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Until the recent unauthorized release of thousands of classified State Department cables, public attention was rarely drawn to the frequently outstanding political analysis done by American diplomats abroad.

Since September 11, 2001, the extensive literature on the United States' image abroad, by popular pundits and academics alike, leaves the reader with a false impression that foreigners' views of America are normally negative and impervious to change. In fact they are complex, emotional, frequently internally contradictory, and often change quickly.

Since the conclusion of World War II, the Korean people and the international community have contemplated a unified peninsula, but a divided Korea remains one of the last visible vestiges of the Cold War.

Public interest in Adolf Hitler and all aspects of the Third Reich continues to grow as new generations ponder the moral questions surrounding Nazi Germany and its historical legacy.

"A Free Man of Color and His Hotel" weaves the story of a uniquely successful black businessman into the burgeoning post - Civil War political struggle that pitted the federal government against the states' desire to remain autonomous. Born in Washington, D.C., James Wormley worked as a hacker in his father's livery stable and a steward on Mississippi River steamboats before establishing his own catering and boardinghouse businesses. During a period of limited opportunity for African Americans, he built and operated D.C.'s luxurious Wormley Hotel at a time when most financial and governmental business was conducted in hotels. Not only did a number of notable diplomats and politicians live at the hotel, but because of its location in the commerical and political center of Washington, Wormley also hosted the city's movers and shakers. Wormley's rise, however, occurred as three landmark decisions by the Supreme Court effectively dismantled Reconstruction and led to the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that legalized segregation. This cautionary tale illustrates how key Supreme Court decisions hindered other African Americans' potential successes after Reconstruction. By examining the issue of states' rights in terms of one man's against-the-odds success, Carol Gelderman shows how these same issues are still relevant in a post-segregation nation.

In 1862, looking for an opportunity to attack Union general John Pope, Confederate general Robert E. Lee ordered Maj. Gen. James Longstreet to conduct a reconnaissance and possible assault on the Chinn Ridge front in Northern Virginia. At the time Longstreet launched his attack, only a handful of Union troops stood between Robert E. Lee and Gen.

It began as a Depression era, winner-take-all challenge between two Chicago stockbrokers, one of them a flamboyant daredevil with more guts than money and the other with more money than sense. It erupted into a national news story, one never told in its entirety - until "King of Clubs: The Great Golf Marathon of 1938". In September 1938, thirty-two-year-old J. Smith Ferebee agreed to play 600 holes of golf in eight cities, from Los Angeles to New York, over four consecutive days. The ordeal meant playing more than thirty-three rounds in just ninety-six hours. The stakes: Ferebee's friend and former business partner, Fred Tuerk agreed that if Ferebee succeeded, he would pay the $30,000 mortgage on 296 acres of waterfront Virginia land on Ferebee's behalf. Brokers on LaSalle Street in Chicago piled up bets. Before long, the marathon was estimated to be worth $100,000, or well more than $1 million today. Playing despite a severe leg injury, Ferebee faced one obstacle after another, including a gambler's brazen sabotage attempt in Philadelphia. He started the morning rounds before dawn and ended the afternoon rounds in darkness, with lighting provided by spectators' cars, local fire departments, or flares. Remarkably, Ferebee never lost a ball. Combining the appeal of "Seabiscuit" and "The Greatest Game", "King of Clubs" will amaze and entertain readers from opening drive to final putt.

William Douglas Pawley was a cross between Indiana Jones and Donald Trump. A self-made millionaire with little education, he immersed himself in whatever business venture he chose and usually came out on top. As a sales representative for the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, Pawley travelled to China in the 1930s and positioned himself as the one source of American military aircraft for the Chinese government. Eventually, he worked to support the Flying Tigers, the American volunteers flying for the Chinese Air Force, and built an airplane factory in India to give the Allies air power in Asia. President Harry Truman appointed Pawley as ambassador to Peru (1945-46), and to Brazil (1946-48). When Dwight Eisenhower ran for president, Pawley switched parties, campaigned for Ike, and was later assigned to the State Department. During this period, he dealt with world leaders on sensitive national security matters, such as back-door diplomacy in the Dominican Republic under Rafael Trujillo in Cuba at the time of Fidel Castro's takeover, and in a plot to overthrow the Guatemalan government in 1954. Later, in an effort to discredit President John Kennedy, Pawley financed secret Operation Tilt to help Russian missile officers defect from Cuba to the United States. This episode, involving a cast of characters from Mafia members to soldiers of fortune, was one of many in an adventure story beyond belief. Anthony R. Carrozza's in-depth biography looks at the extraordinary life of a man whose work influenced thirty years of American and international relations during World War II and the Cold War, and whose death resulted from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia that has been under the leadership of President Nursultan Nazarbayev since independence in 1991, has proven that a mostly Muslim nation can be active on the international scene.

They are Americans, and they are mujahideen. Hundreds of men from every imaginable background have walked away from the traditional American dream to volunteer for battle in the name of Islam. Some have taken part in foreign wars that aligned with U.S.

Authors starting point is Obamas speech of July, 2008, The America We Love, and argues that Obama has the potential to have greater impact on how Americans understand their national identity, and define it, than any president since Abraham Lincoln. Includes contrasting visions from both the GOP and Tea Party of what it means to be an American, and why they find Obamas vision so threatening. Authors opinion pieces and articles have appeared in Newsday, The New Republic, History News Network, and the Daily Kos; Markos Moulitsas (kos) has agreed to provide an endorsement for the book (to come).

The Antarctic is the last, vast terrestrial frontier on Earth. Less than a century ago, no one had ever seen the South Pole. Today, odd machines and adventure skiers from many nations converge there every summer. They arrive from many starting points on the Antarctic coast and go back some other way.

The Western world is fascinated by the new, the luxurious and the expensive. We are exposed on a daily basis to fresh ideas and innovations that feed what has become a constant hunger for the latest trends. This desire is not a new one - since Ancient Times man has sought to surround himself with symbols of power and wealth.

The Ohio State Buckeyes have been a national story for decades, with numerous national championships and National Football League draftees to their credit. With such a successful history, it's no wonder that the passion for Ohio State football has reached a level of devotion that has religious overtones.

The early morning hours of July 6, 1943, found the USS Helena in what would later be known as the Battle of Kula Gulf. But the ship's participation in the battle came to a swift end when three Japanese torpedoes suddenly struck. Almost 170 sailors went down with the ship, many never surviving the initial torpedo hits.

Now in its sixth year, the conflict in Mexico is a mosaic of several wars occurring at once: cartels battle one another, cartels suffer violence within their own organizations, cartels fight against the Mexican state, cartels and gangs wage war against the Mexican people, and gangs combat gangs. The war has killed more than 60,000 people since President Felipe Calderón began cracking down on the cartels in December 2006. The targets of the violence have been wide ranging¿from police officers to journalists, from clinics to discos.Governments on either side of the U.S.- Mexican border have been unable to control the violence. The war has spilled over into American cities and affects domestic policy issues ranging from immigration to gun control, making the border the nexus of national security and public safety concerns.Drawing on fieldwork along the border and interviews with officials at the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the Department of Defense, U.S. Border Patrol, and Mexican military officers, Paul Rexton Kan argues that policy responses must be carefully calibrated to prevent stoking more cartel violence, to cut the incentives to smuggle drugs into the United States, and to stop the erosion of Mexican governmental capacity.

From the 1950s through the 1990s, antisemitism everywhere seemed to be on the wane. But as Neil Kressel documents in this startling book, the Muslim world has resurrected in recent decades almost every diatribe that more than two millennia of European hostility produced against the Jews, and it has introduced many homegrown and novel modes of attack. Though it is impossible to determine precisely how many of the world¿s 1.2 billion Muslims hold anti-Jewish beliefs, Kressel finds that much bigotry comes from the highest levels of religious and political leadership.Compounding the problem, as Kressel demonstrates, many in the West refuse to recognize this issue. The growing epidemic of hate has been largely ignored, misunderstood, or downplayed, Kressel reveals, because of apathy, ignorance, confusion, bigotry, ideology, purported pragmatism, and misguided multiculturalism. Those who value human rights ignore antisemitism at their own risk, he cautions, noting that no antisemitic regime or movement has ever been otherwise reasonable or progressive. Kressel argues convincingly that Muslim antisemitism provides an acid test of the seriousness of Western liberalism. If the West fails to stem this growing tide, as now seems likely, future affairs will not go well for the true proponents of democracy. Kressel moves beyond sounding the alarm to explore the diverse religious, political, social, and psychological forces that have created and nurtured the new hostility to Jews in the Muslim world; he concludes with a bold and clear plan for what must be done to confront this hostility.

Rarely has a foreign policy event spawned such interest in international public opinion as has the Iraq War.

Remarkably, most conventional wisdom about the shifting balance of world power virtually ignores one of the most fundamental components of power: population. The studies that do consider international security and demographic trends almost unanimously focus on population growth as a liability. In contrast, the distinguished contributors to this volume - security experts from the Naval War College, American Enterprise Institute, and other think tanks - contend that demographic decline in key world powers now poses a profound challenge to global stability. The countries at greatest risk are in the developed world, where birthrates are falling and populations are aging. Many have already lost significant human capital, capital that would have helped them innovate and fuel their economy, man their armed forces, and secure a place at the table of world power. By examining the effects of diverging population trends between the United States and Europe and the effects of rapid population aging in Japan, India, and China, this book uncovers increasing tensions within the trans-Atlantic alliance and destabilizing trends in Asian security. Thus relative demographic decline may well make the world less, and not more, secure.

"Haunted Victory: The American Crusade to Destroy Saddam and Impose Democracy on Iraq" explores the dynamic trajectory of beliefs, actions, and their consequences in what will forever be debated as among the most controversial and costly operation in U.S. history in terms of American security, power, wealth, and honor. While many others have written about the Iraq War, William Nester unveils the moral dilemmas that entangled the George W. Bush administration and the American public through each stage of planning, selling, fighting, and attempting to end the Iraq War. He includes vivid revelations of the administration's private tugs-of-war over whether to invade Iraq and then how to fight that war. Nester pulls no punches and discloses who deserves credit for what went right and who deserves condemnation for what went wrong. In his engaging style, Nester has written a page-turner. General readers, students, and experts alike will eagerly welcome Haunted Victory for its concise and comprehensive analysis of the key facets of the Iraq War.

How do Arabs view America? How do Arabs learn about America? The answers to these questions have assumed tremendous importance since 9/11,because therein lies the key to influencing Arab opinion of the United States in a favorable direction. Attainment of this goal has, thus far, eluded diplomats, foreign policy experts, and military strategists.

It has long been held that humans need government to impose social order on a chaotic, dangerous world. How, then, did early humans survive on the Serengeti Plain, surrounded by faster, stronger, and bigger predators in a harsh and forbidding environment? Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers examines an array of natural experiments and accidents of human history to explore the fundamental nature of how human beings act when beyond the scope of the law. Pirates of the 1700s, the leper colony on Molokai Island, prisoners of the Nazis, hippie communes of the 1970s, shipwreck and plane crash survivors, and many more diverse groups¿they all existed in the absence of formal rules, punishments, and hierarchies. Paul and Sarah Robinson draw on these real-life stories to suggest that humans are predisposed to be cooperative, within limits.  What these ¿communities¿ did and how they managed have dramatic implications for shaping our modern institutions. Should today¿s criminal justice system build on people¿s shared intuitions about justice? Or are we better off acknowledging this aspect of human nature but using law to temper it? Knowing the true nature of our human character and our innate ideas about justice offers a roadmap to a better society.