"In his lively, vivid history of pirates, Lehr finds some striking continuities from ancient to modern times." — Foreign AffairsA Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the YearIn the twenty-first century, pirates have regained a central place in Western culture, thanks to an odd combination of a blockbuster film franchise and a dramatic rise in piracy around the Horn of Africa. In this global history of the phenomenon, maritime te...

Managing the ever-changing nature and cross-disciplinary challenges of the maritime sector demands a complete understanding of the special characteristics of the maritime space. The complexity of the operations of ships, ports, shipping companies, and naval and coast guard maritime security operations as well as the economic significance and the in

This book critically discusses the role of technology for counter-terrorism in general, and for securing our vulnerable open societies in particular. It is set against the backdrop of the terrorist threat posed by the combined forces of Al Qaeda and ISIS/Daesh in the foreseeable future.The book commences by illuminating current and foreseeable tactics and weapons used by these implacable enemies – weapons that may well include chemical, biological, radiological and potentially even...

Against the backdrop of the ongoing Rohingya crisis, this book takes a close and detailed look at the rise of militant Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand, and especially at the issues of ‘why’ and ‘how’ around it. We are well aware of Christian fundamentalism, militant Judaism and Islamist Salafism-Jihadism. Extremist and violent Buddhism however features only rarely in book-length studies on religion and political violence. Somehow, the very idea of Buddhist monks as the archetypic...

A global account of pirates and their modus operandi from the middle ages to the present dayIn the twenty-first century piracy has regained a central place in Western culture, thanks to a surprising combination of Johnny Depp and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise as well as the dramatic rise of modern-day piracy around Somalia and the Horn of Africa.In this global history of the phenomenon, maritime terrorism and piracy expert Peter Lehr casts...

The Defence of Heaven brings together, for the first time in one volume, a complete history of the Jin, Song, and Ming dynasties' wars fought against the Mongols. Lasting nearly two centuries, these wars, fought to defend Chinese civilization against a brutal and unrelenting foe, pitted personal heroics against the inexorable Mongol war machine and involved every part of the Chinese state.The resistance of the Chinese dynasties to the Khans is a complex and rich story of shifting a...

A new look at Thomas Morton, his controversial colonial philosophy, and his lengthy feud with the Puritans.Adding new depth to our understanding of early New England society, this riveting account of Thomas Morton explores the tensions that arose from competing colonial visions. A lawyer and fur trader, Thomas Morton dreamed of a society where Algonquian peoples and English colonists could coexist. Infamous for dancing around a maypole in defiance of his Pilgrim ne...

The most important place in American nuclear history are the Marshall Islands—an idyllic Pacific paradise that served as the staging ground for over sixty US nuclear tests. It was here, from 1946 to 1958, that America perfected the weapon that preserved the peace of the post-war years. It was here—with the 1954 Castle Bravo test over Bikini Atoll—that America executed its largest nuclear detonation, a thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima. And it was here that a native people became ...

Comprising personal accounts from an intensely consequential chapter in human history, the transatlantic slave trade, The Great Stain takes listeners from the depths of suffering to the heights of human dignity.There have been numerous books about the why, when, and where of slavery in America, but there is a dearth of material exposing what slavery was actually like. In The Great Stain, researcher Noel Rae frames firsthand accounts from former slaves, slave owner...

From New York Times bestselling author Molly Guptill Manning comes The War of Words, the captivating story of how American troops in World War II wielded pens to tell their own stories as they made history.At a time when civilian periodicals faced strict censorship, US Army Chief of Staff George Marshall won the support of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to create an expansive troop-newspaper program. Both Marshall and FDR recognized that ther...

“This is a powerful, vitally important story, and Lane brings it to life with not only vast amounts of research but with a remarkable gift for storytelling that makes the pages fly by.” —Candice Millard, author of The River of Doubt and Hero of the EmpireFreedom’s Detective reveals the untold story of the Reconstruction-era United States Secret Service and their b...

Only in 1995 did the United States government officially reveal the existence of the super-secret Venona Project. For nearly fifty years American intelligence agents had been decoding thousands of Soviet messages, uncovering an enormous range of espionage activities carried out against the United States during World War II by its own allies. This extraordinary book is the first to examine the Venona messages.Venona Project cryptanalysts, linguists, and mathematicians attempted to d...