Over recent decades, John W. Dower, one of America's preeminent historians, has addressed the roots and consequences of war from multiple perspectives. In War Without Mercy, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, he described and analyzed the brutality that attended World War II in the Pacific, as seen from both the Japanese and the American sides. Embracing Defeat, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, dealt with Japan's...

This almanac traces all of American military history from the European voyages of discovery through 2011, chronicling the pivotal moments that have shaped the United States into the country it is today.

Veneration for the military is a deeply embedded but fatal flaw in America's collective identity. In twenty yers at West Point, whistleblower Tim Bakken has come to understand how unquestioned faith isolates the U.S. armed forces from civil society and leads to catastrophe. Pervaded by chronic deceit, the military's insular culture elevates blind loyalty above all other values. Bakken makes the case that the culture has has observed at West Point...

Bacevich takes stock of the separation between Americans and their military, tracing its origins to the Vietnam era and exploring its pernicious implications: a nation with an abiding appetite for war waged at enormous expense by a standing army demonstrably unable to achieve victory. Rather than something for "other people" to do, Bacevich argues that national defense should become the business of "we the people."