How is foreign policy made in Iraq? Based on dozens of interviews with senior officials and politicians, this book provides a clear analysis of the development of domestic Iraqi politics since 2003. Zana Gulmohamad explains how the federal government of Iraq and Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have functioned and worked together since toppling Saddam to reveal in granular detail the complexity of their foreign policy making. The book shows that the ruling elites and political factions in Baghdad and in the capital of the Kurdistan Region, Erbil, create foreign policies according to their agendas. The formulation and implementation of the two governments' foreign policies is to a great extent uncoordinated. Yet Zana Gulmohamad places this incoherent model of foreign policy making in the context of the country's fragmented political and social context and explains how Iraq's neighbouring countries - Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Syria before the civil war - have each influenced its internal affairs. The book is the first study dedicated to the contemporary dynamics of the Iraqi state - outside the usual focus on the "great powers" - and it explains exactly how Iraqi foreign policy is managed alongside the country's economic and security interests.

Controversial scholarly debates around the beginnings of the Ottoman Empire in the last century are not only rooted in the scarcity or heterogeneity of sources, but also in the mentalities and ideologies that canonised thought paradigms. This book uses an interdisciplinary approach at the interface between Ottoman, Byzantine, Mediterranean and Southeast European studies. Unusual sources such as Western Anatolian numismatics and predominantly European documents met innovative methods from the study of violence and power networks. Making a case study around the military akinci institution, the author re-evaluates the emergence of the Ottoman polity in dealing with various warlords and across multiple identities and political affiliations.

Why did Abraham Lincoln sneak into Washington for his inauguration? was the Gettysburg Address written on the back of an envelope? Where did the Underground Railroad run? Did General Sherman really say, "War is Hell"?

If you can't answer these questions, you're not alone. Millions of Americans, bored by dull textbooks, are in the dark about the most significant event in our history. Now New York Times bestselling author Kenneth C. Davis comes to the rescue, deftly sorting out the players, the politics, and the key events - Emancipation and Reconstruction, Shiloh and Gettysburg, Generals Grant and Lee, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and much more. Drawing on moving eyewitness accounts, Davis includes a wealth of "hidden history" about the roles played by women and African Americans before and during the war, along with lesser-known facts that will enthrall even learned Civil War buffs. Vivid, informative, and hugely entertaining, Don't Know Much About the Civil War is the only book you'll ever need on "the war that never ended."

Do places where violent deaths occur somehow absorb the horror, only to conjure up images that haunt the living for generations to come? Many people believe that this can indeed happen; above all, in the context of that manmade phenomenon that reaps so great a toll in so short a time: War. Haunted U.S. Battlefields takes us on a spine-tingling tour of America's most legendary spectral scenes of human struggle-from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, from the Indian Wars to World War II and beyond. As America's bloodiest conflict, the Civil War has yielded the greatest number of ghostly sightings. Hence, most of the twenty-five battlefield legends this book relates are from this era-whether the myriad strange spectral happenings associated with Gettysburg, or this war's lesser known but equally tragic events. Summing up the eerie essence of wartime scenes across America-many of which today host popular ghost tours-Haunted U.S. Battlefields is a must for students of the paranormal, Civil War buffs, and all others interested in a spine-chilling realm of military history that the history books don't dare tell.