Dan Butterfield played a pivotal role during the Civil War. He led troops in the field at the brigade, division, and corps level, wrote the 1862 Army field manual, composed “Taps,” and served as the chief of staff for Joe Hooker in the Army of the Potomac.

Hal Brands argues that a better understanding of Eurasia's strategic geography can illuminate the contours of rivalry and conflict in today's world. The Eurasian Century explains how revolutions in technology and warfare, and the rise of toxic ideologies of conquest, made Eurasia the center of twentieth-century geopolitics—with pressing implications for the struggles that will define the twenty-first.

In 1945, US air attacks in Japan killed 300,000 civilians in three hours of night bombing and two nuclear strikes. The firebombing of Tokyo in March burned almost the entire city, killed some 85,000 residents, and left more than 1 million homeless. The atomic blast in Hiroshima in August killed some 119,000 civilians and 20,000 soldiers. After a second nuclear attack days later in Nagasaki and a declaration of war by the Soviet Union, Japan accepted defeat.

How do social movements arise, wield power, and decline? Renowned scholar Linda Gordon investigates these questions in a groundbreaking work, narrating the stories of many of America's most influential twentieth-century social movements. Beginning with the turn-of-the-century settlement house movement, Gordon then scrutinizes the 1920s Ku Klux Klan and its successors, the violent American fascist groups of the 1930s.

Few Americans covered as much ground as Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Born in 1823 to a family descended from Boston's Puritan founders, he attended Harvard, like all the men in his family, and prepared for the settled life of a minister. Instead, he rejected both privilege and convention, and embraced radical causes, attaching himself to nearly every major reform movement of the day, from women's rights to abolitionism. More than merely a fellow traveler, Higginson was a proponent of direct action.