The early 1980s were a tense time. The nuclear arms race was escalating, Reagan administration officials bragged about winning a nuclear war, and superpower diplomatic relations were at a new low. Nuclear war was a real possibility and antinuclear activism surged. By 1982 the Nuclear Freeze campaign had become the largest peace movement in American history. In support, celebrities, authors, publishers, and filmmakers saturated popular culture with critiques of Reagan's arms buildup, which threatened to turn public opinion against the president.

Alarmed, the Reagan administration...

The American war in Vietnam was one of the most morally contentious events of the twentieth century, and it produced an extraordinary outpouring of poetry. Yet the prodigious poetic voice of its American participants remains largely unheard; the complex ethical terrain of their experiences underexplored. In A Shadow on Our Hearts, Adam Gilbert rectifies these oversights by utilizing the vast body of soldier-poetry to examine the war's core moral issues.

The soldier-poets provide important insights into the ethical dimensions of their physical and psychological surroundings before,...

The story of America's "War on Drugs" usually begins with Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan. In Containing Addiction, Matthew R. Pembleton argues that its origins instead lie in the years following World War II, when the Federal Bureau of Narcotics -- the country's first drug control agency, established in 1930 -- began to depict drug control as a paramilitary conflict and sent agents abroad to disrupt the flow of drugs to American shores.

U.S. policymakers had long viewed addiction and organized crime as profound domestic and trans-national threats. Yet World War II presented new...