The remarkable untold story of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the five extraordinary men he used to pull America into World War II In the dark days between Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt sent five remarkable men on dramatic and dangerous missions to Europe. The missions were highly unorthodox and they confounded and infuriated diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic. Their importance is little understood to this day. In fact, they were crucial to the course of the Second World War. The envoys were magnificent, unforgettable characters. First off the mark was Sumner Welles, the chilly, patrician under secretary of state, later ruined by his sexual misdemeanors, who was dispatched by FDR on a tour of European capitals in the spring of 1940. In summer of that year, after the fall of France, William “Wild Bill” Donovan—war hero and future spymaster—visited a lonely United Kingdom at the president’s behest to determine whether she could hold out against the Nazis. Donovan’s report helped convince FDR that Britain was worth backing. After he won an unprecedented third term in November 1940, Roosevelt threw a lifeline to the United Kingdom in the form of Lend-Lease and dispatched three men to help secure it. Harry Hopkins, the frail social worker and presidential confidant, was sent to explain Lend-Lease to Winston Churchill. Averell Harriman, a handsome, ambitious railroad heir, served as FDR’s man in London, expediting Lend-Lease aid and romancing Churchill’s daughter-in-law. Roosevelt even put to work his rumpled, charismatic opponent in the 1940 presidential election, Wendell Willkie, whose visit lifted British morale and won wary Americans over to the cause. Finally, in the aftermath of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Hopkins returned to London to confer with Churchill and traveled to Moscow to meet with Joseph Stalin. This final mission gave Roosevelt the confidence to bet on the Soviet Union. The envoys’ missions took them into the middle of the war and exposed them to the leading figures of the age. Taken together, they plot the arc of America’s trans¬formation from a divided and hesitant middle power into the global leader. At the center of everything, of course, was FDR himself, who moved his envoys around the globe with skill and élan. We often think of Harry S. Truman, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and George F. Kennan as the authors of America’s global primacy in the second half of the twentieth century. But all their achievements were enabled by the earlier work of Roosevelt and his representatives, who took the United States into the war and, by defeating domestic isolationists and foreign enemies, into the world. In these two years, America turned. FDR and his envoys were responsible for the turn. Drawing on vast archival research, Rendezvous with Destiny is narrative history at its most delightful, stirring, and important.

A story of the wise and the shortsighted, the bold and the timid, the generous and the grasping men and women who have been the stuff of American reform.

This comprehensive history of America in the 1920s presents the decade's most compelling controversies as precursors to today's culture wars. Americans have been embroiled in debate over culturally significant issues including race and immigration, gender and sexuality, and morality and religion for decades. American culture as we know it is an amalgamation of generations of Americans' voices in these national debates, many of which began in the 1920s. This book provides a detailed account of 1920s America within the context of these issues. The first on its subject written by a historian in almost 20 years, it offers a fresh perspective of America during the Roaring Twenties and on the history of the very same social and political battles we struggle with today. Useful for students and history enthusiasts alike, this work gives readers a holistic view of a popular decade and encourages discussion about its continued relevance to modern society. Other important topics covered include city values versus rural values, creationism versus evolutionism, the modern woman, and Prohibition.

This volume brings together an international team of distinguished political and economic historians to take stock of earlier work on the origins and impact of the Marshall Plan, and reinterpret it in light of revolutionary upheavals in Central and Easter Europe.

"A Date with Destiny; A Sex-Trafficking Story of Survival is the 1st book in the trilogy written by Eleana M Lukes, BES, MS. This book is a TRUE story about sex trafficking right here in the United States. Author Eleana M Lukes is in the process of editing the second book in the trilogy which highlights her true story of resiliency and survival while being trapped in a life of sex-trafficking in the state of Minnesota. The second book is titled "Don?t Call Me Destiny, That Is Not My Name," and will be available July 11th 2020. The second book is a great follow-up to the first book. The final book in the trilogy is "Just Call Me Blessed" which ties together her transition from victim, to survivor, to thriver. Eleana was trafficked by then called and still may be, one of the biggest prostitution rings in United States History. The Notorious Evans Family out of Minneapolis, Minnesota"--amazon.com.