New Books: History

The Achilles Trap masterfully untangles the people, ploys of power, and geopolitics that led to America's disastrous war with Iraq, and dramatizes America's fundamental miscalculations during its decades-long relationship with Saddam Hussein. Beginning with Saddam's rise to power in 1979 and the birth of Iraq's secret nuclear weapons program, Steve Coll traces Saddam's motives by way of his inner circle. This was a man whose reasoning was impossible to reduce to a simple explanation, and the CIA and successive presidential administrations failed to grasp integral nuances of his paranoia, resentments, and inconsistencies.

The Globe tells the story of humanity's quest to discover the shape of the world. Philosophers in ancient Greece deduced the true shape of the Earth in the fourth century BCE; the Romans passed the knowledge to India, and from there it spread to Baghdad and Central Asia. In early medieval Europe, Christians debated the matter but long before the time of Columbus, the Catholic Church had accepted that the Earth is round and not flat. However, it wasn't until the seventeenth century that Jesuit missionaries finally convinced the Chinese that their traditional square-earth cosmology was mistaken.

Plymouth Colony brings together for the first time fascinating first-hand narratives written by English settlers with a selection of carefully chosen documents that illuminate the intricacies of Anglo-Native encounters, the complex role of Christian Indians, and the legacy of Massasoit, Weetamoo, Metacom ("King Philip"), and other Wampanoag leaders who faced the ongoing incursion into their lands of settlers from across the sea.

In 1943, America declared that Japanese-held Taiwan would return to China at the conclusion of World War II. However, the Communist Party came to power in China and the defeated Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, fled to Taiwan, where he was afforded US protection. The specter of conflict has loomed ever since. In The Struggle for Taiwan, Khan offers the first comprehensive history of the triangular relationship between the United States, China, and Taiwan, exploring America's ambivalent commitment to Taiwan's defense, China's bitterness about the separation, and Taiwan's impressive transformation into a flourishing democracy.

In a fast-paced narrative of soaring ideals and sordid politics, of civil war and foreign invasion, the award-winning historian Alan Taylor presents a pivotal twenty-year period in which North America's three largest countries--the United States, Mexico, and Canada--all transformed themselves into nations. The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights, where Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story. The rollicking story of liberal ideals, political venality, and corporate corruption marked the dawn of the Gilded Age in North America.

This book brings together archaeological and linguistic evidence to provide a sweeping global history of ancient Africa, tracing how the continent played an important role in the technological, agricultural, and economic transitions of world civilization. Christopher Ehret takes readers from the close of the last Ice Age some ten thousand years ago, when a changing climate allowed for the transition from hunting and gathering to the cultivation of crops and raising of livestock, to the rise of kingdoms and empires in the first centuries of the common era. Ehret takes up the problem of how we discuss Africa in the context of global history

The entire vast, modern American intelligence system--the amalgam of three-letter spy services of many stripes--can be traced back to the dire straits the world faced at the dawn of World War II. Prior to 1940, the United States had no organization to recruit spies and steal secrets or launch covert campaigns against enemies overseas and just a few codebreakers, isolated in windowless vaults. It was only through Winston Churchill's determination to mobilize the US in the fight against Hitler that the first American spy service was born, built from scratch against the background of the Second World War.

Recognized as the iconic foremother of Black women's intellectual history and activism, Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964) penned one of the most forceful and enduring statements of Black feminist thought to come of out of the nineteenth century. The Portable Anna Julia Cooper brings together Cooper's major collection of essays, A Voice from the South, along with several previously unpublished poems, plays, journalism and selected correspondences, including over thirty previously unpublished letters between Anna Julia Cooper and W. E. B. Du Bois.

A radical abolitionist, sailor, and miner, John Jacobs has a life story that is as global as it is American. Born into slavery, by 1855, he had fled both the South and the United States altogether, becoming a stateless citizen of the world and its waters. That year, he published his life story in an Australian newspaper, far from American power and its threats. Unsentimental and unapologetic, Jacobs radically denounced slavery and the state, calling out politicians and slaveowners, critiquing America’s founding documents, and indicting all citizens who maintained the racist and intolerable status quo.

As far back as ancient Greece, physicians were notorious for administering painful and often fatal treatments -- and charging for the privilege. For the most effective treatment, the ill and injured went to the women in their lives. Yet somehow, between 1650 and 1740, the domestic female and the physician switched places in the cultural consciousness: she became the ineffective, potentially dangerous quack, he the knowledgeable, trustworthy expert. A revelatory history of medicine that draws on a vast body of archival material, The Apothecary's Wife challenges the myths of the triumph of science and instead uncovers the fascinating truth.