On April 28, 1946, a small group of American wives and children arrived at the port of Bremerhaven, West Germany, the first of thousands of military family members to make the trans-Atlantic journey. They were the basis of a network of military communities--"Little Americas"--that would spread across the postwar German landscape. During a 45-year period which included some of the Cold War's tensest moments, their presence confirmed America's resolve to maintain Western democracy in the fac...

"Beware the Red Peril!" was the clarion call of General Charles A. Willoughby at the close of World War II. The refrain echoed from Capitol Hill into American living rooms. For three decades after the war, the Old Right crusaded against global communist expansion, sniffing out internal and external threats to the American way of life.These paleo-conservatives faced resistance from the Left, as well as from an emerging faction on the Right that sought to frame a new identity for con...

Capitalizing on thousands of feet of accumulated footage captured by combat camera crews during the early years of the Korean War, a small group of US Army officers conceptualized a film series that would widen viewers’ understanding of the service and its mission. Their efforts produced the documentary television series that in late 1951 would become The Big Picture.Although it would take years to fully utilize the emerging technologies and develop the concept into a popu...

Selected as a Financial Times Best Book of 2013 In Strategy: A History, Sir Lawrence Freedman, one of the world's leading authorities on war and international politics, captures the vast history of strategic thinking, in a consistently engaging and insightful account of how strategy came to pervade every aspect of our lives. The range of Freedman's narrative is extraordinary, moving from the surprisingly advanced strategy practiced in primate groups, to the opposing strat...

"A superb book....Mearsheimer has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the behavior of great powers."—The National Interest, Barry R. PosenA decade after the cold war ended, policy makers and academics foresaw a new era of peace and prosperity, an era in which democracy and open trade would herald the "end of history." The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, sadly shattered these idyllic illusions, and John Mearsheimer's masterful new book explains ...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER | NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR.From an eminent international security scholar, an urgent examination of the geopolitical conditions that could produce a catastrophic conflict between the United States and China—and how it might be prevented.China and the United States are heading toward a war neither wants. The reason is Thucydides’s Trap: when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one in the field of international rela...

Provocative and highly controversial, The Nazi Hydra in America reveals the dark secrets of the fascist influence in the USA. While Eisenhower's troops defeated The Third Reich on the battlefields of Europe, the war against fascism was lost on the home front, to the very cadre of American plutocrats who built and paid for Hitler's war machine. At the center of this small confederacy two firms stand out: Brown Brothers & Harriman, and Sullivan & Cromwell. And at the very eye of this oligarc...

Beginning in 1945, America rocketed through a quarter-century of extraordinary economic growth, experiencing an amazing boom that soared to unimaginable heights in the 1960s. At one point, in the late 1940s, American workers produced 57 percent of the planet's steel, 62 percent of the oil, 80 percent of the automobiles. The U.S. then had three-fourths of the world's gold supplies. English Prime Minister Edward Heath later said that the United States in the post-War era enjoyed "the greates...

On the evening of September 11, 2002, with the Statue of Liberty shimmering in the background, television cameras captured President George W. Bush as he advocated the charge for war against Iraq. This carefully staged performance, writes Susan Brewer, was the culmination of a long tradition of sophisticated wartime propaganda in America. In Why America Fights, Brewer offers a fascinating history of how successive presidents have conducted what Donald Rumsfeld calls "perception ma...

Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives! presents an intellectually invigorating set of hypotheticals about the twentieth century--had we been smart enough to avoid World War I.The "Great War" claimed nearly 40 million lives and set the stage for World War II, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. More than one hundred years later, historians are beginning to recognize how unnecessary it was. In Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives!, acclaimed political psychologist Richard Ne...

“A bracing and intelligent reminder that, for all its woes, America remains extraordinarily dynamic, innovative, and resilient.”—Fareed ZakariaHailed by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best books of 2013, The Myth of America’s Decline is a highly provocative look at how the United States, for all its failings, continues to be the leading business, political, and intellectual model for all other nations. In a world where America bashers constantly cho...

In February 1941, Henry Luce announced the arrival of “The American Century.” But that century—extending from World War II to the recent economic collapse—has now ended, victim of strategic miscalculation, military misadventures, and economic decline. Here some of America’s most distinguished historians place the century in historical perspective.