In the last decades, America has gone to war as supposed defenders of democracy. The War on Terror was waged to protect the West from the dangers of Islamists. US Solders are stationed in over 800 locations across the world to act as the righteous arbiters of the rule of law. In this volume, Cockburn dissects the intentions behind Washington's appetite for war. The American war machine can only be understood in terms of the "private passions" and...

"A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's provocative reinterpretation of the eight decades surrounding the Civil War (and leading into the twentieth century); the next volume in the Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner. In this ambitious story of American imperial conquest and capitalist development, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Steven Hahn takes on the conventional histories of the nineteenth century and offers a perspective...

"Just as World War II transformed the United States into a global military and economic superpower, so too did it forge the gun country America is today. After 1945, war-ravaged European nations possessed large surpluses of mass-produced weapons, and American entrepreneurs seized the opportunity to buy used munitions for pennies on the dollar and resell them stateside. A booming consumer market made cheap guns accessible to millions of Americans,...

"From an acclaimed historian and financial analyst, the first definitive history of the legendary private investment firm Brown Brothers Harriman - and through it, the rise to world power of the so-called American Establishment. Conspiracy theories have always swirled around Brown Brothers Harriman, and not without reason. Throughout the 19th century, when America was convulsed by a devastating financial panic every generation, Brown Brothers quietly...

In this major new history of the Civil War, Bruce Levine tells the riveting story of how that conflict upended the economic, political, and social life of the old South, utterly destroying the Confederacy and the society it represented and defended.

"Setting the great crisis of 2020 in broad historical perspective, Niall Ferguson challenges the conventional wisdom that our failure to cope better with disaster was solely a crisis of political leadership, as opposed to a more profound systemic problem. Disasters are by their very nature hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate...

"Supermarkets were invented in the United States, and from the 1940s on they made their way around the world, often explicitly to carry American-style economic culture with them. This innovative history tells us how supermarkets were used as anticommunist weapons during the Cold War, and how that has shaped our current food system. The widespread appeal of supermarkets as weapons of free enterprise contributed to a "farms race" between the United...

"Unshackling America challenges the persistent fallacy that Americans fought two separate wars of independence. Williard Sterne Randall documents an unremitting fifty-year-long struggle for economic independence from Britain overlapping two armed conflicts linked by an unacknowledged global struggle. Throughout this perilous period, the struggle was all about free trade. Neither Jefferson nor any other Founding Father could divine that the Revolutionary...