In September 1814, as British troops approached their home town of Plattsburgh, New York, a group of teenaged students from Plattsburgh Academy volunteered to defend their home town against the invaders.

Moving through the jungle near the Cambodian border on May 18, 1967, a company of American infantry observed three North Vietnamese Army regulars, AK-47s slung over their shoulders, walking down a well-worn trail in the rugged Central Highlands. Startled by shouts of “Lai day, lai day” (“Come here, come here”), the three men dropped their packs and fled. The company commander, a young lieutenant, sent a platoon down the trail to investigate. Those few men soon found themselves outnumbered, surrounded, and fighting for their lives. Their first desperate moments marked the beginning of a series of bloody battles that lasted more than a week, one that survivors would later call “the nine days in May border battles.” Nine Days in May is the first full account of these bitterly contested battles. Part of Operation Francis Marion, they took place in the Ia Tchar Valley and the remote jungle west of Pleiku. Fought between three American battalions and two North Vietnamese Army regiments, this prolonged, deadly encounter was one of the largest, most savage actions seen by elements of the storied 4th Infantry Division in Vietnam. Drawing on interviews with the participants, Warren K. Wilkins recreates the vicious fighting in gripping detail. This is a story of extraordinary courage and sacrifice displayed in a series of battles that were fought and won within the context of a broader, intractable strategic stalemate. When the guns finally fell silent, an unheralded American brigade received a Presidential Unit Citation and earned three of the twelve Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division in Vietnam.

The 1st April 1989 marked the first day of peace in Namibia. After seemingly endless years of dispute between South Africa and the UN, after 23 years of bush warfare between SWAPO and the SADF, which had spread from Namibia into Angola and, at times, into Zambia, Namibia was finally on course for UN supervised free and fair elections in November 1989, which would lead to independence in 1990. The South Africans had stuck to the letter of the agreements and even more. By 1st April they had demobilised the powerful SWA Territory Force, drastically reduced the strength of the SADF and confined the residue still remaining in Namibia to their bases. When the Sun rose on that fateful day, it would catch the shadows of only five SAAF Alouette helicopter gunships, emasculated of their deadly cannons, and dispersed along 400-km of the Namibian border with Angola. SWAPOAs leader, Sam Nujoma, knew it, for the knowledge was international property via the UN.

It is 1939 and although Australia is about to go to war, it doesn’t quite realise yet that the situation is serious. Deep in the working-class Melbourne suburb of Richmond it is business—your own and everyone else’s—as usual. And young Kip Westaway, failed scholar and stablehand, is living the most important day of his life.

"[A] masterly and often riveting account of King’s ordeal and the 1960 'October Surprise' that may have altered the course of modern American political history." —Raymond Arsenault, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) The authors of Douglass and Lincoln present fully for the first time the story of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s imprisonment in the days leading up to the 1960 presidential election and the efforts of three of John F. Kennedy’s civil rights staffers who went rogue to free him—a move that changed the face of the Democratic Party and propelled Kennedy to the White House. Less than three weeks before the 1960 presidential election, thirty-one-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested at a sit-in at Rich’s Department Store in Atlanta. That day would lead to the first night King had ever spent in jail—and the time that King’s family most feared for his life. An earlier, minor traffic ticket served as a pretext for keeping King locked up, and later for a harrowing nighttime transfer to Reidsville, the notorious Georgia state prison where Black inmates worked on chain gangs overseen by violent white guards. While King’s imprisonment was decried as a moral scandal in some quarters and celebrated in others, for the two presidential candidates—John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon—it was the ultimate October surprise: an emerging and controversial civil rights leader was languishing behind bars, and the two campaigns raced to decide whether, and how, to respond. Stephen and Paul Kendrick’s Nine Days tells the incredible story of what happened next. In 1960, the Civil Rights Movement was growing increasingly inventive and energized while white politicians favored the corrosive tactics of silence and stalling—but an audacious team in the Kennedy campaign’s Civil Rights Section (CRS) decided to act. In an election when Black voters seemed poised to split their votes between the candidates, the CRS convinced Kennedy to agitate for King’s release, sometimes even going behind his back in their quest to secure his freedom. Over the course of nine extraordinary October days, the leaders of the CRS—pioneering Black journalist Louis Martin, future Pennsylvania senator Harris Wofford, and Sargent Shriver, the founder of the Peace Corps—worked to tilt a tight election in Kennedy’s favor and bring about a revolution in party affiliation whose consequences are still integral to the practice of politics today. Based on fresh interviews, newspaper accounts, and extensive archival research, Nine Days is the first full recounting of an event that changed the course of one of the closest elections in American history. Much more than a political thriller, it is also the story of the first time King refused bail and came to terms with the dangerous course of his mission to change a nation. At once a story of electoral machinations, moral courage, and, ultimately, the triumph of a future president’s better angels, Nine Days is a gripping tale with important lessons for our own time.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author lends his remarkable narrative skills to the story of the most famous POW this country has known. In I Am a Soldier, Too, Bragg lets Jessica Lynch tell the story of her capture in the Iraq War in her own words--not the sensationalized ones of the media's initial reports. Here we see how a humble rural upbringing leads to a stint in the military, one of the most exciting job options for a young person in Palestine, West Virginia. We see the real story behind the ambush in the Iraqi Desert that led to Lynch's capture. And we gain new perspective on her rescue from an Iraqi hospital where she had been receiving care. Here Lynch’s true heroism and above all, modesty, is allowed to emerge, as we're shown how she managed her physical recovery from her debilitating wounds and contended with the misinformation--both deliberate and unintended--surrounding her highly publicized rescue. In the end, what we see is a uniquely American story of courage and true heroism.

The enlisted men in the United States Army during the Indian Wars (1866-91) need no longer be mere shadows behind their historically well-documented commanding officers. As member of the regular army, these men formed an important segment of our usually slighted national military continuum and, through their labors, combats, and endurance, created the framework of law and order within which settlement and development become possible. We should know more about the common soldier in our military past, and here he is. The rank and file regular, then as now, was psychologically as well as physically isolated from most of his fellow Americans. The people were tired of the military and its connotations after four years of civil war. They arrayed their army between themselves and the Indians, paid its soldiers their pittance, and went about the business of mushrooming the nation’s economy. Because few enlisted men were literarily inclined, many barely able to scribble their names, most previous writings about them have been what officers and others had to say. To find out what the average soldier of the post-Civil War frontier thought, Don Rickey, Jr., asked over three hundred living veterans to supply information about their army experiences by answering questionnaires and writing personal accounts. Many of them who had survived to the mid-1950’s contributed much more through additional correspondence and personal interviews. Whether the soldier is speaking for himself or through the author in his role as commentator-historian, this is the first documented account of the mass personality of the rank and file during the Indian Wars, and is only incidentally a history of those campaigns.