Search results for ""potomac books""

Modern biographies of Richard Nixon have been consumed with Watergate. All have missed arguably the most important perspective on Nixon as California’s native son, the only U.S. president born and raised in California. In addition, Nixon was also a son, brother, friend, husband, father, uncle, and grandfather. By shifting the focus from Watergate and Washington to Nixon’s deep, defining roots in California, Paul Carter boldly challenges common conceptions of the thirty-seventh president of the United States. More biographies have been written on Nixon than any other U.S. politician. Yet the territory traversed by Carter is unexplored, revealing for the first time the people, places, and experiences that shaped Richard Nixon and the qualities that garnered him respect from those who knew him well. Born in Yorba Linda and raised in Whittier, California, Nixon succeeded early in life, excelling in academics while enjoying athletics through high school. At Whittier College he graduated at the top of his class and was voted Best Man on Campus. During his career at Whittier’s oldest law firm, he was respected professionally and became a chief trial attorney. As a military man in the South Pacific during World War II, he was admired by his fellow servicemen. Returning to his Quaker roots after the war, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate, and the vice presidency, all within six short years. After losing to John Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign, Nixon returned to Southern California to practice law. After losing his gubernatorial race he reinvented himself: he moved to New York and was elected president of the United States in 1968. He returned to Southern California after Watergate and his resignation to heal before once again taking a place on the world stage.Richard Nixon: California’s Native Son is the story of Nixon’s Southern California journey from his birth in Yorba Linda to his final resting place just a few yards from the home in which he was born.

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9/12 is the epic saga of more than ten thousand first responders who became ill as a result of working on the Ground Zero cleanup and the historic and ground-breaking legal, political, medical and scientific battle on their behalf.

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In Bourbon and Bullets, John Tramazzo reveals the rich and dramatic connection between bourbon and military service in America.

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Gen. David McMurtrie Gregg (1833–1917) was one of the ablest and most successful commanders of cavalry in any Civil War army. Pennsylvania-born, West Point–educated, and deeply experienced in cavalry operations prior to the conflict, his career personified that of the typical cavalry officer in the mid-nineteenth-century American army. Gregg achieved distinction on many battlefields, including those during the Peninsula, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Bristoe, Overland, and Petersburg campaigns, ultimately gaining the rank of brevet major general as leader of the Second Division, Cavalry Corps, Army of the Potomac. The highlight of his service occurred on July 3, 1863, the climactic third day at Gettysburg, when he led his own command as well as the brigade of Brig. Gen. George Armstrong Custer in repulsing an attempt by thousands of Confederate cavalry under the legendary J.E.B. Stuart in attacking the right flank and rear of the Union Army while Pickett’s

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From Hope to Horror is Joyce E. Leader's eyewitness account of the struggle for democracy and peace in Rwanda during the early 1990s and the failed diplomatic efforts to prevent conflict from escalating to genocide.

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The reconstruction of a little-known battle during World War II, and the impact it has to this day.

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Deconstructing Dr. Strangelove examines how well the Cold War crisis films stack up against historical reality, or at least as much of that reality as we can reconstruct with confidence.

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In The I-35W Bridge Collapse, Kimberly J. Brown combines memoir and exposé to provide a full account of the Minneapolis I-35W bridge collapse of August 1, 2007, and its aftermath.

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It has long been a commonly shared wisdom that humans need government to bring social order to what would otherwise be a chaotic and dangerous world.

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Assessment of Anwar Sadat and the 1973 War, as well as the event's global implications.

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For centuries, Chinese marriage involved matchmakers, child brides, dowries, and concubines, until the People's Republic of China was established in 1949. This book explores love in Communist China through the personal memories of those who endured the Cultural Revolution and the generations that followed.

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Long before it became the slogan of the Obama campaign, Dr. Dorothy Ferebee (1898-1980) lived by the motto Yes, We Can. An African American elite descended from lawyers, journalists, politicians, and possibly a white governor of Virginia, Ferebee was an obstetrician and civil rights activist from Washington, D.C.

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For many football fans, the National Football League (NFL) season of 1970 was a landmark year in the history of the game. The NFL and American Football League finally began playing as a merged leaguea league that featured such legendary figures as George Blanda, Tom Dempsey, Vince Lombardi, George Allen, Sid Gillman, Lamar Hunt, and Al Davis.

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Americans have been divided along political lines for so long that they have nearly forgotten how to talk to one another, much less how to listen. This is not likely to improve as long as differences between them continue to be cast in overly simplistic terms, such as ignorance vs. enlightened awareness or morality vs. reprobate immorality.

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It began as a Depression-era, winner-take-all challenge between two Chicago stockbrokers, one of them a flamboyant daredevil with more guts than money and the other with more money than sense. It erupted into a national news story, one never told in its entiretyuntil King of Clubs: The Great Golf Marathon of 1938.

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World War II naval history has been discussed and examined from almost every possible angle. One story that has never been told in detail, however, is that of the U.S. Navy's little landing craft, tank (LCT). Even though they are known for landing on the beaches at Normandy, the LCTs were more than mere transports.

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Every ten years political representation in the U.S.House of Representatives is redistributed (reapportioned) among the fifty states.The process began anew with the 2010 census, which is counting the nation's population as the basis for reapportionment.The decennial census has a history wrought with failures and inaccurate counts.

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New York City has long been a breeding ground for spies, saboteurs, terrorists, and other threats to the nation and its greatest city. Battleground New York City examines the history of domestic security operations and the people and agencies involved in safeguarding the city that never sleeps.

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Since radio's debut in the 1920s and television's in the '30s, the baseball announcer has become entertainer, observer, and extended member of the family.

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From 1789 to 1800, the Federalist and Republican parties held opposing visions for America's future.

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On January 26, 1993, a young Palestinian man named Abdel Nasser Zaben was arrested and incarcerated in New York City for kidnapping and robbery. Just thirty days later, while he remained locked up, radical Islamic fundamentalists detonated a bomb in the World Trade Center.

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In March 2004, Capt. Jason Whiteley was appointed the governance officer for Al Dora, one of Baghdad's most violent districts. His job was to establish and oversee a council structure for Iraqis that would allow them to begin governing themselves.

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This edited volume reveals how a permanent war economy has made the United States unable to spread democracy abroad and has worsened domestic problems.

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While many people are familiar with the U.S. Marshals Service's reputation from frontier days, when legendary lawmen such as Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson enforced the Wild West, the agency's modern exploits are less well known.

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FBI operative Raymond W. Holcomb's assignments took him across America, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Africa, and involved espionage, counter narcotics, Mafia takedowns, national security, Special Weapons and Tactics, and much more.

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Takes the reader on a journey from Iraq's troubled history through the country's invasion and chaotic collapse of governance to the fragile state of political development. This book explains the social, cultural and political roots of violent conflict and political confrontation among Iraq's numerous factions.

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Osama bin Laden's words carry a great deal of weight in the West. When he speaks, or allegedly speaks, we listen. But what about the words of other key leaders in the Al-Qa'ida terrorist network? We can learn how to conduct the war on terrorism more successfully when we study their own manuals, written for their followers.

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Does America's pro-Israel lobby, including the legendary American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), have as much power as is commonly believed? Does it have an unbreakable stranglehold on America's Middle East policies? The answer is no, according to Dan Fleshler, an American Jewish activist who has worked within his community to try ...

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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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In Red Rogue, Bruce Bechtol analyzes the changing nature of North Korea's national defense, foreign policy, and illicit economic activities in the post9/11 era. He describes how North Korea has adapted to a changing global and regional environment to ensure regime survival and has often dictated the agenda in East Asia.

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During the Iraq War, coauthor Capt. Jason Conroy commanded Charlie Company, which was part of Task Force 1-64, 2d Brigade Combat Team, part of the U.S. Army's 3d Infantry Division. A tank unit equipped with mammoth M1A1 Abrams tanks, Conroy's company was literally at the tip of the U.S. Army's spear and one of the first elements into Baghdad.

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Surviving Twice is the story of five Vietnamese Amerasians born during the Vietnam War to American soldiers and Vietnamese mothers. Unfortunately, they were not among the few thousand Amerasian children who came to the United States before the war's end and grew up as Americans, speaking English and attending American schools.

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Although the basketball teams of the Southeastern Conference dominate the national college rankings, it wasn't too long ago that the SEC was mostly recognized for football. Today the SEC has displaced the Big Ten and the Atlantic Coast Conference as the premier conference of college basketball.

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Journey back fifty years to explore the decade of baby boomers, the Red scare, and the birth of rock and roll with Robert Rodriguez's The 1950s' Most Wanted: The Top 10 Book of Rock & Roll Rebels, Cold War Crises, and All-American Oddities.

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These are the compelling letters of Karl Fuchs, an ordinary German soldier who was completely convinced of the righteousness of his cause and who wrote them free of the recriminations and hindsight arising from the bitterness of defeat.

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Call Me Commander unravels the mysterious life and crimes of John Donald Cody, a lawyer and former intelligence officer who used a fraudulent veterans charity to swindle tens of millions from unsuspecting Americans.

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During the Cold War, stories of espionage became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imagination of readers and filmgoers alike as secret police quietly engaged in surveillance under the shroud of impenetrable secrecy. And curiously, in the postCold War period there are no signs of this enthusiasm diminishing. The opening of secret police archives in many Eastern European countries has provided the opportunity to excavate and narrate for the first time forgotten spy stories. Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe brings together a wide range of accounts compiled from the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate, and the Ukrainian KGB files. The stories are a complex amalgam of fact and fiction, history and imagination, past and present. These stories of collusion and complicity, betrayal and treason, right and wrong, and good and evil cast surprising new light on the question of Cold War certainties and divides.

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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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