E. Fogarty's Fascism draws parallels between German culture of the early twentieth century and American culture today, concluding that fascism could arise in the United States.

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Since the end of World War II a paradigm shift has occurred in armed conflict. Asymmetric, or fourth generation warfare--the challenge of non-state belligerents to the authority and power of the state--has become the dominant form of conflict while interstate conventional war has become an increasingly irrelevant instrument of statecraft.

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In March 2011 a magnitude 9 earthquake struck off the eastern coast of northern Japan, triggering a massive tsunami and damaging a nearby nuclear reactor. Nearly twenty thousand people were killed or went missing, and many areas have yet to rebuild.

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The New York Police Department is an iconic symbol of one of the world's most famous cities. The blue uniforms of the men and women who serve on the force have long stood for integrity and heroism in the work to serve and protect the city's residents.

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This elegant and original tour de force reveals the often forgotten emotive and violent effect Western imperialism and colonialism had on the peoples of West Asia. A must read for our times.

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Air Commanders combines short military biographies and operational analyses to reveal how the personalities, attitudes, and life experiences of twelve outstanding U.S. airmen shaped the central air campaigns in American history. From Gen. Carl Tooey Spaatz, who began his career in World War I, to the contemporary Gen. T.

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At a time when violent images of the Muslim world dominate our headlines, Western audiences are growing increasingly interested in a different picture of Islam, specifically the idea of Muslim nonviolence, and what it could mean for the world.

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Since the founding of professional baseball, few teams have risen above years of mediocrity only to see their fortunes interrupted by war and tragedy. In the early twentieth century, one team rallied to claim first place and then won a world's championship in a most spectacular style that has yet to be replicated.

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China has evolved from a nation with local and regional security interests to a major economic and political power with global interests, investments, and political commitments. It now requires a military that can project itself around the globe, albeit on a limited scale, to secure its interests. Therefore, as Larry M.

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The magisterial collaboration over half a lifetime between historian Dumas Malone and his subject, Thomas Jefferson, is the basis for William G. Hyland Jr.'s compelling volume Long Journey with Mr. Jefferson.

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Haunted Victory: The American Crusade to Destroy Saddam and Impose Democracy on Iraq explores the dynamic trajectory of beliefs, actions, and their consequences in what will forever be debated as among the most controversial and costly operations in U.S. history in terms of security, power, wealth, and honor.

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As the first great Jewish player in the major leagues and the first African American to play major-league baseball during the twentieth century, respectively, Hank Greenberg and Jackie Robinson are forever linked because of the barriers they encountered, the discrimination they endured, the athletic gifts they exhibited, and especially the ...

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Changing the Rules of Engagement brings to life the authentic, vivid stories of leadership from inspiring and adventurous women who achieved the extraordinary by serving their country in the U.S. military. These women shattered the glass ceiling and performed extraordinary feats by refusing to take “no” for an answer and learning how to lead in traditionally male-dominated environments. Martha LaGuardia-Kotite skillfully captures their leadership lessons, struggles, and successes—showing how courageous and tenacious women can achieve their goals and help change policy, insights also applicable to today’s leaders in corporate and business boardrooms. Whether soaring into outer space with the second woman to command a space shuttle or plunging to the depths of the Atlantic Ocean with a combat veteran special operations diver, these profiles in leadership highlight a range of powerful examples: from Vivien Crea, a vice commandant of the Coas

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When Peter J. Vernezze took a leave of absence from his position as a philosophy professor to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer in China, he supplemented his main taskteaching Englishwith leading a weekly philosophical discussion group with Chinese undergraduate and graduate students at Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu.

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The shadow war between Israel and Iran has been raging for more than three decades, ever since the Iranian revolution of 1979 ushered in a fundamentalist regime whose sworn enemies have consistently included, first and foremost, Israel and the United States.

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Days of Decision spans a century of American foreign policymaking, from the Spanish- American War of 1898 to the attacks of September 11, 2001. Michael J. Nojeim and David P. Kilroy carefully examine twelve foreign-policy landmarks, each of which played a crucial role in shaping world history and led to profound changes in U.S. foreign policy.

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In 1961 at the Bay of Pigs, CIA-trained and -organized Cuban exiles aiming to overthrow Fidel Castro were soundly defeated. Most were taken prisoner by Cuban armed forces. Fearing another U.S.

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As of early 2010, more than two million U.S. troops have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the American public is neither much engaged in the issues of these two wars nor particularly knowledgeable about the troops' experiences, which have ranged from positive and energizing to searing and debilitating.

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Both U.S. and Japanese policymakers understand that leveraging military resources during a disaster is an opportunity to save lives and property, to help maintain stability and prosperity in affected nations, and to promote the allies' diplomatic interests.

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The United States has struggled to define its approach to what has been called the information battlefield since the information era began. Yet with the outbreak of the war on terror, the United States has been violently challenged to take a position and react to the militants' use of emerging information technology.

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It is only in the past two decades that scholars have breached the language barrier in Germany, Austria, and Russia, permitting a comprehensive reexamination of the Napoleonic Wars.

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In this provocative set of essays, John Bookman delves beneath the transitory issues of the day to identify and respond to the fundamental, perennial questions of American politics. The questions concern the myths that shape the thinking of so many Americans about politics.

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Today the U.S. military is more nimble, mobile, and focused on rapid responses against smaller powers than ever before. One could argue that the Gulf War and the postwar standoff with Saddam Hussein hastened needed military transformation and strategic reassessments in the postCold War era.

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The Cold War continues to shape international relations almost twenty years after being acknowledged as the central event of the last half of the twentieth century. Interpretations of how it ended thus remain crucial to an accurate understanding of global events and foreign policy.

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Murder is an effective way to gain power over others. Kill its leaders, and a country can be yours. Kill the people or ruthlessly intimidate them, and you can control their territory. Kill the journalistsor the storyand the truth of what is happening can be buried.

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The turbulent occupation of Iraq has once again embroiled the United States military in an unconventional war. Chasing Ghosts is a study of unconventional warfare in American military history and its implications for the present and future. John J. Tierney examines America's numerous past experiences with this type of warfare from the Revolutionary War to the Vietnam War.

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