"The United States has been fighting wars constantly since invading Afghanistan in 2001. This nonstop warfare is far less exceptional than it might seem: the US has been at war or has invaded other countries almost every year since independence. In The United States of War, David Vine traces this pattern of bloody, near-permanent conflict from Columbus's 1494 arrival in Guantanamo Bay through the 250-year expansion of a global US empire. Drawing on...

An authoritative chronicle, drawing on new research on World War I, traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute narrative that examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914.

"The WWII invasion of Allied troops into German-occupied Europe, known as D-Day, was the largest military endeavor in history. By the time it occurred on June 6, 1944, Hitler and the Axis powers had a chokehold grip on the European continent, which the Allies called "Fortress Europe." Behind enemy lines, Nazi Germany was engaged in the mass extermination of the Jewish people and the oppression of civilians across Europe. The goal of D-Day was no less...

In "Dirty Wars," Jeremy Scahill, author of the "New York Times" best-seller "Blackwater," takes us inside America's new covert wars. As he reveals, the foot soldiers in these battles operate daily across the globe and inside the United States with orders from the White House to do whatever is necessary to hunt down, capture, or kill individuals designated by the president as enemies of America.

From a master historian comes an astonishing chronicle of life in medieval Europe and the battle that altered the course of an empire. Although almost six centuries old, the Battle of Agincourt still captivates the imaginations of men and women on both sides of the Atlantic. It has been immortalized in high culture (Shakespeare's Henry V) and low (the New York Post prints Henry's battle cry on its editorial page each Memorial Day).It is the classic...

Best-selling author and renowned religious scholar Karen Armstrong presents a concise and articulate history of Islam, the world's fastest-growing faith. Beginning with the Prophet Muhammad's flight from Medina and concluding with an examination of modern Islamic practices and concerns, Armstrong delivers an unbiased overview. She contends that no religion is more feared and misunderstood by the Western world as Islam, and firmly challenges the notion...

Traces America's intelligence, military, and diplomatic efforts to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the years since 9/11, and how the U.S. efforts in the Afghan War faltered because of a failure to understand the intentions of Pakistan's intelligence agency.

For eons, the city of Troy--whose legendary fall was detailed in Homer's Iliad--was believed to be myth, until archaeologists in the nineteenth century uncovered its ancient walls buried beneath the sands. In the frozen tundra of Greenland, a group of modern-day researchers stumble on a shocking find: a medieval ship buried a half-mile below the ice. The ship's hold contains a collection of even older artifacts--tools of war--dating back to the Bronze...

The Pentagon's a strange place. Inside secure command centers, military officials make life and death decisions--but the Pentagon also offers food courts, banks, drugstores, florists, and chocolate shops. When Rosa Brooks gave her family a tour, her mother gaped at the glossy window displays: "So the heart of American military power is a shopping mall?" In a sense, yes: the U.S. military has become our one-stop-shopping solution to global problems....

"In Countdown bin Laden, celebrated journalist and anchor of Fox News Sunday Chris Wallace delivers a thrilling new account of the final eight months of intelligence gathering, national security strategizing, and meticulous military planning that leads to the climactic mission when SEAL Team Six closes in on its target. The book delivers new information collected from Wallace's in-depth interviews with more than a dozen central figures, including...