Veterans

Military Recruiting in the United States provides a fearless and penetrating description of the deceptive practices of the U.S. military as it recruits American youth into the armed forces. Long-time antiwar activist Pat Elder exposes the underworld of American military recruiting in this explosive and consequential book. The book describes how recruiters manage to convince youth to enlist. It details a sophisticated psy-ops campaign directed at children. Elder describes how the military encourages first-person shooter games and places firearms into the hands of thousands using the schools, its JROTC programs, and the Civilian Marksmanship Program to inculcate youth with a reverence for guns. Previously unpublished investigative work reveals how indoor shooting ranges in schools are threatening the health of children and school staff through exposure to lead particulate matter. The book provides a kind of "what's coming next manual" for European peacemakers as they also confront a rising tide of militarism. The book examines the disturbing, nurturing role of the Catholic Church in recruiting youth. It surveys the wholesale military censorship of Hollywood films, pervasive military testing in the high schools, and an explosion of military programs directed toward youth

Starting in the early 1960s, there was fear in America about the proliferation of computer database and networking technologies. People worried that these systems were going to be used by both corporations and governments for surveillance and control. Indeed, the dominant cultural view at the time was that computers were tools of repression, not liberation -- and that included the ARPANET, the military research network that would grow into the Internet we use today. Surveillance Valley starts in the past, but moves into the present, looking at the private surveillance business that powers much of Silicon Valley and the overlap between the Internet and the military-industrial complex. It also investigates and uncovers the close ties that exist between U.S. intelligence agencies and the anti-government privacy movement that has sprung up in the wake of Edward Snowden's leaks. The Internet was developed as a weapon, and remains a weapon today. American military interests continue to dominate all parts of the network, even those that supposedly stand in opposition.

Tanya Biank gives us the inside story of women in today's military and their professional and personal challenges from the combat zone to the home front.

Jim Sciutto, CNN's Chief National Security Correspondent, reveals the invisible fronts that make up 21st century warfare, and the battles we don't know about, from disinformation campaigns to advanced satellite weapons

All democracies have had to contend with the challenge of tolerating hidden spy services within otherwise relatively transparent governments. Democracies pride themselves on privacy and liberty, but intelligence organizations have secret budgets, gather information surreptitiously around the world, and plan covert action against foreign regimes. Sometimes, they have even targeted the very citizens they were established to protect, as with the COINTELPRO operations in the 1960s and 1970s, carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) against civil rights and antiwar activists. In this sense, democracy and intelligence have always been a poor match. Yet Americans live in an uncertain and threatening world filled with nuclear warheads, chemical and biological weapons, and terrorists intent on destruction. Without an intelligence apparatus scanning the globe to alert the United States to these threats, the planet would be an even more perilous place. In Spy Watching, Loch K. Johnson explores the United States' travails in its efforts to maintain effective accountability over its spy services. Johnson explores the work of the famous Church Committee, a Senate panel that investigated America's espionage organizations in 1975 and established new protocol for supervising the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the nation's other sixteen secret services. Johnson explores why partisanship has crept into once-neutral intelligence operations, the effect of the 9/11 attacks on the expansion of spying, and the controversies related to CIA rendition and torture programs. He also discusses both the Edward Snowden case and the ongoing investigations into the Russian hack of the 2016 US election. Above all, Spy Watching seeks to find a sensible balance between the twin imperatives in a democracy of liberty and security. Johnson draws on scores of interviews with Directors of Central Intelligence and others in America's secret agencies, making this a uniquely authoritative account.

Donald Trump's presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we'd be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes. Democracy no longer ends with a bang--in a revolution or military coup--but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that, by electing Trump, we have already passed the first one. Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die--and how ours can be saved.

The China Lake missile range is located in a huge stretch of the Mojave Desert. People who make missiles and other weapons are regular working people, with domestic routines and everyday dilemmas, and four of them were Karen Piper's parents, her sister, and--when she needed summer jobs--herself.

Published to mark the 200th anniversary, The Battle of Waterloo Experience is a compelling new treatment of the Hundred Days campaign, beautifully illustrated and including reproductions of contemporary letters and documents that graphically portray the background to Napoleon’s final overthrow.

What we remember, what we've forgotten, and what we never knew about America's least understood war, revealed in a riveting, richly illustrated volume based on the major ten-part PBS documentary series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Historian Geoffrey C. Ward and filmmaker Ken Burns, the authors of the acclaimed and best-selling The Civil War, Jazz, The War, and Baseball, present an intimate history of the Vietnam War. All the major milestones are here--from the Gulf of Tonkin and the Tet Offensive to Hamburger Hill and the fall of Saigon--and we are able to listen in as three American presidents and their advisors search for a way to win or to get out. But most of the voices that echo from these pages belong to less exalted men and women--nearly 100 of them, those who fought in the war as well as those who fought against it, victims and victors, and Vietnamese from both North and South willing for the first time to share their memories of the war as it really was. More than forty years have passed since the end of the Vietnam War, but its ghosts remain. We still ask the questions today we asked then: Why were we there? What should we have done differently, or should we have done anything at all? Who was right and who was wrong? Answers remain elusive. But over the intervening decades, archives have opened, ideology has softened, men and women whose memories were once too painful to revisit have become eager to talk. The result is a compelling, completely fresh account of the long and brutal conflict that reunited Vietnam while dividing the United States as nothing else had since the Civil War. This unique tour de force filled with rare photographs, illuminating guest essays, and unforgettable firsthand accounts will reshape your understanding of the Vietnam War, and of war itself.

Published in association with the Imperial War Museum, this volume charts the period when the Axis powers reigned supreme. It begins with the German drive eastwards and the invasion of Russia and moves to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the entry of America into the war.