Bruce A. Glasrud and Deborah M. Liles have gathered over thirty years of scholarship—articles, book excerpts, and new, original essays—to offer for the first time an overview of the history of African Americans in Central Texas. From slavery and agriculture in the nineteenth century to entrepreneurship and the struggle for civil rights in the twentieth century, African Americans in Central Texas History: From Slavery to Civil Rights fills in the critical missing pieces of an often...

Few works of military history are able to move between the battlefield and academia. But Warriors and Scholars takes the best from both worlds by presenting the viewpoints of senior, eminent military historians on topics of their specialty, alongside veteran accounts for the modern war being discussed. Editors Peter Lane and Ronald Marcello have added helpful contextual and commentary footnotes for student readers. The papers, originally from the University of North Texas's annual Military...

**A New York Times bestseller!An epic history of the decline of American military leadership—from the bestselling author of Fiasco and Churchill and Orwell.**While history has been kind to the American generals of World War II—Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley—it has been less kind to the generals of the wars that followed, such as Koster, Franks, Sanchez, and Petraeus. In The Generals, Thomas E. Ricks sets out to explain why that...

In a tour de force, prize-winning New York Times reporter C.J. Chivers traces the invention of the assault rifle, following the miniaturization of rapid-fire arms from the American Civil War, through WWI, Vietnam, to present day Afghanistan when Kalashnikovs and their knock-offs number as many as 100 million—enough for one out of seventy people on earth.At a secret arms-design contest in Stalin’s Soviet Union, army technicians submitted a stubby rifle with...

Even fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, it is still hard to grasp that we no longer live under its immense specter. For nearly half a century, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, all world events hung in the balance of a simmering dispute between two of the greatest military powers in history. Hundreds of millions of people held their collective breath as the United States and the Soviet Union, two national ideological entities, waged proxy wars to determine spheres ...

Marytanov explains why and how the US armed forces have lost the military supremacy they thought they once had and how Russia, which supposedly had been defeated in the Cold War, succeeded not only in catching up with USA, but actually surpassing it in many key domains such as long range cruise missiles, diesel-electric submarines, air defenses, electronic warfare, air superiority and many others. Andrei Martyanov's book is an absolute 'must read' for any person wanting to understand the r...

A monumental, groundbreaking work, now in paperback, that shows how technological and strategic revolutions have transformed the battlefieldCombining gripping narrative history with wide-ranging analysis, War Made New focuses on four "revolutions" in military affairs and describes how inventions ranging from gunpowder to GPS-guided air strikes have remade the field of battle—and shaped the rise and fall of empires.War Made New begins with ...

THE FINANICAL TIMES - BEST BOOKS OF 2022'The prolific military chronicler and analyst Mark Galeotti has produced exactly the right book at the right time.' - The TimesA history of how Putin and his conflicts have inexorably reshaped Russia, including his devastating invasion of Ukraine.Putin's Wars is a timely overview of the conflicts in which Russia has been involved since Vladimir Putin became p...

One of the most influential experts on military history and strategy has now written his magnum opus, an original and provocative account of the past hundred years of global conflict. The Changing Face of War is the book that reveals the path that led to the impasse in Iraq, why powerful standing armies are now helpless against ill-equipped insurgents, and how the security of sovereign nations may be maintained in the future.While paying close attention to the unpredictable human e...

Airpower, more than any other factor, has shaped war in the twentieth century. In this fascinating narrative history, Martin van Creveld vividly portrays the rise of the plane as a tool of war and the evolution of both technology and strategy. He documents seminal battles and turning points, and relates stories of individual daring and collective mastery of the skies.However, the end of airpower's glorious age is drawing near. The conventional wisdom to the contrary, modern precisi...

An authoritative illustrated analysis of the history of the military Special Forces units of the Soviet Union and Russian Federation.When the shadowy, notorious Spetsnaz were first formed, they drew on a long Soviet tradition of elite, behind-the-lines commando forces from World War II and even earlier. Throughout the 1960s–70s they were instrumental both in projecting Soviet power in non-aligned states and in suppressing resistance within the Warsaw pact.A...

An indispensable reference on World War II produced by the Library of Congress and edited by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David M. Kennedy. With hundreds of illustrations and quotations from contemporary documents, this will be the most authoritative popular reference on World War II.The noted historian John Keegan called World War II "the largest single event in human history." More than sixty years after it ended, that war continues to shape our world. Going ...