In War and the Ivory Tower, David L. Schalk explores the public role of the intellectual in times of national crisis. He compares American responses to the Vietnam War with French responses to the Algerian War, finding many similarities in the way intellectuals voiced their outrage at the policies of their governments. At a time when national crises abound but protest is out of fashion, and intellectuals are possibly a dying species, this book presents a needed reexamination of what it means for intellectuals to speak out on issues of international importance.

Decades later, the Vietnam War remains a divisive memory for American society. Partisans on all sides still debate why the war was fought, how it could have been better fought, and whether it could have been won at all.

In this major study, a noted expert on the war brings a needed objectivity to these debates by examining dispassionately how and why President Lyndon Johnson and his administration conducted the war as they did. Drawing on a wealth of newly released documents from the LBJ Library, including the Tom Johnson notes from the influential Tuesday Lunch Group, George...

In his last years as president of the United States, an embattled George Washington yearned for a time when his nation would have "the strength of a Giant and there will be none who can make us afraid." At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States seemed poised to achieve a position of world power beyond what even Washington could have imagined.

In The American Century and Beyond: U.S. Foreign Relations, 1893-2014, the second volume of a new split paperback edition of the award-winning From Colony to Superpower, George C. Herring recounts the rise of the...