How did the most powerful nation on earth come to embrace terror as the organizing principle of its security policy? In The Theater of Operations, Joseph Masco locates the origins of the present-day U.S. counterterrorism apparatus in the Cold War's "balance of terror." He shows how, after the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. global War on Terror mobilized a wide range of affective, conceptual, and institutional resources established during the Cold War to enable a new planetary theater of operations. Tracing how specific aspects of emotional management, existential danger, state secrecy, and threat awareness have evolved as core aspects of the American social contract, Masco draws on archival, media, and ethnographic resources to offer a new portrait of American national security culture. Undemocratic and unrelenting, this counterterror state prioritizes speculative practices over facts, and ignores everyday forms of violence across climate, capital, and health in an unprecedented effort to anticipate and eliminate terror threats—real, imagined, and emergent. 

Product Description: Blending diplomatic, military, technology and business history, Winkler here shows how US officials during World War I discovered the enormous value of global communications. He looks at the American use of cable and radio, and how they benefited the war effort, particularly in the area of intelligence gathering...read more

Product Description: This unique collection of essays lays the groundwork for the study of the intersection of European integration and transatlantic relations in the 1980s. With archives for this period only recently being opened, scholars are beginning to analyze and understand what some have called a peak moment in the European project and others have called the Second Cold War...read more

A stunningly compelling new account of the Kennedy years, exploring for the first time the full impact of JFK's death on RFK, who sought election partly as a way of revealing the truth of what happened in Dallas.

For decades, books about John or Robert Kennedy have woven either a shimmering tale of Camelot gallantry or a tawdry story of runaway ambition and reckless personal behavior. But the real story of the Kennedys in the 1960s has long been submerged ― until now. In Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, David Talbot sheds a dramatic new light on the tumultuous inner life of the Kennedy presidency and its stunning aftermath. Talbot, the founder of Salon.com, has written a gripping political history that is sure to be one of the most talked-about books of the year. Brothers begins on the shattering afternoon of November 22, 1963, as a grief-stricken Robert Kennedy urgently demands answers about the assassination of his brother. Bobby’s suspicions immediately focus on the nest of CIA spies, gangsters, and Cuban exiles that had long been plotting a violent regime change in Cuba. The Kennedys had struggled to control this swamp of anti-Castro intrigue based in southern Florida, but with little success. Brothers then shifts back in time, revealing the shadowy conflicts that tore apart the Kennedy administration, pitting the young president and his even younger brother against their own national security apparatus. The Kennedy brothers and a small circle of their most trusted advisors ― men like Theodore Sorensen, Robert McNamara, and Kenneth O’Donnell, who were so close the Kennedys regarded them as family ― repeatedly thwarted Washington’s warrior caste. These hard-line generals and spymasters were hell-bent on a showdown with the Communist foe ― in Berlin, Laos, Vietnam, and especially Cuba. But the Kennedys continually frustrated their militaristic ambitions, pushing instead for a peaceful resolution to the Cold War. The tensions within the Kennedy administration were heading for an explosive climax, when a burst of gunfire in a sunny Dallas plaza terminated John F. Kennedy’s presidency. Based on interviews with more than one hundred fifty people ― including many of the Kennedys’ aging “band of brothers,” whose testimony here might be their final word on this epic political story ― as well as newly released government documents, Brothers reveals the compelling, untold story of the Kennedy years, including JFK’s heroic efforts to keep the country out of a cataclysmic war and Bobby Kennedy’s secret quest to solve his beloved brother’s murder. Bobby’s subterranean search was a dangerous one and led, in part, to his own quest for power in 1968, in a passion-filled campaign that ended with his own murder. As Talbot reveals here, RFK might have been the victim of the same plotters he suspected of killing his brother. This is historical storytelling at its riveting best ― meticulously researched and movingly told. Brothers is a sprawling narrative about the clash of powerful men and the darker side of the Cold War ― a tale of tragic grandeur that is certain to change our understanding of the relentlessly fascinating Kennedy saga.

Product Description: This book traces the Eisenhower administration's enthusiastic pursuit of the profoundly destabilizing technology of nuclear weapons, and its significance for the course of the Cold War.

Product Description: In Arsenal of Democracy, historian and public intellectual Julian Zelizer shows how internal politics have influenced American foreign policy since the Cold War. Rejecting the notion that, prior to the presidency of George W. Bush, politics “stopped at the water's edge,” Zelizer exposes the partisan fighting that shaped the foreign policies of presidents from FDR to Kennedy to Reagan, revealing the extent to which the GOP and Democratic party have alternately sought to define themselves as the party of war and the party of peace as the political mood shifted...read more

Product Description: America's Global Role, a collection of essays and reviews on national security, geopolitics and war, combines a broad historical and geopolitical overview of U.S. national security policy with commentary on historical events and biographical sketches of historical figures...read more

Product Description: This collection of essays and reviews on national security, geopolitics and war combines a broad historical and geopolitical overview of U.S. national security policy with commentary on historical events and biographical sketches of historical figures.

A novelization of the Dick Tracey comic strip to tie-in with Walt Disney's release of the movie, starring Warren Beatty and Madonna. Max Allan Collins has also written the award-winning "Elliot Ness" mystery series and other crime novels.

A Cross of Iron provides the fullest account yet of the national security state that emerged in the first decade of the Cold War. Michael J. Hogan traces the process of state-making through struggles to unify the armed forces, harness science to military purposes, mobilize military manpower, control the defense budget, and distribute the cost of defense across the economy. President Harry S. Truman and his successor were in the middle of a fundamental contest over the nation's political identity and postwar purpose, and their efforts determined the size and shape of the national security state that finally emerged. (view table of contents)

Product Description: A novelization of the Dick Tracey comic strip to tie-in with Walt Disney's release of the movie, starring Warren Beatty and Madonna. Max Allan Collins has also written the award-winning "Elliot Ness" mystery series and other crime novels.