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This collection of essays on American history reflects recent scholarship. Contributors new to this edition include Gary Nash, Arthur Schlesinger, Richard P. McCormick, Gerda Lerner, Ellen C. DuBois, Vicki L. Ruiz, Nathan I. Huggins, John Lewis Gaddis, Paul Kennedy and Kevin P. Philips. Edited by Gerald N. Grob and George Athan Billias.

Spanning the years 500 to 1000 A.D., this volume illustrates the conflict between brutality and civilization that seemed to characterize the period so often callednot improperlythe "Dark Ages." Islam and Byzantium, as much as Western Europe, figure in the twenty-two chapters of documents offered in this book, part of the ten-volume series, "Sources of Western Civilization."

From the award-winning author of Fatal Voyage comes the first full account of one of World War IIs most secret scandals. In November 1942 a Japanese torpedo destroyed the USS Juneau, killing 700 men. From extensive interviews, Kurzman reveals the agonizing truth behind one of Americas greatest military tragedies.

Winner of the 2012 Colby Award and the first Afghanistan memoir ever to be written by a Marine Harrier pilot, A Nightmares Prayer portrays the realities of war in the twenty-first century, taking a unique and powerful perspective on combat in Afghanistan as told by a former enlisted man turned officer. Lt. Col. Michael Zak Franzak was an AV-8B Marine Corps Harrier pilot who served as executive officer of VMA-513, The Flying Nightmares, while deployed in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003. The squadron was the first to base Harriers in Bagram in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. But what should have been a standard six-month deployment soon turned to a yearlong ordeal as the Iraq conflict intensified. And in what appeared to be a forgotten war half a world away from home, Franzak and his colleagues struggled to stay motivated and do their job providing air cover to soldiers patrolling the inhospitable terrain. I wasnt in a foxhole. I was above it. I was safe and comfortable in my sheltered cocoon 20,000 feet over the Hindu Kush. But I prayed. I prayed when I heard the muted cries of men who at last understood their fate.Franzaks personal narrative captures the day-by-day details of his deployment, from family good-byes on departure day to the squadrons return home. He explains the role the Harrier played over the Afghanistan battlefields and chronicles the life of an attack pilotfrom the challenges of nighttime, weather, and the austere mountain environment to the frustrations of working under higher command whose micromanagement often exacerbated difficulties. In vivid and poignant passages, he delivers the full impact of enemy ambushes, the violence of combat, and the heartbreaking aftermath.And as the Iraq War unfolded, Franzak became embroiled in another battle: one within himself. Plagued with doubts and wrestling with his ego and his belief in God, he discovered in himself a man he loathed. But the hardest test of his lifetime and career was still to comeone that would change him forever.A stunning true account of service and sacrifice that takes the reader from the harrowing dangers of the cockpit to the secret, interior spiritual struggle facing a man trained for combat, A Nightmares Prayer brings to life a Marines public and personal trials set against the fine talcum brown soot of Afghanistan that permeated everythingeven ones soul.

A seminal book about swordplay Rick Broadbent, The Times The definitive study, hugely readable, of mans most deadly art Simon Winchester The classic history of sword fighting, as told by national sabre champion and Olympic fencer Richard Cohen. The art and science of sword fighting goes back almost to the dawn of civilization and has been an obsession for much of mankind throughout recorded history. Evidence of this passion is all around us to this day: we shake hands to show that we are not reaching for our sword. A gentleman offers a lady his right arm because his sword was once attached to his left hip. Men button their jackets to the right to give them swifter access to their swords. From the Roman arena to feudal Japan and from the duellists of Europe to the development of modern-day Olympic fencing, Richard Cohen traces the course of swordsmanship with wit and erudition in a fascinating and wonderfully wide-ranging account. He lets us see swordplay as graceful and brutal, balletic and deadly, technical and fiercely competitive the most romantic of martial arts. Superbly written and impeccably researched, By the Sword is a tribute to a perilous but beautiful skill, the mastery of which for centuries defined what it meant to be a man.

So much about the society that is now emerging in the twenty-first century bears an astonishing resemblance to the most prominent features of what we call the classical world - its institutions, its priorities, its entertainment, its physics, its sexual morality, its food, its politics, even its religion. The ways in which we live our rich and varied lives correspond - almost eerily so - to the ways in which the Greeks and Romans lived theirs. Whether we are eating and drinking, bathing or exercising or making love, pondering, admiring or enquiring, our habits of thought and action, our diversions and concentrations recreate theirs. It is as though the 1500 years after the fall of Rome had been time out from traditional ways of being human. This eye-opening book makes us look afresh at who we are and how we got here. Full Circleis not only wonderfully witty and brilliantly astute, but also profound and often disquieting. Ferdinand Mount effortlessly peels back 2000 years of history to show how much we are like the ancients, how in ways both trivial and crucial we arethem and they are us.

2014 ACKER AWARD WINNERAnyone who cares to understand the literary and cultural ferment of America in the later twentieth century must be familiar with the writings and lives of those scruffy bohemians known as the Beat Generation.In this highly entertaining work, Bill Morgan, the countrys leading authority on the movement and a man who personally knew most of the Beats, narrates the history of these writers as primarily a social group of friends, tracing their origins together during the World War II years to the full blossoming of their notoriety in the late 1950s to their profound influence on the social upheaval of the 1960s. Indeed, it is impossible to comprehend the sixties without first grasping the importance of the social ripples set in motion by the Beats a decade earlier.Although their prose and poetry varied in style and for the most part did not represent a genuine literary movement, the Beats, through their words and nonconformist lives, collectively posed a challenge to the staid and complacent America of the postwar years. They believed in free expression, opposing all censorship; they dabbled in free love; they practiced Eastern philosophy, leading to an embrace in America of alternative forms of spirituality; sooner than others, they watched with dismay the increasingly heavy hand of military and corporate culture in our national life; they embraced the aspirations, as well as the lingo, of urbanized black Americans. They believed in the liberating influence of hallucinogenic drugs.In short, the Beats were thoroughly American in their love of individual freedom. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that J. Edgar Hoover described them in 1960 as one of the three greatest threats to American security (after communism and intellectual "eggheads").The story that Bill Morgan tells has less to do with sociology than with social mingling. He traces the closely knit friendships of the Beat luminaries Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and the small army of other names. Although Kerouac, author of the much loved novel On the Road, was the most famous of the Beat writers, it was Ginsberg, Morgan contends, who resided at the center of the group and for more than two decades provided it with cohesion and a sense of direction.The Beats were not saints. They were sexually irresponsible, undependable in marriage (the movement could in fact fairly be described as misogynistic); they did too many drugs and consumed too much booze; the very quality that characterized their lives and writingsa fervent belief in spontaneitydestroyed some friendships. Indeed, Morgans story begins with a murder in New Yorks Riverside Park in 1944.Bill Morgan has provided a sweeping, indispensable story about these discontented free spirits. We watch their peripatetic lives, their sexual misadventures, their ambivalent response to fame. We are reminded above all that while their personal lives may have not have been holy, their typewriters and their lasting words very much were.

The adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1791 marked the creation of a uniquely innovative mechanism for constitutional change by which Americans have continued to renew and redefine their governance over a two-hundred-year period. Now, in time for the bicentennial celebration of this great document, seven distinguished scholars combine their expertise to explore the history and contemporary meaning of these first ten amendments to the Constitution.

There may not be a more fascinating a historical period than the late fourteenth century in Europe. The Hundred Years War ravaged the continent, yet gallantry, chivalry, and literary brilliance flourished in the courts of England and elsewhere. It was a world in transition, soon to be replaced by the Renaissance and the Age of Exploration -- and John of Gaunt was its central figure.In todays terms, John of Gaunt was a multibillionaire with a brand name equal to Rockefeller. He fought in the Hundred Years War, sponsored Chaucer and proto-Protestant religious thinkers, and survived the dramatic Peasants Revolt, during which his sumptuous London residence was burned to the ground. As head of the Lancastrian branch of the Plantagenet family, Gaunt was the unknowing father of the War of the Roses; after his death, his son usurped the crown from his nephew, Richard II. Gaunts adventures represent the culture and mores of the Middle Ages as those of few others do, and his death is portrayed in The Last Knight as the end of that enthralling period.

The Progressive Era, a few brief decades around the turn of the last century, still burns in American memory for its outsized personalities: Theodore Roosevelt, whose energy glinted through his pince-nez; Carry Nation, who smashed saloons with her axe and helped stop an entire nation from drinking; women suffragists, who marched in the streets until they finally achieved the vote; Andrew Carnegie and the super-rich, who spent unheard-of sums of money and became the wealthiest class of Americans since the Revolution. Yet the full story of those decades is far more than the sum of its characters. In Michael McGerrs A Fierce Discontent Americas great political upheaval is brilliantly explored as the root cause of our modern political malaise.The Progressive Era witnessed the nations most convulsive upheaval, a time of radicalism far beyond the Revolution or anything since. In response to the birth of modern America, with its first large-scale businesses, newly dominant cities, and an explosion of wealth, one small group of middle-class Americans seized control of the nation and attempted to remake society from bottom to top. Everything was open to question -- family life, sex roles, race relations, morals, leisure pursuits, and politics. For a time, it seemed as if the middle-class utopians would cause a revolution.They accomplished an astonishing range of triumphs. From the 1890s to the 1910s, as American soldiers fought a war to make the world safe for democracy, reformers managed to outlaw alcohol, close down vice districts, win the right to vote for women, launch the income tax, take over the railroads, and raise feverish hopes of making new men and women for a new century.Yet the progressive movement collapsed even more spectacularly as the war came to an end amid race riots, strikes, high inflation, and a frenzied Red scare. It is an astonishing and moving story.McGerr argues convincingly that the expectations raised by the progressives utopian hopes have nagged at us ever since. Our current, less-than-epic politics must inevitably disappoint a nation that once thought in epic terms. The New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, the Great Society, and now the war on terrorism have each entailed ambitious plans for America; and each has had dramatic impacts on policy and society. But the failure of the progressive movement set boundaries around the aspirations of all of these efforts. None of them was as ambitious, as openly determined to transform people and create utopia, as the progressive movement. We have been forced to think modestly ever since that age of bold reform. For all of us, right, center, and left, the age of "fierce discontent" is long over.

She was both guardian of the hearth and, on occasion, ruler and warrior, leading men into battle, managing the affairs of her people, sporting war paint as well as necklaces and earringsshe is the Native American woman. She built houses and ground corn, wove blankets and painted pottery, played field hockey and rode racehorses. Frequently she enjoyed an open and joyous sexuality before marriage; if her marriage didnt work out she could divorce her husband by the mere act of returning to her parents. She mourned her dead by tearing her clothes and covering herself with ashes, and when she herself died was often shrouded in her wedding dress. She was our native sister, the American Indian woman, and it is of her life and lore that Carolyn Niethammer writes in this rich tapestry of Americas past and present. Here, as it unfolded, is the chronology of the Native American womans life. Here are the birth rites of Caddo women from the Mississippi-Arkansas border, who bore their children alone by the banks of rivers and then immersed themselves and their babies in river water; here are Apache puberty ceremonies that are still carried on today, when the cost for the celebrations can run anywhere from one to six thousand dollars. Here are songs from the Night Dances of the Sioux, where girls clustered on one side of the lodge and boys congregated on the other; here is the Shawnee legend of the Corn Person and of Our Grandmother, the two female deities who ruled the earth. Far from the submissive, downtrodden squaw of popular myth, the Native American woman emerges as a proud, sometimes stoic, always human individual from whom those who came after can learn much. At a time when many contemporary American women are seeking alternatives to a lifestyle and role they have outgrown, Daughters of the Earth offers us an absorbingand illuminatinglegacy of dignity and purpose.

A fascinating work of detective history, The Black Death traces the causes and far-reaching consequences of this infamous outbreak of plague that spread across the continent of Europe from 1347 to 1351. Drawing on sources as diverse as monastic manuscripts and dendrochronological studies (which measure growth rings in trees), historian Robert S. Gottfried demonstrates how a bacillus transmitted by rat fleas brought on an ecological reign of terror -- killing one European in three, wiping out entire villages and towns, and rocking the foundation of medieval society and civilization.

Is it true that King Louis XIV never bathed? Was Doc Holliday really a doctor? Who were the twelve knights of King Arthurs Round Table? And what do Scots traditionally wear under their kilts? Youll get the answers to these fascinating questions and many, many more in the wildly entertaining, un-put-down-able Just Curious About History, Jeeves. Based on the legion of unexpected questions posed at the popular Ask Jeeves Web site, Just Curious tackles all the puzzlers, bafflers, and stumpers that find their way into our everyday lives. What were the Pig Wars and were they actually caused by pigs? Who were the first gangsters? Did Cleopatra really wear makeup? Was Ivan the Terrible that terrible? Sure curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back. So if you want to know how tall Napoleon was, whether Captain Kidd had any little Kidds, or who the heck Charles the Fat was, look no further than Just Curious About History, Jeeves -- the unequivocal say-all, end-all, be-all authority on historys who, what, where, when, why, and how.

From Paris to Stalingrad, the Nazis systematically plundered all manner of art and antiquities, but the first and most valuable treasures they looted were the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empirenow, bestselling author Sidney Kirkpatrick tells the riveting and never-before-told true story of how an American college professor turned Army sleuth recovered these cherished symbols of Hitlers Thousand-Year Reich before they could become a rallying point in the creation of a Fourth and equally unholy Reich.Anticipating the Allied invasion of Nazi Germany, Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler had ordered a top-secret bunker carved deep into the bedrock beneath Nurnberg castle. Inside the well-guarded chamber was a specially constructed vault that held the plundered treasures Hitler valued the most: the Spear of Destiny (reputed to have been used to pierce Christs side while he was on the cross) and the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire, ancient artifacts steeped in medieval mysticism and coveted by world rulers from Charlemagne to Napoleon. But as Allied bombers rained devastation upon Nurnberg and the U.S. Seventh Army prepared to invade the city Hitler called the soul of the Nazi Party, five of the most precious relics, all central to the coronation ceremony of a would-be Holy Roman Emperor, vanished from the vault. Who took them? And why? The mystery remained unsolved for months after the wars end, until the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, ordered Lieutenant Walter Horn, a German-born art historian on leave from U.C. Berkeley, to hunt down the missing treasures. To accomplish his mission, Horn must revisit the now-rubble-strewn landscape of his youth and delve into the ancient legends and arcane mysticism surrounding the antiquities that Hitler had looted in his quest for world domination. Horn searches for clues in the burnt remains of Himmlers private castle and follows the trail of neo-Nazi Teutonic Knights charged with protecting a vast hidden fortune in plundered gold and other treasure. Along the way, Horn has to confront his own demons: how members of his family and former academic colleagues subverted scholarly research to help legitimize Hitlers theories of Aryan supremacy and the Master Race. What Horn discovers on his investigative odyssey is so explosive that his final report will remain secret for decades. Drawing on unpublished interrogation and intelligence reports, as well as on diaries, letters, journals, and interviews in the United States and Germany, Kirkpatrick tells this riveting and disturbing story with cinematic detail and revealsfor the first timehow a failed Vienna art student, obsessed with the occult and dreams of his own grandeur, nearly succeeded in creating a Holy Reich rooted in a twisted reinvention of medieval and Church history.

Over Lord is the fascinating story of how American tactical air power was developed by General Elwood "Pete" Quesada during World War II, including its decisive role in Operation OVERLORD and the liberation of Europe.Pete Quesada is one of World War IIs unsung yet crucial heroes. With his famous "Ninth Tactical Air Command," Quesada established the best air-ground team in the European theater. he pioneered the use of radar in close air support operations, introducing weapons systems specifically geared to tactical operations. He nurtured new flying methods designed for the kind of precision bombing the battlefields of Europe demanded. And more than anything else, Pete Quesada championed efforts to model air and ground officers into a single fighting unit. His relationships with ground leaders like Generals Omar Bradley and "Lightning Joe" Collins were a model for the kind of interservice harmony that was essential for dislodging the entrenched German Army.At wars end everybody from General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower to ordinary infantrymen recognized Pete Quesada as the premier expert and dogged patron of close air support. Allied airplanes over the battlefields of Europe had undoubtedly shortened the war and saved many thousands of lives, and Pete Quesada came home to a heros welcome in 1945. By then he was the personification of tactical air power. Indeed, he was its over lord.Unfortunately, Quesadas groundbreaking methods were all but forgotten after the war. As the Cold War deepened, Air Force leaders stressed the role of big bombers flying deep into enemy territory and renounced the importance of close air support missions. Quesada himself was shunted into jobs that were both illsuited to his fiery temperament and divorced from his wartime expertise in tactical aviation. Frustrated, he retired from the Air Force in 1951 at forty-seven years of age.Fortunately, the story of Quesadas innovative tactics did not end there for the American military. In Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam in the 1960s, U.S. servicemen struggled -- and died -- relearning and recreating the kinds of tactics that Quesada had made commonplace in 1944-45. Had the U.S. Air Force nurtured its capacity for close air support, those two conflicts may have unfolded differently. Since then, the Air Force has struggled for a better balance between its bombardment missions and its support functions.This is the definitive story of an extraordinary man, whose remarkable efforts to aid foot soldiers in World War II contributed significantly to the Allies success. Americas belated rediscovery of Quesadas precepts some forty years later in conflicts like Operation DESERT STORM only underscores the importance of Quesadas story.

From the two-time winner of the prestigious Lincoln Prize, a stirring and surprising account of the debates that made Lincoln a national figure and defined the slavery issue that would bring the country to war.In 1858, Abraham Lincoln was known as a successful Illinois lawyer who had achieved some prominence in state politics as a leader in the new Republican Party. Two years later, he was elected president and was on his way to becoming the greatest chief executive in American history.What carried this one-term congressman from obscurity to fame was the campaign he mounted for the United States Senate against the countrys most formidable politician, Stephen A. Douglas, in the summer and fall of 1858. As this brilliant narrative by the prize-winning Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo dramatizes, Lincoln would emerge a predominant national figure, the leader of his party, the man who would bear the burden of the national confrontation.Lincoln lost that Senate race to Douglas, though he came close to toppling the Little Giant, whom almost everyone thought was unbeatable. Guelzos Lincoln and Douglas brings alive their debates and this whole year of campaigns and underscores their centrality in the greatest conflict in American history.The encounters between Lincoln and Douglas engage a key question in American political life: What is democracys purpose? Is it to satisfy the desires of the majority? Or is it to achieve a just and moral public order? These were the real questions in 1858 that led to the Civil War. They remain questions for Americans today.

From Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will, whose thinking is stimulating, erudite, and makes for great reading (The Boston Globe) comes a biting, humorous, and perceptive (The New York Times Book Review) argument for the necessity of term limits in Congress. The worlds oldest democracyourshas an old tradition of skepticism about government. However, the degree of dismay about government today is perhaps unprecedented in our history. Americans are particularly convinced that Congress has become irresponsible, either unwilling or incapable of addressing the nations problemswhile it spends its time and our money on extending its members careers. Many Americans have come to believe fundamental reform is needed, specifically limits on the number of terms legislators can serve.In Restoration, George Will makes a compelling case, drawn from our history and his close observance of Congress, that term limits are now necessary to revive the traditional values of classical republican government, to achieve the Founders goal of deliberative democracy, and to restore Congress to competence and its rightful dignity as the First Branch of government. At stake, Will says, is the vitality of Americas great promise self-government under representative institutions. At issue is the meaning of representation. The morality of representative government, Will argues, does not merely permit, it requires representatives to exercise independent judgment rather than merely execute instructions given by constituents. However, careerism, which is a consequence of the professionalization of politics, has made legislators servile and has made the national legislature incapable of rational, responsible behavior. Term limits would restore the constitutional space intended by the Founders, the healthy distance between the electors and the elected that is necessary for genuine deliberation about the public interest.Blending the political philosophy of the Founders with alarming facts about the behavior of legislative careerists, Restoration demonstrates how term limits, by altering the motives of legislators, can narrow the gap between the theory and the practice of American democracy.

Published in tandem with his upcoming PBS special of the same name, the eminent political commentator argues that the parties stands on social issues such as crime, welfare, and morality will decide future elections. 25,000 first printing.

Forty years ago few women worked, married women could not borrow money in their own names, schools imposed strict quotas on female applicants, and sexual harassment did not exist as a legal concept. Yet despite the enormous changes for women in America since 1960, and despite a blizzard of books that continue to argue about womens "proper place," there has not been a serious, definitive history of what happened -- until now.Sara M. Evans is one of our foremost historians of women in America. Her book Personal Politics is a classic that captured the origins of the modern womens movement; its successor, Born for Liberty, set the standard for sweeping histories of women. In Tidal Wave Evans again sets the standard by drawing on an extraordinary range of interviews, archives, and published sources to tell the incredible story of the past forty years in womens history.Encompassing both the so-called Second Wave of feminisms initial explosion in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Third Wave of the 1980s and 1990s, she challenges traditional interpretations at every step. She shows that the Second Wave was beset by fragmentation and infighting from the beginning; its slogan, "the personal is political," was both a rallying cry and the seed of its self-destruction. Yet the Third Wave has been surprisingly strong, and almost all women today might be thought of as feminists -- in practice if not in name.From national events, and from leaders of institutions such as NOW and Emilys List to little-known local stories of women who simply wanted more out of their lives only to discover that they were creating a movement, Tidal Wave paints a vast canvas of a society in upheaval -- from politics to economics to popular culture to marriage and the family.Today, Evans argues, the womens movement is as alive and vital as ever, precisely because it has enjoyed such stunning success. Though not all women are comfortable with the term "feminist," the vast majority hold jobs and enjoy previously unimaginable personal freedoms. Never before in American or world history have women experienced full and equal citizenship and opportunity. At last, the extraordinary story can be told.

This wonderfully moving and frequently very funnyguide through the confounding, terrifying, and strangely exhilarating world inhabited by the U.S. military in Iraq (The Washington Post) is a true-life M*A*S*H tale of doctors, wars, and field hospitals (The Denver Post).At the age of fifty-one, Dr. Dave Hnida volunteered as a trauma chief at one of the busiest Combat Support Hospitals in Iraq during the Surge. The 399th CSH practiced fast-food medicine at its best: working in a series of tents connected to the occasional run-down building, Dr. Hnida and his fellow doctors raced to keep the wounded alive until they could be airlifted out of Iraq and achieved an astounding survival rate of 98 percent.His deployment was filled with colorful characters and gifted surgeons, a diverse group who soon became trusted friends as together they dealt with the psychological toll of seeing the casualties of war firsthand. On call round-the-clock, the doctors had a prescription for sanity that included jokes, pranks, and misbehavior. Told with humility and candor, and the goofy humor that sustained him and his battle buddies through their darkest hours, Paradise General is an unparalleled look at wartime medical careand the inspiring story of an ordinary citizen turned volunteer soldier trying to make a difference.