Potomac Books Inc : 472 books

Seymour Hersh has been the most important, famous, and controversial journalist in the United States for the last forty years. From his exposé of the My Lai massacre in 1969 to his revelations about torture at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004, Hersh has consistently captured the public imagination, spurred...

Varina Anne ôWinnieö Davis was born into a war-torn South in June of 1864, the youngest daughter of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his second wife, Varina Howell Davis. Born only a month after the death of beloved Confederate hero General J.E.B. Stuart during a string of Confederate victories,...

In keeping with Robert J. McMahon's series Issues in the History of American Foreign Relations, Jussi M. Hanhimäki offers students and scholars a survey of the evolution of American foreign policy during a key period in recent history, the era of superpower détente and global transformation in the...

How much do you really know about former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin? The revelations in Matthew ZenceyÆs account of her tenure will surprise you. Although Palin is widely seen as a conservative social ideologue, her political career in Alaska was marked by a progressive approach that is at odds with...

On September 21, 2011, the controversial execution of Georgia inmate Troy Davis, who spent twenty years on death row for a crime he most likely did not commit, revealed the complexity of death penalty trials, the flaws in America's justice system, and the rift between those who are for and against...

George H. W. Bush ranks among America’s most distinguished men of the twentieth century. A war hero, businessman, politician, and the forty-first president of the United States, Bush has spent most of his life dedicated to public service.Curt Smith worked with Bush for more than twenty years,...

At a time when violent images of the Muslim world dominate our headlines, Western audiences are growing increasingly interested in a different picture of Islam, specifically the idea of Muslim nonviolence, and what it could mean for the world. But is nonviolence compatible with the teachings of Islam?...

The Jewish people are in greater danger than ever before. Given the debacle in Iraq, many Americans who had not taken a serious interest in the Middle East have begun asking themselves, What are we doing wrong? Why do we keep misreading the signals coming from that part of the world? More fundamentally,...

From the 1950s through the 1990s, antisemitism everywhere seemed to be on the wane. But as Neil Kressel documents in this startling book, the Muslim world has resurrected in recent decades almost every diatribe that more than two millennia of European hostility produced against the Jews, and it has introduced...

No person involved in so much history received so little attention as the late Robert C. Byrd, the longest-serving U.S. senator. In The Last Great Senator, David A. Corbin examines ByrdÆs complex and fascinating relationships with eleven presidents of the United States, from Eisenhower to Obama. Furthermore,...

The Greater Middle East poses major challenges for the United States. Yet despite decades of intense involvement in Middle Eastern affairs, most Americans still know little about the cultures of the region. Simple Gestures describes one American's efforts over forty years to better understand the society...

Few people have garnered so much enduring interest as Sir Richard Burton. A true polymath, Burton is best known today for his translations of the Kama Sutra and Arabian Nights. Yet, Africa stood at the center of his adult life. The Burton-Speke expedition (1856–59) that put Lake Tanganyika on the map...

Kristian GustafsonÆs Hostile Intent reexamines one of the most controversial chapters in U.S. intelligence history, the Central Intelligence Agency's covert operations in Chile from 1964 to 1974. At the request of successive U.S. presidents, the CIA in conjunction with the State Department and the Defense...

In 1924, the last caliphate—an Islamic state as envisioned by the Koran—was dismantled in Turkey. With no state in existence that matches the radical Islamic ideal since, al Qaeda, which sees itself as a government in exile, along with its hundreds of affiliate organizations, has failed to achieve...