The United States, founded as an extension of the British Empire, never planned to accept a multipolar world upon its ascension to dominance in the early twentieth century. The U.S. prospered through geographic isolation and two world wars even as it regularly descends into race-based political chaos due to a historical legacy of internal chattel slavery. Its foreign policy is founded on militarism, the major force in advancing global economic hegemony over all competitors. This 15-chapter book begins with the two-ocean Spanish-American War, preparing Washington for World War I and then explores how Washington prompted corporations and universities to enable the Axis Powers. Last Western Empire addresses how Soviet military victory over Germany in World War II prompted Washington's Cold War. In the aftermath of world war, the U.S. engaged in a succession of interventions, including Puerto Rico and Korea. The book highlights President Kennedy's fleeting attempt at peaceful coexistence, followed by the about face and the unleashing of the military by his presidential successors: Johnson and Nixon, with the support of the political establishment. President Carter armed Iraq to attack Iran while the Reagan-Bush regime aided both sides to covertly finance contra terrorism against Nicaragua, exposing their unconstitutional foreign policy decisions. Major historical events are analyzed, from the dismantling of the Soviet Union to 9/11 and its aftermath, as the U.S. used the attacks as pretext to invade, occupy, and seize Iraq's oil. U.S. foreign policy in the first two decades of the twentieth century reveal a penchant to consolidate and expand its sphere of influence, from reinforcing control over Latin America through the overthrow of Honduran democracy to seeking to erode Russia's influence. Last Western Empire demonstrates that Washington continues to expand global power and influence through full-spectrum dominance, for example, demonizing of Russia, China, and Iran and supporting unsavory forces in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia through funding, training and financially supporting opposition to governments that do not conform to its imperialist designs.

Perhaps the most sophisticated and complex of shows in HBO's recent history, Deadwood has surprisingly little coverage in our current scholarship. Grounding contemporary anxieties about race and class, domesticity and American exceptionalism in its nineteenth-century setting, Deadwood revises our understanding of a formative period for the American nation through a re-examination of one of the main genres through which this national story has been transmitted: the Western. With contributions from scholars in American studies, literature, and film and television studies, The Last Western situates Deadwood in the context of both its nineteenth-century setting and its twenty-first-century audience. Together, these essays argue for the series as a provocative meditation on both the state and historical formation of U.S. empire, examining its treatment of sovereign power and political legitimacy, capital accumulation and dispossession, racial and gender identities, and social and family structures, while attending to the series' peculiar and evocative aesthetic forms. What emerges from this collection is the impressive range of Deadwood's often contradictory engagement with both nineteenth and twenty-first century America.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Gates of Europe offers “a stirring account of an extraordinary moment” in Russian history (Wall Street Journal) On Christmas Day, 1991, President George H. W. Bush addressed the nation to declare an American victory in the Cold War: earlier that day Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned as the first and last Soviet president. The enshrining of that narrative, one in which the end of the Cold War was linked to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the triumph of democratic values over communism, took center stage in American public discourse immediately after Bush's speech and has persisted for decades -- with disastrous consequences for American standing in the world. As prize-winning historian Serhii Plokhy reveals in The Last Empire, the collapse of the Soviet Union was anything but the handiwork of the United States. Bush, in fact, was firmly committed to supporting Gorbachev as he attempted to hold together the USSR in the face of growing independence movements in its republics. Drawing on recently declassified documents and original interviews with key participants, Plokhy presents a bold new interpretation of the Soviet Union's final months, providing invaluable insight into the origins of the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the outset of the most dangerous crisis in East-West relations since the end of the Cold War. Winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize Choice Outstanding Academic Title BBC History Magazine Best History Book of the Year

Filled with unforgettable stories of emperors, generals, and religious patriarchs, as well as fascinating glimpses into the life of the ordinary citizen, Lost to the West reveals how much we owe to the Byzantine Empire that was the equal of any in its achievements, appetites, and enduring legacy. For more than a millennium, Byzantium reigned as the glittering seat of Christian civilization. When Europe fell into the Dark Ages, Byzantium held fast against Muslim expansion, keeping Christianity alive. Streams of wealth flowed into Constantinople, making possible unprecedented wonders of art and architecture. And the emperors who ruled Byzantium enacted a saga of political intrigue and conquest as astonishing as anything in recorded history. Lost to the West is replete with stories of assassination, mass mutilation and execution, sexual scheming, ruthless grasping for power, and clashing armies that soaked battlefields with the blood of slain warriors numbering in the tens of thousands.

In a brisk revisionist history, William Rowe challenges the standard narrative of Qing China as a decadent, inward-looking state that failed to keep pace with the modern West. This original, thought-provoking history of China's last empire is a must-read for understanding the challenges facing China today.

John Micheal O'Flynn traces the development of the position of the generalissimo, or emperor's commander of the military forces, in the western part of the Roman Empire during the first century AD. From the arrogant barbarian Arbogast, who treated the youthful emperor Valentinian as his puppet, to Odovacar, who dismissed the last western emperor and was pronounced king of Italy in 476, the generalissimos' seizure of power led to dissolution and chaos from which would emerge the political patterns of medieval and modern Europe.