Potomac Books Inc imprint: 299 books

Within hours of the September 11 attacks, Sean M. Maloney deciphered that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were the aggressors behind the despicable act. A war in Afghanistan then was inevitable. As a military historian, Maloney was determined to go there to study and record the events for posterity, if...

Its the rare bird that doesnt like Christmas. Sure there are Scrooges and, here and there, cries of "Bah, humbug," but Christmas is a time for celebrating, for giving, and for trying to be just a little nicer to your fellow man. As the song goes, "If every day could be just like Christmas what a wonderful...

In 1950, Vin Scully broadcast his first major league baseball game for the thenBrooklyn Dodgers. Nearly sixty years later he still invites a listener to pull up a chair, completing a record fifty-ninth consecutive year of play-by-play. Recruited and mentored by the legendary Red Barber, the New Yorkborn...

Most fans today know that gamblers and ballplayers conspired to ôfixö the 1919 World Seriesùthe Black Sox Scandal. It has been touched upon in classic works of sports history such as Eliot AsinofÆs Eight Men Out, referred to in literary classics like W. P. KinsellaÆs Shoeless Joe, and has been central...

At 3:17 p.m. on March 18, 1937, a natural gas leak beneath the London Junior-Senior High School in the oil boomtown of New London, Texas, created a lethal mixture of gas and oxygen in the schools basement. The odorless, colorless gas went undetected until the flip of an electrical switch triggered a...

Bernard Fall wrote the classics Street Without Joy and Hell in a Very Small Place, which detailed the French experience in Vietnam. One of the first (and the best-informed) Western observers to say that the United States could not win there either, he was killed in Vietnam in 1967 while accompanying...

This compact and accessible biography critically assesses the life and career of Dean Acheson, one of AmericaÆs foremost diplomats and strategists. As a top State Department official from 1941 to 1947 and as Harry S. TrumanÆs secretary of state from 1949 to 1953, Acheson shaped many of the key U.S....

Half-Hispanic, half-Yaqui Indian, and an orphan, Roy Benavidez fought his way out of poverty and bigotry to serve with the U.S. Armys elitethe Airborne and the Special Forces. Seriously wounded in Vietnam, he was told he would never walk again. Benavidez not only conquered his disability but demanded...

Intrigued by the mystique and challenge of the Marine Corps, eighteen-year-old Wesley Fox enlisted in the summer of 1950, shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War. He saw action with the First Marine Division in Korea and was wounded in 1951. After Korea, Fox advanced steadily in the enlisted ranks,...

In this new edition of his classic 1970 memoir about the notorious U-2 incident, pilot Francis Gary Powers reveals the full story of what actually happened in the most sensational espionage case in Cold War history. After surviving the shoot-down of his reconnaissance plane and his capture on May 1,...

The death of CIA operative Theodore G. "Ted" Shackley in December 2002 triggered an avalanche of obituaries from all over the world, some of them condemnatory. Pundits used such expressions as "heroin trafficking," "training terrorists," "attempts to assassinate Castro," and "Mob connections." More specifically,...

During the Iraq War, coauthor Capt. Jason Conroy commanded Charlie Company, which was part of Task Force 1-64, 2d Brigade Combat Team, part of the U.S. ArmyÆs 3d Infantry Division. A tank unit equipped with mammoth M1A1 Abrams tanks, ConroyÆs company was literally at the tip of the U.S. ArmyÆs spear...

Fighter ace Col. Johannes Steinhoff commanded an elite group of pilots trained to fly the first jet aircraft employed in combat, the famous Messerschmitt Me-262, at a time when Reich Marshal Hermann Goring, by then out of favor with Hitler for his failure to stop the Allied bombing raids, denounced his...

Dwight David Eisenhower proudly claimed that he ôcame from the very heart of America.ö Yet it could be argued that, despite those provincial beginnings, no other American exerted more influence on world history during the twentieth century. From his humble birth in Abilene, Kansas, Eisenhower rose...