The Coming Storm is a bracing, powerful book on the interventions necessary to prevent a cataclysm akin to the First World War, which left 40 million dead and wounded worldwide. As Westad writes, “If there are lessons from history, now is the time when we need to heed them, so that we do not end up in another Great Power war because of the fatal combinations of jingoism, fear, fatalism, and sheer stupidity that set off the first major war of the 20th century.”

More than fifty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, his murder continues to haunt the American psyche and stands as a turning point in our nation's history. The Warren Commission rushed out its report in 1964, but questions continue to linger: Was there a conspiracy? Was there a coup at the highest levels of government? On the Trail of the Assassins—the primary source material for Oliver Stone's hit film JFK—is Garrison's own account of his investigations into the background of Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of President Kennedy.

Russian-born journalist Mikhail Zygar was ten years old when the Soviet Union collapsed. Now, after nearly ten years of research, he offers a timely and compelling new approach on Russian history—one that rewrites everything we thought we knew about the fall of the Soviet Union—and argues that its ending is yet to come. Starting with the historic launch of the first human into space in April 1961, Zygar unravels a dramatic story of resistance, resilience, and resurgence that led to the Soviet Union’s dissolution—and the echoes of its legacy today.

In 1692 the people of Massachusetts were living in fear, and not solely of satanic afflictions. Horrifyingly violent Indian attacks had all but emptied the northern frontier of settlers, and many traumatized refugees—including the main accusers of witches—had fled to communities like Salem. Meanwhile the colony’s leaders, defensive about their own failure to protect the frontier, pondered how God’s people could be suffering at the hands of savages.

Overturning familiar scripts, Splendid Liberators is the first work of narrative nonfiction to look at this far-flung war through American, Cuban, and Filipino eyes, and to gauge the consequences and costs of America's first major imperial adventure.

In The Raider, Cundill Prize-winning historian Stephen R. Platt gives us the first authoritative account of Carlson’s larger-than-life exploits: the real story, based on years of research including newly discovered diaries and correspondence in English and Chinese, with deep insight into the conflicted idealism about the Chinese Communists that would prove Carlson’s undoing in the McCarthy era. Tracing the rise and fall of an unlikely American war hero, The Raider is a story of exploration, of cultural (mis)understanding, and of one man’s awakening to the sheer breadth of the world.

In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order. In Scorched Earth, historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin dispatches the myth of World War II as a good war. Instead, he depicts the conflict as it truly was: a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe.

Hard Neighbors follows the people who came to be known as Scotch-Irish and traces their relations with Native Americans, examines their experiences as marginalized people, and demonstrates their roles as protective and disruptive forces on the edge of colonialism. The Scotch-Irish fought Indian wars and shaped the frontier, and their experiences living near and fighting against Indians shaped their identity and their attitudes towards government. They influenced national attitudes and policies, and they transformed Indian people into racial others as they transformed themselves into Americans.

For the doomed stand American forces made in the Philippines at the start of World War II, two generals received their country’s highest military award, the Medal of Honor. One was the charismatic and controversial Douglas MacArthur, whose orders forced him to leave his soldiers on the islands to starvation and surrender but whose vow to return echoed around the globe. The other was the gritty Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, who became a hero to the troops whose fate he insisted on sharing even when it meant becoming the highest-ranking American prisoner of the Japanese.

After the fall of France in June 1940, all that stood between Adolf Hitler and total victory was a narrow stretch of water and the defiance of the British people. Desperate for allies, Winston Churchill did everything he could to bring the United States into the conflict, drive the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany apart, and persuade neutral countries to resist German domination. By early 1942, after the German invasion of Russia and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the British-Soviet-American alliance was in place.

Throughout the war on the Eastern Front, there were two consistent trends. The Red Army battled to learn how to fight and win, while involved in a struggle for its very survival. But by 1944 it had a leadership that was able to wield it with lethal effect and with far more effective equipment than before. By contrast, the Wehrmacht had commenced a slow process of decline after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Hitler became increasingly unwilling to delegate decision-making to commanders in the field, which had been crucial to earlier success.

The Mission has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

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.

In 1945 the United States and Japan fought the largest and most devastating land battle of their war in the Pacific, a month-long struggle for the city of Manila. It was a key piece of the campaign to retake control of the Philippine Islands, which itself signified the culmination of the war, breaking the back of Japanese strategic power and sealing its outcome. In The Battle of Manila, Nicholas Sarantakes offers the first in-depth account of this crucial campaign from the American, Japanese, and, significantly, Filipino perspective.

A major new history from the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Founding Brothers and the National Book Award winner American Sphinx, on how America’s founders—Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams—regarded the issue of slavery as they drafted the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. In this daring and important work, our most trusted voice on the founding era reckons with the realities and regrets of our founding and the tragedy of its two great failures: the failure to end slavery and the failure to avoid Indian removal