Potomac Books

National security, a topic routinely discussed behind closed doors by Washington's political scientists and policy makers, is believed to be an insider's game. All too often this highly specialized...

Organized Crime in Mexico takes a hard look at the dire implications of the pervasive and powerful criminal enterprises in northern Mexico, comparing and contrasting the present threat to past...

Faced with a decreasing supply of national troops, dwindling defense budgets, and the ever-rising demand for boots on the ground in global conflicts and humanitarian emergencies, decision makers are...

More than twelve million immigrants, many of them children, passed through Ellis Island's gates between 1892 and 1954. Children also came through the "Guardian of the Western Gate," the detention...

Few people have garnered so much enduring interest as Sir Richard Burton. A true polymath, Burton is best known today for his translations of the Kama Sutra and Arabian Nights. Yet, Africa stood at...

While researching an article on Gen. George S. Patton, Kevin M. Hymel made an astonishing discovery. Browsing the Library of Congress's Patton index, he found lists of photo albums. Opening one, he...

The Pattons is an exceptional portrait of the famous military family, eloquently written by the grandson of its most illustrious member, George S. Patton. Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley...

Pauline Frederick Reporting is the biography of the life and career of the first woman to become a network news correspondent. After no less an authority than Edward R. Murrow told her there was no...

On October 23, 1983, nearly simultaneous suicide truck bombings killed 241 U.S. peacekeepers in their barracks at the Beirut International Airport (BIA) and 58 French paratroopers at their...

Personality, Character, and Leadership in the White House is the first book-length work to present truly scientific personality evaluations of the American presidents. This benchmark work...

Few figures in modern French history have aroused more controversy than Marshal Philippe P?tain, who rose from obscurity to great fame in the First World War only to fall into infamy during the dark...

Few figures in modern French history have aroused more controversy than Marshal Philippe P?tain, who rose from obscurity to great fame in the First World War only to fall into infamy during the dark...

Philip II of Macedonia (382-336 BCE), unifier of Greece, author of Greece's first federal constitution, founder of the first territorial state with a centralized administrative structure in Europe,...

In FBI terms, leaders who pick up their own brass casings at the firing range are more effective than those who expect someone else to do it for them. To those at the bureau, this small action speaks...

Bruce F. Pauley draws on his family and personal history to tell a story that examines the lives of Volga Germans during the eighteenth century, the pioneering experiences of his family in late...

For thousands of years pirates, privateers, and seafaring raiders have terrorized the ocean voyager and coastal inhabitant, plundering ship and shore with impunity. From the victim's point of view,...

It has long been held that humans need government to impose social order on a chaotic, dangerous world. How, then, did early humans survive on the Serengeti Plain, surrounded by faster, stronger, and...

After seventeen years as the team physician for the NFL's Seattle Seahawks, Dr. Pierce Scranton describes the frenzied world of treating injured professional athletes while also coping with team...

On August 1, 1943, an enormous armada of America B-24 Liberator bombers roared at nearly treetop level over the peaceful farms and villages of Romania. This mission was Operation Tidal Wave. Its...

Remarkably, most conventional wisdom about the shifting balance of world power virtually ignores one of the most fundamental components of power: population. The studies that do consider...

With landslide political changes in Europe in the early 1990s, politicians and military planners started to contemplate their possible effects on military postures. Most countries, however, did not...

Postcards From Pit Road is a revealing and lively account of the 2002 NASCAR season. Noted motor sports journalist Monte Dutton covers everything at each stop on the 2002 Winston Cup tour, from the...

Predators is a riveting introduction to the murky world of Predator and Reaper drones, the CIA's and U.S. military's most effective and controversial killing tools. Brian Glyn Williams combines...

Dramatic changes have taken place in the last decade with respect to the views of the American Jewish community toward Israel and Zionism. Since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000, the...

The radicalization of Muslims and Islamic institutions in the United States, Europe, and across the Islamic world has fostered a new generation of Islamist activists, many of them willing to use...

Monte Dutton's Rebel With a Cause provides an inside look at emerging NASCAR superstar Tony Stewart's 2000 racing season. Stewart's impressive 2000 campaign has not disappointed the fans who...

The epic World War II battles between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union are the subject of a vast literature, but little has been published in English on the experiences of ordinary...

In Red Rogue, Bruce Bechtol analyzes the changing nature of North Korea's national defense, foreign policy, and illicit economic activities in the post-9/11 era. He describes how North Korea has...

Even as we celebrate the return of our military from wars in the Middle East, we are becoming increasingly aware of the struggles that await veterans on the home front. Red, White, and True offers...

What if, on September 11, 1814, the United States had lost the close-run battle that Winston Churchill called the "most decisive" of the War of 1812? With a victory at Plattsburgh, would the British...