The complex man at the center of America's most self-destructive presidency In this provocative and revelatory assessment of the only president ever forced out of office, the legendary Washington journalist Elizabeth Drew explains how Richard M. Nixon's troubled inner life offers the key to understanding his presidency. She shows how Nixon was surprisingly indecisive on domestic issues and often wasn't interested in them. Turning to international affairs, she reveals the inner workings of Nixon's complex relationship with Henry Kissinger, and their mutual rivalry and distrust. The Watergate scandal that ended his presidency was at once an overreach of executive power and the inevitable result of his paranoia and passion for vengeance.
Even Nixon's post-presidential rehabilitation was motivated by a consuming desire for respectability, and he succeeded through his remarkable resilience. Through this book we finally understand this complicated man. While giving him credit for his achievements, Drew questions whether such a man--beleaguered, suspicious, and motivated by resentment and paranoia--was fit to hold America's highest office, and raises large doubts that he was.

A new compendium of firsthand reminiscences of life on the American home front during World War II. America's Home Front Heroes: An Oral History of World War II brings together in one rich resource the voices of those whom history often leaves out-the ordinary men, women, and children caught up in an extraordinary time. America's Home Front Heroes is divided into four sections: A Time for Heightened Passion, A Time for Caution and Prejudice, A Time for Flag Waving, and A Time for War Plant Women. The 34 brief oral histories within these sections capture the full diversity of the United States during the war, with contributions coming from men, women, and children of all backgrounds, including Japanese Americans, conscientious objectors, African Americans, housewives, and journalists. A treasure trove for researchers and World War II enthusiasts, this remarkable volume offers members of "the greatest generation" an opportunity to relive their defining era. For those with no direct experience of the period, it's a chance to learn firsthand what it was like living in the United States at a pivotal moment in history. 34 concise oral histories describing everyday life in the United States during World War II Four sections: A Time for Heightened Passion, A Time for Caution, A Time for Flag Waving, and A Time for War Plant Women Based entirely on primary sources-letters, journals, correspondence, interviews, etc-from people who lived through World War II on the American home front Photographs that capture the look and feel of how life changed for Americans at home during World War II Includes contributions and photographs from Martha Kostyra, mother of Martha Stewart

By 1945, both the US State Department and US Intelligence saw Czechoslovakia as the master key to the balance of power in Europe and a chessboard for the power-game between East and West. In this book, Igor Lukes illuminates the early stages of the Cold War in postwar Prague. He paints a critical portrait of Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt and shows that although Washington understood that the outcome of the crisis in Prague might shape the political trends elsewhere in Europe, it ignored signs that democracy in Czechoslovakia was in trouble. A large section of the book deals with US Intelligence in postwar Prague. The American intelligence officials who served in Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1948 were committed to the mission of gathering information and protecting democracy. Yet they were defeated by the Czech and Soviet clandestine services that proved to be more shrewd and better informed. Indeed, Lukes reveals that a key American officer may have been turned by the Russians. Consequently, as the Communists moved to impose their dictatorship, the American Embassy was unprepared and helpless.

Vivid, succinct, and highly accessible, Heinrich Winkler's magisterial history of modern Germany offers the history of a nation and its people through two turbulent centuries. It is the story of a country that, while always culturally identified with the West, long resisted the political trajectories of its neighbors.
This first volume (of two) begins with the origins and consequences of the medieval myth of the "Reich," which was to experience a fateful renaissance in the twentieth century, and ends with the collapse of the first German democracy. Winkler offers a brilliant synthesis of complex events and illuminates them with fresh insights. He analyses the decisions that shaped the country's triumphs and catastrophes, interweaving high politics with telling vignettes about the German people and their own self-perception.
With a second volume that takes the story up to reunification in 1990, Germany: The Long Road West will be welcomed by scholars, students, and anyone wishing to understand this most complex and contradictory of countries.

Performance Anxiety analyses the efforts of German elites, from 1890 to 1945, to raise the productivity and psychological performance of workers through the promotion of mass sports. Michael Hau reveals how politicians, sports officials, medical professionals, and business leaders, articulated a vision of a human economy that was coopted in 1933 by Nazi officials in order to promote competition in the workplace. Hau's original and startling study is the first to establish how Nazi leaders' discourse about sports and performance was used to support their claims that Germany was on its way to becoming a true meritocracy. Performance Anxiety is essential reading for political, social, and sports historians alike.

The gripping tale of a legendary, century-old murder spree *** A silent, simmering killer terrorized New England in1911. As a terrible heat wave killed more than 2,000 people, another silent killer began her own murderous spree. That year a reporter for the Hartford Courant noticed a sharp rise in the number of obituaries for residents of a rooming house in Windsor, Connecticut, and began to suspect who was responsible: Amy Archer-Gilligan, who'd opened the Archer Home for Elderly People and Chronic Invalids four years earlier. "Sister Amy" would be accused of murdering both of her husbands and up to sixty-six of her patients with cocktails of lemonade and arsenic; her story inspired the Broadway hit Arsenic and Old Lace. The Devil's Rooming House is the first book about the life, times, and crimes of America's most prolific female serial killer. In telling this fascinating story, M. William Phelps also paints a vivid portrait of early-twentieth-century New England.

Designed for secondary school and college student research, this work is a readable history and ready-reference guide to the Holocaust based on the most recent scholarship. It provides the reader with an overview of Nazi Germany's attempt to exterminate world Jewry. Fischel, a leading authority on the Holocaust, combines narrative description, analytical essays, a timeline of events, lengthy biographical profiles, and the text of key primary documents relating to the Nazi plan for the "Final Solution" to help students gain a comprehensive understanding of the causative factors and major events and personalities that shaped the Nazi genocide. A glossary of key terms, selected tables, and an annotated bibliography of recommended further reading will aid student research. Topical essays designed for the student and general reader provide an accessible historical overview and analysis of Hitler and the Jews, the racial state, genocide, the "Final Solution," and resistance to the Nazis. Fischel explains the factors that led to the Holocaust, the implementation of the decision to exterminate the Jews, the response of the free world and the Papacy, the role of "righteous gentiles" who risked their lives to save Jews, and the resistance of the Jews to their fate under the Nazis. Biographical sketches provide valuable information on the key personalities among both the Nazis and Allies, and the text of key primary documents brings the Nazis blatant plan for genocide to stark reality. In providing valuable information, analysis, and ready-reference features, this work is a one-stop resource on the Holocaust for students, teachers, library media specialists, and interested readers.

Longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and Winner of the Crossword Prize for Non-fiction '"Curfewed Night" is a passionate and important book - a brave and brilliant report from a conflict the world has chosen to ignore.' Salman Rushdie Basharat Peer was a teenager when the separatist movement exploded in Kashmir in 1989. Over the following years countless young men, fuelled by feelings of injustice, crossed over the 'Line of Control' to train in Pakistani army camps. Peer was sent off to boarding school in Aligarh to keep out of trouble. He finished college and became a journalist in Delhi. But Kashmir - angrier, more violent, more hopeless - was never far away. In 2003 Peer, now a young journalist, left his job and returned to his homeland. Drawing a harrowing portrait of Kashmir and her people - a mother forced to watch her son hold an exploding bomb, politicians living in refurbished torture chambers, picturesque villages riddled with landmines - this is above all, a story of what it really means to return home - and the discovery that there may not be any redemption in it. Lyrical, spare, gut-wrenching and intimate, Curfewed Night is a powerful and intensely moving debut, combining the insight of a journalist with the prose of a poet.

The Korean War occupies a unique place in American history and foreign policy. Because it followed closely after World War II and ushered in a new era of military action as the first hot conflict of the cold war, the Korean War was marketed as an entirely new kind of military campaign. But how were the war-weary American people convinced that the limited objectives of the Korean War were of paramount importance to the nation?
In this ground-breaking book, Steven Casey deftly analyzes the Truman and Eisenhower administrations' determined efforts to shape public discourse about the war, influence media coverage of the conflict, and gain political support for their overall approach to waging the Cold War, while also trying to avoid inciting a hysteria that would make it difficult to localize the conflict. The first in-depth study of Truman's and Eisenhower's efforts to garner and sustain support for the war, Selling the Korean War weaves a lucid tale of the interactions between the president and government officials, journalists, and public opinion that ultimately produced the twentieth century concept of limited war.
It has been popularly thought that the public is instinctively hostile towards any war fought for less than total victory, but Casey shows that limited wars place major constraints on what the government can say and do. He also demonstrates how the Truman administration skillfully rededicated and redefined the war as it dragged on with mounting casualties. Using a rich array of previously untapped archival resources--including official government documents, and the papers of leading congressmen, newspaper editors, and war correspondents--Casey's work promises to bethe definitive word on the relationship between presidents and public opinion during America's "forgotten war."

For much of the 20th century, Catholics in Ireland spent significant amounts of time engaged in religious activities. This book documents their experience in Limerick city between the 1920s and 1960s, exploring the connections between that experience and the wider culture of an expanding and modernising urban environment. Sile de Cleir discusses topics including ritual activities in many contexts: the church, the home, the school, the neighbourhood and the workplace. The supernatural belief underpinning these activities is also important, along with creative forms of resistance to the high levels of social control exercised by the clergy in this environment. De Cleir uses a combination of in-depth interviews and historical ethnographic sources to reconstruct the day-to-day religious experience of Limerick city people during the period studied. This material is enriched by ideas drawn from anthropological studies of religion, while perspectives from both history and ethnology also help to contextualise the discussion. With its unique focus on everyday experience, and combination of a traditional worldview with the modernising city of Limerick - all set against the backdrop of a newly-independent Ireland - Popular Catholicism in 20th-century Ireland presents a fascinating new perspective on 20th-century Irish social and religious history.

Some see the 1980s as a Golden Age, a "Morning in America" when Ronald Reagan revived America's economy, reoriented American politics, and restored Americans' faith in their country and in themselves. Others see the 1980s as a new "Gilded Age," an era that was selfish, superficial, glitzy, greedy, divisive, and destructive. This multifaceted exploration of the 1980s brings together a variety of voices from different political persuasions, generations, and vantage points. The volume features work by Reagan critics and Reagan fans (including one of President Reagan's closest aides, Ed Meese), by historians who think the 1980s were a disastrous time, those who think it was a glorious time, and those who see both the blessings and the curses of the decade. Their essays examine everything from multiculturalism, Southern conservatism, and Reaganomics, to music culture, religion, crime, AIDS, and the city. A complex, thoughtful account of a watershed in our recent history, this volume will engage anyone interested in this pivotal decade.