Although the war in the Pacific is usually considered a carrier war, it was the cruisers that dominated the early fighting. This thrilling duel presents the cruiser clashes during the crucial battles for Guadacanal in 1942, highlighting the Battle of Savo Island on the August 9 and the Battle of Cape Esperance October 11-12th , 1942. The first was an overwhelming Japanese victory that resulted in the loss of four Allied cruisers. However, in the latter, the Americans managed to successfully turn the tables despite the fact that the was fought through the night under dangerous conditions.

This book presents a side-by-side view of the design and development of the opposing weapons systems, illustrated with newly commissioned digital artwork. It uses first-hand accounts to bring the desperate battles to life and explain why the American forces suffered early on, but eventually had their revenge.

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Bob Woodward - Obama's War (2010).jpg

In Obama's Wars, Bob Woodward provides the most intimate and sweeping portrait yet of the young president as commander in chief. Drawing on internal memos, classified documents, meeting notes and hundreds of hours of interviews with most of the key players, including the president, Woodward tells the inside story of Obama making the critical decisions on the Afghanistan War, the secret campaign in Pakistan and the worldwide fight against terrorism.

At the core of Obama's Wars is the unsettled division between the civilian leadership in the White House and the United States military as the president is thwarted in his efforts to craft an exit plan for the Afghanistan War.

"So what's my option?" the president asked his war cabinet, seeking alternatives to the Afghanistan commander's request for 40,000 more troops in late 2009. "You have essentially given me one option.... It's unacceptable."

"Well," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates finally said, "Mr. President, I think we owe you that option."

It never came. An untamed Vice President Joe Biden pushes relentlessly to limit the military mission and avoid another Vietnam. The vice president frantically sent half a dozen handwritten memos by secure fax to Obama on the eve of the final troop decision.

President Obama's ordering a surge of 30,000 troops and pledging to start withdrawing U.S. forces by July 2011 did not end the skirmishing.

General David Petraeus, the new Afghanistan commander, thinks time can be added to the clock if he shows progress. "I don't think you win this war," Petraeus said privately. "This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives."

Hovering over this debate is the possibility of another terrorist attack in the United States. The White House led a secret exercise showing how unprepared the government is if terrorists set off a nuclear bomb in an American city--which Obama told Woodward is at the top of the list of what he worries about all the time.

Verbatim quotes from secret debates and White House strategy sessions--and firsthand accounts of the thoughts and concerns of the president, his war council and his generals--reveal a government in conflict, often consumed with nasty infighting and fundamental disputes.

Woodward has discovered how the Obama White House really works, showing that even more tough decisions lie ahead for the cerebral and engaged president.

Obama's Wars offers the reader a stunning, you-are-there account of the president, his White House aides, military leaders, diplomats and intelligence chiefs in this time of turmoil and danger.

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Cameron B. Wesson - Households and Hegemony, Early Creek Prestige Goods, Symbolic Capital, and Socia l Power (2008).jpg

USA Books1 - Cameron B. Wesson - Households and Hegemony, Early Cre...estige Goods, Symbolic Capital, and Social Power 2008.jpg

The long-term significance of the household as a social and economic forceâ€”particularly in relation to authority positions or institutionsâ€”has remained relatively unexplored in North American archaeology. Households and Hegemony makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the role households played in long-term cultural change after contact with European traders and settlers.Â Drawing together information from ethnohistoric records and data from one of the largest excavations in Alabama's history (the Fusihatchee Project), Cameron B. Wesson reexamines changes in early Creek culture from before and after contact with Europeans, beginning in the sixteenth century. Casting the household as a multifaceted cultural institution, he contends that important social, economic, and political transformations occurred during this timeâ€”changes that redefined the relationship between Creek households and authority. As avenues for exchange with outsiders broadened and diversified, prestige trade goods usually associated with Creek elites became increasingly available to individual households, so that contact with Europeans contributed to empowerment for Creek households and a weakening of traditional chiefly authority.
Â Wesson demonstrates that change within Creek culture in the historic period was shaped by small-scale social units and individual decisions rather than by the effects of larger social and political events. Households and Hegemony enriches our understanding of Creek history and makes a key contribution to comparative archaeological models of cultural change.

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Cameron B. Wesson - Households and Hegemony, Early Creek Prestige Goods, Symbolic Capital, and Socia l Power (2008).pdf

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Claudia B. Haake - The State, Removal and Indigeno us Peoples in the United States and Mexico, 1620-2 000 (2007)(1).jpg

USA Books1 - Claudia B. Haake - The State, Removal and Indigenous ...ples in the United States and Mexico, 1620-2000 20071.jpg

This book investigates the forced migration of the Delawares in the United States and the Yaquis in Mexico, focusing primarily on the impact removal from tribal lands had on the (ethnic) identity of these two indigenous societies. It analyzes Native responses to colonial and state policies to determine the practical options that each group had in dealing with the states in which they lived. Haake convincingly argues that both nation-states aimed at the destruction of the Native American societies within their borders. This exemplary comparative, transnational study clearly demonstrates that the legacy of these attitudes and policies are readily apparent in both countries today. This book should appeal to a wide variety of academic disciplines in which diversity and minority political representation assume significance.

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Claudia B. Haake - The State, Removal and Indigeno us Peoples in the United States and Mexico, 1620-2 000 (2007)(1).pdf

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Mark Falcoff - Panama's Canal, What Happens When t he United States Gives a Small Country What It Wan ts (1998).jpg

USA Books1 - Mark Falcoff - Panamas Canal, What Happens When the Un...nited States Gives a Small Country What It Wants 1998.jpg

Author Mark Falcoff focuses on one of the most ignored subjects in contemporary American foreign policy analysis: at noon on December 31, 1999, the United States will hand control of the Panama Canal over to the government of Panama. This may sound like a small problem, but consider: roughly five percent of the world's trade flows through the canal's locks, and most of this business has either its origin or destination in the United States. The canal, in other words, plays a crucial role in both the global and American economies. Although Falcoff views the transfer--so far--as a model of postimperialism since the signing of the 1978 Carter-Torrijos treaty, he's not entirely sanguine about the future. Panama's political class, for example, is having second thoughts about a substantial U.S. pullout and its attendant financial and security consequences. Falcoff provides a comprehensive account of the transfer and its origins, and capably conveys an enormous amount of detailed information without ever imposing a burden on the reader. A chapter on the canal's history would have given Panama's Canal a more rounded quality, but Falcoff nevertheless presents a model work of political analysis focused on a topic that cries out for more attention.

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Mark Falcoff - Panama's Canal, What Happens When t he United States Gives a Small Country What It Wan ts (1998).pdf

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Matthew D. Lassiter - The Myth of Southern Excepti onalism (2009).jpg

More than one-third of the population of the United States now lives in the South, a region where politics, race relations, and the economy have changed dramatically since World War II. Yet historians and journalists continue to disagree over whether the modern South is dominating, deviating from, or converging with the rest of the nation. Has the time come to declare the end of southern history? And how do the stories of American history change if the South is no longer seen as a region apart--as the conservative counterpoint to a liberal national ideal?

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Nancy L. Sanders - America's Black Founders, Revol utionary Heroes & Early Leaders with 21 Activities (2010).jpg

Sanders includes well-known figures such as Phillis Wheatley, Crispus Attucks, and James Forten in her narrative, but also enriches traditional accounts of the period by explaining the contributions of lesser-known patriots. For example, she talks about black troops who fought at Bunker Hill and Valley Forge. She also tells the story of James Armistead Lafayette, a black soldier who spied on Benedict Arnold and Lord Cornwallis. Most of the activities help make this period real to young people. The "Explore Your Family Tree" project gives print and online resources that can help readers discover the roles their own ancestors may have played in the American Revolution. This book also includes information about how African Americans created social and political networks to support one another during the earliest days of the Republic. Sanders makes excellent use of primary sources, providing the original texts of documents and petitions that demanded equal rights and the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

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Nancy L. Sanders - America's Black Founders, Revol utionary Heroes & Early Leaders with 21 Activities (2010).pdf

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Randal L. Hall - Lum and Abner, Rural America and the Golden Age of Radio (2007).jpg

In the 1930s radio stations filled the airwaves with programs about rural Americans struggling through the Great Depression. One of the most popular of these shows was Lum and Abner, the brainchild of two young businessmen from Arkansas. Chester "Chet" Lauck and Norris "Tuffy" Goff based Pine Ridge, the community they created on the air, on the hamlet of Waters, Arkansas. The title characters, who are farmers, local officials, and keepers of the Jot 'Em Down Store, manage to entangle themselves in a variety of hilarious dilemmas.
In Lum and Abner: Rural America and the Golden Age of Radio, historian Randal L. Hall contributes an extended introduction explaining the history and importance of the program, its creators, and its national audience and then presents a treasure trove of twenty-nine previously unavailable scripts from the show's earliest period.

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Steven C. Levi - Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldf ields, A Multicultural Adventure (2007).jpg

In this lively narrative, Steven C. Levi captures the color and the riches of the Alaska Gold Rush with legendary characters from E.T. Barnette, who founded his own city (Fairbanks), established his own bank (Washington Alaska), and then absconded with every dime in the vault to George Hinton Henry, the father of Alaska journalism, who was run out of every town where he tried to establish a newspaper.

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Steven C. Levi - Boom and Bust in the Alaska Goldf ields, A Multicultural Adventure (2007).pdf

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Larry Starr, Christopher Waterman - American Popul ar Music, The Rock Years (2005).jpg

Rock, country, pop, soul, funk, punk, folk, hip-hop, techno, grunge--it's all here. In American Popular Music: The Rock Years, Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman take readers on a fascinating journey through the rich historical and stylistic landscape of American rock. An abridged version of the authors' acclaimed American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV, this volume includes chapters 8-14 of the longer book along with new introductory and concluding chapters.

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John Bryant - Melville and Repose. The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance (1993).jpg

John Bryant's book is a strong and significant argument for the centrality of humor in Melville's novels. The purpose of Melville and Repose is dual: to ground the uses of romantic humor in Melville in sensitive readings of contemporaneous European and American writings, and to offer a definitive account of the comic as the shaping force of Melville's narrative voice throughout the major phase of his literary career. Arguing that Melville saw writing as a series of attempts to reach an unreachable union of word and thought ("voicing the voiceless"), Bryant shows how Melville attempted to place the reader in an equivalent condition of "tense repose". He posits that Melville incorporated laughter into his writing as a means of teasing the reader into deeper thought. To this end, Melville fused a "rhetoric of geniality" and "picturesque sensibility" adopted from the British with a "rhetoric of deceit" borrowed from the American tall tale, thus creating his own amiably cosmopolitan "rhetoric of aesthetic repose". Looking closely at Typee, Moby Dick, and The Confidence-Man, Bryant offers unique and ground-breaking readings of Melville's work - particularly with respect to the rhetoric of humor and repose, the picturesque, and cosmopolitanism. Thorough research into American culture and recent Melville manuscript findings, an engaging style, and full, scholarly readings combine to make this historicist study a welcome addition to the libraries of Americanists and Melville scholars and enthusiasts.

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John Bryant - Melville and Repose. The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance (1993).pdf

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Herbert Inhaber, Sidney Carroll - How Rich Is Too Rich, Income and Wealth in America (1992).jpg

"a new twist on the eternal question of inequitable income distribution, though they focus on wealth (accumulated income) rather than income. The authors document the dramatic disparities in the distributions of income and wealth and describe the problems these cause. Their solution, the `alternative distribution system," is quite simple: tax inheritance rather than estates. Individuals could inherit up to $1 million tax free. Each succeeding million would be taxed at progressively higher rates. This plan, they argue, would force an estate to be distributed among more people and would cuase beneficiaries to use inheritances more `vigorously and creatively.' The authors do an excellent job of making obscure economic data understandable."

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Herbert Inhaber, Sidney Carroll - How Rich Is Too Rich, Income and Wealth in America (1992).pdf

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William I. Robinson - A Faustian Bargain, U.S. Int ervention in the Nicaraguan Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era (1992).jpg

USA Books1 - William I. Robinson - A Faustian Bargain, U.S. Interv...American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era 1992.jpg

As an analysis of the controversial US role in the 1990 Nicaraguan elections, this book exposes the duplicitous and possibly illegal intervention of the US in the electoral process of a sovereign nation. Drawing on secret documents and interviews, the author brings to light the clandestine activities of US officials and examines the implications of the "electoral intervention project" for US foreign policy and for social change in the Third World in the post-Cold War era.

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William I. Robinson - A Faustian Bargain, U.S. Int ervention in the Nicaraguan Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era (1992).pdf

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Stephen Spector - Evangelicals and Israel, The Sto ry of American Christian Zionism (2008).jpg

I would like to recommend, in very strong terms, Evangelicals and Israel: the Story of American Christian Zionism. I have read with admiration this very instructive and carefully researched book. It is, to date, the best study of the topic and currently the best place for students and interested readers to learn about this highly complex and controversial topic in a balanced and dispassionate manner. In the last decade there has been a growing awareness of the special relationship that has developed between Israel and conservative evangelical Christians, but no one has, as yet, carried the kind of comprehensive and vigorous research that this book brings forward.

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Michael R. Beschloss - The Conquerors, Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 19 41-1945 (2003).jpg

USA Books1 - Michael R. Beschloss - The Conquerors, Roosevelt, Tru...nd the Destruction of Hitlers Germany, 1941-1945 2003.jpg

A New York Times bestseller, The Conquerors reveals how Franklin Roosevelt's and Harry Truman's private struggles with their aides and Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin affected the unfolding of the Holocaust and the fate of vanquished Nazi Germany.
With monumental fairness and balance, The Conquerors shows how Roosevelt privately refused desperate pleas to speak out directly against the Holocaust, to save Jewish refugees and to explore the possible bombing of Auschwitz to stop the killing. The book also shows FDR's fierce will to ensure that Germany would never threaten the world again. Near the end of World War II, he abruptly endorsed the secret plan of his friend, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, to reduce the Germans to a primitive existence -- despite Churchill's fear that crushing postwar Germany would let the Soviets conquer the continent. The book finally shows how, after FDR's death, President Truman rebelled against Roosevelt's tough approach and adopted the Marshall Plan and other more conciliatory policies that culminated in today's democratic, united Europe.

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Michael R. Beschloss - The Conquerors, Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 19 41-1945 (2003).pdf

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Martin W. Husk - The 111th New York Volunteer Infa ntry, A Civil War History (2009).jpg

This regimental history follows the 111th New York Volunteer Infantry's service from muster through victory. Drawing on many first-hand accounts and primary sources, it provides details on the towns from which the regiment was organized and the backgrounds of the men who served in its ranks. Battles in which the regiment fought, including Harpers Ferry, Gettysburg and Petersburg, are covered in detail, with close unit-level coverage as well as information on the overall strategy and the regiment's place in the greater conflict. An appendix covers in depth the October 1864 capture of 83 111th soldiers by the Confederacy and their subsequent imprisonment, during which many died from hunger and disease.

About the Author
Martin W. Husk is a project manager for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He lives in Cary, North Carolina.

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Martin W. Husk - The 111th New York Volunteer Infa ntry, A Civil War History (2009).pdf

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Jim Roetzel, Jim Zipp, Roger J. Lederer - Birds of New England (2008).jpg

The variety of habitats and seasonal influences throughout New England are conducive to over 700 species of birds during different times of the year. As experienced bird-watchers and masterful bird photographers, Jim Roetzel and Jim Zipp have traveled extensively across the New England region sighting the native bird population up close. Their photos capture the attributes of over 200 avian species in exquisite, colorful detail, reflecting specific behavior and habitats in each image, as only experienced and passionate birders can.

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