NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this “beautifully written and superbly researched dual biography” (Los Angeles Times Book Review), Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Jon Meacham “paints a powerful portrait of the enormous friendship between World War II allies [Franklin] Roosevelt and [Winston] Churchill” (Vanity Fair).
 
“Intense and compelling reading.”—The...

A top historian offers a compelling history of perhaps the most remarkable holiday season in 20th-century history--December 1941--a Christmas season that played out in the shadows of the Pearl Harbor attack and the start of America's involvement in World War II. Christmas 1941 came little more than two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The shock--in some cases overseas, elation--was worldwide. While Americans attempted to go about celebrating...

"James Bulloch, a sea captain turned Confederate agent, arrived in Liverpool at a crucial moment during the U.S. Civil War: a Union blockade was preventing Southern cotton exports from reaching Britain, threatening to destroy what was left of the Confederate economy-unless Bulloch could secretly arrange for the construction of a fleet of warships to break the northern grip on the South. Shortly thereafter, Union operative Thomas Dudley, a pious Quaker...

A British-perspective chronicle of the Boston Tea Party and other events that led up to the American Revolution traces three years of volatile politics, personalities and economics on both sides of the conflict.

"The fall of France in 1940 panicked US leaders, leading to their fateful decision to recognize the pro-Nazi Vichy government. Michael S. Neiberg takes readers back to the fraught early years of World War II, when America's misguided policy on Vichy alienated its British ally and ensured tensions with Charles de Gaulle and the postwar French Republic"--

"Explores how two great WWII leaders, Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, created the postwar world order that lasted for nearly seventy-five years"--

History records only one peaceful transition of hegemonic power: the passage from British to American dominance of the international order. What made that transition uniquely cooperative and nonviolent? Does it offer lessons to guide policy as the United States faces its own challengers to the order it has enforced since the 1940s? To answer these questions, Kori Schake explores nine points of crisis or tension between Britain and the United States,...

"Using newly declassified records and long-forgotten memoirs, including the diaries of a key British spy, James Barr tears up the conventional interpretation of this era in the Middle East, vividly portraying the tensions between London and Washington, and shedding an uncompromising light on the murkier activities of a generation of American and British diehards in the region, from the battle of El Alamein in 1942 to Britain's abandonment of Aden...