Many historians consider America’s Mexican War of the 1840s to be an unjust war, one primarily waged to grab land for the extension of slavery and thus of human greed. Because of this motive and rampant nativism in the US Army, many immigrant soldiers deserted the American army to join the Mexican forces. This story tells of these soldiers’ formation of the Saint Patrick’s Battalion (many immigrants were Irish) and of their historical leader John…
Hiding secrets (i.e., cryptography or the science of encryption) has become an increasingly important topic in the modern Information Age. It’s not just the stuff of the military and diplomacy. We cannot communicate secrets like credit card numbers over the Internet without it. In this book, dated around the turn of the millennium, Singh shares the history of encrypting messages. He begins to forecast its impact in the twenty-first century while noting exciting trends in…
In the 1990s, scientists made significant advances to limit the impact of HIV upon human lives… in the West. However, HIV continued to flourish in sub-Saharan Africa, and it remained for the new millennium to limit its reach there. Bass’s book tells the story of the American effort in this quest that spanned multiple presidencies across both political parties. She concludes with its impact on the COVID pandemic. The effort to defeat HIV/AIDS is so…
The genre of historical fiction is as well-known for romances as it is for stories set in World War II. This book takes those simple premises but upends them by adding so much more to produce a beautiful product of art. Its setting – Shanghai, China, during the war – is unusual as are its main protagonists, a Chinese businesswoman and a Jewish refugee. Apparently, Shanghai, long-known for its prowess as an international business culture,…
The human response to venereal disease has always had a strongly social component. Not only is there biology involved; other factors also include prostitution, gender dynamics, sexuality, fear, and moralisms. In this work, Brandt identifies all of these impacts and constructs a narrative of how Americans have reacted to this disease since the underlying biology had begun to be unearthed in the late 19th century. He does so meticulously and comprehensively so that no important…
Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) and Winston Churchill both remain among some of the most towering figures in twentieth-century history. Without them, democracy might only be a relic of history. Without them, the lingua franca of the world might be German instead of English. Rather, their friendship, forged by need and trial, led to an end to great European wars and to the blossoming of hopes of world peace. It also cemented the Anglo-American alliance as a…
After 70 years, Eisenhower remains a respected president with a mostly positive influence. Not only did he lead the Allies to victory in World War II, but as president, he also organized the world for a lasting peace. He continued to develop the American economy so that over time, America would win the Cold War against communism while not annihilating the world in the process. Newton analyzes these issues in careful detail, but he tends…
There exist few ways to understand something better than understanding its history. Nuanced details make more sense when attached to the historical narrative. Such is certainly the case in medicine, the universal human struggle against death. This book, an edited collection of histories of various aspects of medicine, offers these explanations with clarity and erudition. It offers hard science commingled with human insight – a coupling appropriate for the task of healing. Students of medicine…
Former US President Lyndon Johnson is one of the more difficult to understand presidents. He reached the heights of politics through an assassination. He changed America permanently through the Civil Rights Acts of 1964-5. Pragmatically, he attempted to build a nation based on equal opportunity through the Great Society. He had an unparalleled genius for administrative leadership in the Senate and Oval Office. Yet he led the nation down a horrific course in Vietnam and…
Do you think America has never seen such polarizing times as ours today? Pulitizer Prize winner Jon Meacham stands ready to correct you and then to enlist you in the struggle for America to choose the better path. In this work, starting with Abraham Lincoln, he traces how historically Americans fought over choices that today might seem taken for granted – like women’s suffrage, lynchings, the right to vote, and trumped-up charges of political treason.…