Search results for ""Potomac Books Inc""

A comprehensive history of the Global Positioning System.

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Told from the vantage point of two insiders with a privileged perspective on the individuals and events involved, Cheatedexamines athletic-academic corruption at the University of North CarolinaChapel Hill and in NCAA athletics.

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Before Chappaquiddick is the biography of Mary Jo Kopechne, a twenty-eight-year-old secretary who worked for Robert F. Kennedy. She was killed on July 18, 1969, when a car driven by Ted Kennedy plunged off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island.

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This multi-layered biography examines five remarkable women who made important contributions to the Union cause at various stages before, during, and following the defining years of the American Civil War.

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David W. Jourdan recovers the sunken history of the Japanese cargo-carrying submarine I-52, exploring air-sea-undersea warfare and Japanese technology during World War II.

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Drawing on government and private World War II archives, Cartron gives the first detailed account of the only failed mission of the smuggler Charbonnierwhen 29 Allied soldiers in a group of 35 were captured on their way to freedom over the French Pyrenees.

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The true story of how Alexander Haig orchestrated Richard Nixon's demise, resignation, and pardon.

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Reppetto offers a behind-the-scenes look at some of the most famous cases during the era of detectives. He proposes a return of the detective as the primary force of the police department and a change in police policy, calling for community policing.

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Andrew L. Yarrow tells the story of Look magazine, one of the greatest mass-circulation publications in American history, and the very different United States in which it existed.

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While the specificities of individual wars vary, they share a ubiquitous aftermath: the task of finding and identifying the disappeared. The Bosnian war of the early 1990s that destroyed the sovereign state of Yugoslavia is no exception.

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The Battle of Petersburg was the culmination of the Virginia Overland Campaign, which pitted the Army of the Potomac, led by Ulysses S. Grant and George Gordon Meade, against Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.

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One of the most tragic follies of modern warfare was the Gallipoli Campaign of the First World War. Begun in February 1915 with a failed month-long naval attack on Turkey in the Dardanelles Straits, a combined force of British, Australian, New Zealand, Indian, and French troops invaded the Gallipoli Peninsula two months later.

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No person was involved in so much history and yet received so little attention as Senator Robert C. Byrd, the longest-serving U.S. senator in history. Initially elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1952, Byrd served for six years before being elected to the Senate in 1958.

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Woody Klein explores the anti-poverty programsor lack thereofduring each successive administration, explaining how and why no president, thus far, has been able to end poverty. American Poverty urges the president and Congress to work together to finally eradicate poverty in America.

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Straightening the Bell Curve offers a new way of looking at the distressingly persistent subject of intelligence research as it relates to race and gender.

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Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia that has been under the leadership of President Nursultan Nazarbayev since independence in 1991, has proven that a mostly Muslim nation can be active on the international scene.

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For centuries, arsenic's image as a poison has been inextricably tied to images of foul play. Now, medical historian John Parascandola takes readers through the history of this deadly element in King of Poisons. From Dorothy Sayers to Gustave Flaubert, arsenic has long held a place in the literary realm as an instrument of murder and suicide.

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From literary journalist Sara Mansfield Taber comes a deep and wondrous memoir of her exotic childhood as the daughter of a covert CIA operative. Born under an Assumed Name portrays the thrilling and confusing life of a girl growing up abroad in a world of secrecy and diplomacyand the heavy toll it takes on her and her father.

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Keepers of the Game celebrates the last generation of baseball writers whose careers were rooted in Teletype machines, train travel and ten-team leagues and who wielded an influence and power within the game that are unthinkable today.

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Since the United Nations adopted the principle of self-determination in 1945, great powers have found that military strength is no guarantee of success in small wars fought against insurgents who use guerrilla and terrorist tactics.

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As leader of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and then the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Michael Collins developed a bold, new strategy to use against the British administration of Ireland in the early twentieth century.

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The most visible face of terrorismwhich is embedded in the conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the border region between the two countriescould mask an even bigger danger.

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Rarely has a foreign policy event spawned such interest in international public opinion as has the Iraq War.

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That American forces should torture prisoners in their war on terror is disturbing, but more shocking still is that the highest officials of the Bush-Cheney administration planned, authorized, encouraged, and concealed these war crimes.

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President John F. Kennedy remains a subject of fascination for both historians and citizens. Consistently ranked among the most popular U.S.

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From his birth in a Texas hill country town that no longer exists, Weldon L. Kennedy has come a long way. After service as a naval intelligence officer, he joined the FBI in 1963. Over the course of four decades, he served the Bureau with distinction, exemplifying the cutting-edge of crisis management.

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John Brady Kiesling, a twenty-year veteran of the foreign service, publicly resigned his position as political counselor of the U.S. Embassy in Athens in February 2003 to protest the Bush administration's impending invasion of Iraq.

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For the men of the Army Air Corps in early World War II, the chance of surviving the obligatory twenty-five missions without death, injury, or imprisonment was one in three. In this groundbreaking book, Rob Morris has sought out remarkable but little-known stories of the air war from the men who lived and fought it.

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As the literature on military-media relations grows, it is informed by antagonism either from journalists who report on wars or from ex-soldiers in their memoirs. Academics who attempt more judicious accounts rarely have any professional military or media experience.

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Born into a Quaker family, Nathanael Greene had nothing in his background that pointed to a military career. His total military training before mid-1775, when he abandoned pacifism, consisted of serving as a private in the Rhode Island militia for a few hours each week.

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In recent years, the United States and Japan have each undertaken a dramatic overhaul of various crisis and consequence management structures for preventing and responding to natural and man-made disasters, including earthquakes, terrorist attacks, critical infrastructure failures, and nuclear accidents.

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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. Instead, this group of Amerasians faced much more formidable obstacles, both in Vietnam and in their new home. Surviving Twice raises significant questions about how mixed-race children born of wars and occupations are treated and the ways in which the shifting laws, policies, social attitudes, and bureaucratic red tape of two nations affect them their entire lives.

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The 95th Bomb Group achieved fame as the first unit to strike Berlin in a daylight raid and as the only combat group in Europe to win three Presidential Distinguished Unit Citations for courage and daring.

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An essential experience of being a baseball fan is the hopeful anticipation of seeing the hometown nine make a run at winning the World Series. In Paths to Glory, Mark L. Armour and Daniel R. Levitt review how teams build themselves up into winners.

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Based on audiotapes he recorded during the war and sent home to his family, Randy Zahn's Snake Pilot recounts his experiences flying AH-1 Cobra helicopters during the Vietnam War. First deployed in Vietnam in 1967 and loaded with a formidable arsenal of weaponry, the Cobra was the first helicopter designed from inception as an attack aircraft.

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Despite the voluminous literature on the central figure in American history, no other book in the field of political science compares to Lincoln's American Dream. It addresses comprehensively the overarching themes of Lincoln's political thought and leadership through provocative and divergent interpretations from leading scholars.

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Aninsider's account of Soviet and Russian politics from Gorbachev's democratizing reforms in the 1980s to the current authoritarian Russia of Putin.

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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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