As the Vietnam War divided the nation, a network of antiwar coffeehouses appeared in the towns and cities outside American military bases. Owned and operated by civilian activists, GI coffeehouses served as off-base refuges for the growing number of active-duty soldiers resisting the war. In the first history of this network, David L. Parsons shows how antiwar GIs and civilians united to battle local authorities, vigilante groups, and the military establishment itself by building a dynamic peace...
Deceit on the Road to War (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)
by John M. Schuessler
In Deceit on the Road to War, John M. Schuessler examines how U.S. presidents have deceived the American public about fundamental decisions of war and peace. Deception has been deliberate, he suggests, as presidents have sought to shift blame for war onto others in some cases and oversell its benefits in others. Such deceit is a natural outgrowth of the democratic process, in Schuessler's view, because elected leaders have powerful incentives to maximize domestic support for war and retain consi...
In September 1941, a handful of isolationist senators set out to tarnish Hollywood for warmongering. The United States was largely divided on the possibility of entering the European War, yet the immigrant moguls in Hollywood were acutely aware of the conditions in Europe. After Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), the gloves came off. Warner Bros. released the first directly anti-Nazi film in 1939 with Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Other studios followed with such films as The Mortal Storm (...
Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest intelligence official ever to defect from the Soviet bloc, reviews the Kennedy assassination, reveals facts covered up by the Kremlin, and addresses questions left unanswered by official investigations and numerous books. Pacepa is the only investigator of the assassination who had direct knowledge of the KGB's ties to Lee Harvey Oswald. Programmed to Kill places Pacepa's knowledge about the KGB's secret involvement with Oswald in the context of factual rep...
As a five-feet-three-inch hunchback who weighed about 100 pounds, Homer Lea (1876--1912), was an unlikely candidate for life on the battlefield, yet he became a world-renowned military hero. Homer Lea: American Soldier of Fortune paints a revealing portrait of a diminutive yet determined man who never earned his valor on the field of battle, but left an indelible mark on his times. Lawrence M. Kaplan draws from extensive research to illuminate the life of a "man of mystery," while also yielding...
In With All My Might, his definitive autobiography, Caldwell tells about his work as a cotton picker, stagehand, professional football player, and war correspondent for Life magazine during World War II. In 1932, Erskine Caldwell's first novel, Tobacco Road, was the center of controversy. Some critics condemned the book; others considered it to be the work of a genius. Today Caldwell's fifty-plus books have sold more than 80 million copies worldwide, and his stature as a writer has been firmly e...
Globalizing the U.S. Presidency (New Approaches to International History)
Using John F. Kennedy as a central figure and reference point, this volume explores how postcolonial citizens viewed the US president when peak decolonization met the Cold War. Exploring how their appropriations blended with their own domestic and regional realities, the chapters span sources, cases and languages from Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe to explore the history of US and third world relations in a way that pushes beyond US-centric themes. Examining a range of actors, Globalizi...
Japanese American World War Two Evacuation History Project
Part of a series intended to analyze the decision by the American government to intern Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II, this volume comprises interviews with the administrators who were responsible for this incarceration. Recorded within the study are the experiences of two men who served as the second-ranking officials at the Army-operated alien internment centre in Lordsburg, New Mexico and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)-managed centre for aliens...
This book helps to recover a usable past. In ""Creating Colonial Williamsburg"", Anders Greenspan examines the restoration and re-creation of the structures and gardens of Virginia's colonial capital beginning in 1926. The restoration was undertaken by the Rockefeller family, whose aim was to promote a twentieth-century appreciation for eighteenth-century ideals. Ironically, those ideals, including democracy, individualism, and representative government, were often promoted at the expense of a m...
Richard Halliburton (1900-1939), considered the world's first celebrity travel writer, swam the length of the Panama Canal, recreated Ulysses' voyages in the Mediterranean, crossed the Alps on an elephant, flew around the world in a biplane, and descended into the Mayan Well of Death, all the while chronicling his own adventures. Several books treat his life and travels, yet no book has addressed in detail Halliburton's most ambitious expedition: an attempt to sail across the Pacific Ocean in a...
The 4th Marine Brigade at Belleau Wood and Soissons
by J Michael Miller
The battles of Belleau Wood and Soissons in June and July of 1918 marked a turning point in World War I and in the stature of the US Marine Corps, whose fighting proved so critical in repelling the Germans that the French would later rename Belleau 'Bois de la Brigade de Marine.' In this book J. Michael Miller, a historian of the Marine Corps and veteran chronicler of battle, takes us to the battlefields of Belleau Wood and Soissons, immersing us in the experience of a single brigade of marines...
Red Chicago is a social history of American Communism set within the context of Chicago's neighborhoods, industries, and radical traditions. Using local party records, oral histories, union records, party newspapers, and government documents, Randi Storch fills the gap between Leninist principles and the day-to-day activities of Chicago's rank-and-file Communists. Uncovering rich new evidence from Moscow's former party archive, Storch argues that although the American Communist Party was an int...
"Troublemaker" Memories of the Freedom Movement (Freedom Now!, #3)
by Bruce Hartford
At the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of Italian immigrants left their home country for the United States and, particularly, New York City. A small minority of the immigrants were members of a criminal syndicate that largely victimized fellow immigrants. The most common crime was a type of extortion known as "Black Hand." The methods of extortion were particularly violent, and included kidnapping, arson, and murder. The New York Police Department, unable to speak the language and unawa...
The Manhattan Project (1942-1946) resulted in the development and detonation of the first nuclear weapons - and irrevocably changed the course of world events. Born out of a small research programme that began in 1939, the project would eventually employ more than 130,000 people and cost a total of nearly $2 billion - and it was operated under a shroud of deep secrecy. This authoritative book provides a complete and vivid history of the project and its legacy, from the widest array of perspectiv...
Upon the 2018 death of George H. W. Bush, pundits and politicians mourned the passing of an exemplar of the statesmanship and bipartisan ethos of an earlier day. The judgment, though sound, would have shocked observers of the 1988 election that put Bush in the White House. From a scholar who played a small role in that long-ago election, After Reagan provides an eye-opening look at a presidential campaign that few suspected marked the end of an era-or the rise of forces roiling our political lan...
Peace in the Mountains analyzes student activism at the University of Pittsburgh, Ohio University, and West Virginia University during the Vietnam War era. Drawing from a wide variety of sources including memoirs, periodicals, archival manuscript collections, and college newspapers such as The Pitt News, author Thomas Weyant tracks the dynamics of a student-led campus response to the war in real time and outside the purview of the national media. Along the way, he musters evidence for an emergin...
Where are the Right Places, those exclusive locations where the privileged live and play? You may be in for a surprise. For as Stephen Birmingham shows, in the same witty, penetrating style that characterized his other studies of the elite, the Right Places could be just about anywhere, from exclusive chalets in Sun Valley, Idaho to the traditionally swank estates of Fairfield County, Connecticut, to the nascent avant-garde art scene in Kansas City, Missouri. Birmingham goes to great lengths...