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Contact: Sam Dorrance – Potomac Books, Dulles, VA. Email: [email protected]
Pub Month – March, 2015
Jack Ross
The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History
At a time when the word "socialist" is but one of numerous political epithets, divorced from its historical
context in America's political history, The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History presents a new,
mature understanding of America's most important minor political party of the twentieth century. From its
origins in the Labor and Populist movements at the end of the nineteenth century, to its heyday under the
charismatic Eugene V. Debs and persistence through the Depression and Second World War under the
steady leadership of "America's conscience," Norman Thomas, The Socialist Party of America guides
readers through the Socialist party's twilight, ultimate demise, and the successor groups that arose from
the party's collapse.
Rights: All
Territory: World
Jay M. Smith and Mary Willingham
Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports
Home of the legendary Tar Heels basketball team, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill enjoys a
sporting brand known the world over. The alma mater of Michael Jordan and Mia Hamm, winner of forty
national championships in six different sports, and a partner in what Sporting News calls "the best rivalry
in sports," UNC-Chapel Hill is a colossus of college athletics. Now, it has become ground zero in the
debate on how the $16 billion college sports industry operates--an industry that coexists uneasily within a
university system professly dedicated to education and research.
Written by notorious UNC athletics department whistleblower, Mary Willingham, and her close faculty
ally, Jay Smith, Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time
College Sports exposes the fraudulent inner workings that for decades have allowed barely literate
basketball and football players to take fake courses, earning fake degrees from one of the nation's top
universities while faculty and administrators looked the other way. In unobscured detail, Cheated
recounts the academic fraud in UNC's athletic department, even as university leaders attempted to sweep
the matter under the rug in order to keep the billion-dollar college sports revenue machine functioning,
and it makes an impassioned argument that the "student-athletes" in these programs are being cheated of
what, after all, has been promised them from the start--a college education.
Rights: All
Territory: World
Pub Month – April, 2015
Howard Ball
Working in the Killing Fields : Forensic Science in Bosnia
While the specificities of individual wars vary, they share a ubiquitous aftermath: the task of finding and
identifying the "disappeared." The Bosnian war of the early 1990s that destroyed the sovereign state of
Yugoslavia is no exception. In Working in the Killing Fields: Forensic Science in Bosnia, Howard Ball
focuses on the recent development of forensic science technology and on the work of forensic
professionals in Bosnia. The book offers a distinctive approach to war and its aftermath because it
balances examination of complex features of new scientific forensic technology with insights into the
lives of the men and women from around the globe who are tasked with finding and excavating bodies
and conducting pathological examinations, along with explaining the cause of death to both international
court criminal prosecutors and surviving families of the victims. Ball considers the physical dangers these
professionals regularly confront while performing their site excavations, as well as the emotional pain,
including PTSD, they contend with during their time in Bosnia and after they leave the killing fields.
Rights: All
Territory: World
Pub Month – May, 2015
J. Kevin Baird and Sangkot Marzuki
War Crimes in Japan-Occupied Indonesia : A Case of Murder by Medicine
Immediately following Pearl Harbor, Japan wrenched the meagerly defended Netherlands East Indies,
now known as Indonesia, from the hands of its Dutch colonialists. Suddenly, one of the world's largest
nations was at the service of the Japanese Imperial Army. A highly successful campaign recruited young
Indonesian men to support the Japanese war efforts, but hidden behind the façade of Asian brotherhood
was a sinister truth—during the brief 40 months of Japanese occupation, as many as several million
Indonesians were worked to death or summarily killed as expendable slave laborers known as the
romusha.
While many romusha were lost from all memory and record, nine hundred Indonesians were known
victims of a brutal and immoral medical experiment perpetuated by an increasingly desperate Imperial
Japan. With the tide of the war turning and in dire need of a means to protect their troops from tetanus in
anticipation of a land assault, the Japanese used romusha as human guinea pigs for a vaccine that had not
been sufficiently vetted. In a matter of days, all 900 patients had suffered protracted and agonizing deaths.
With the American and Allied forces poised to win the war, Japan needed a scapegoat for this
well-documented incident if it was to avoid war crimes prosecution. In War Cimes in Japan-Occupied
Indonesia: A Case of Murder by Medicine, J. Kevin Baird and Sangkot Marzuki chronicle the life and
wrongful execution of Achmad Mochtar, a native Indonesian and renowned scientist, against the
backdrop of a tropical medicine and the science of vaccination, not only to exonerate an innocent man,
but also to provide a picture of a nascent country emerging from the ravages of colonization and
occupation.
Rights: All
Territory: World
Pub Month – June, 2015
Sean Michael Chick
The Battle of Petersburg, June 15-18, 1864
The Battle of Petersburg was the culmination of the Virginia Overland Campaign, which pitted the Army
of the Potomac, led by Ulysses S. Grant and George Gordon Meade, against Robert E. Lee’s Army of
Northern Virginia. In spite of having outmaneuvered Lee, and after three days of battle in which the
Confederates at Petersburg were outnumbered by wide margins, the Union forces failed to take the city.
On the fourth day, the Union made a final futile attack that only added to already staggering casualties.
By holding Petersburg against great odds, the Confederacy arguably won its last great strategic victory of
the war.
In The Battle of Petersburg, June 15-18, 1864 Sean Michael Chick takes an in-depth look at an important
battle largely overlooked in Civil War studies. By exploring the tactical realities of linear combat that left
Union generals without the best means of achieving decisive results, Chick offers a new perspective on
why the Army of the Potomac’s leadership, from Grant down to his corps commanders, could not win a
battle in which it held colossal advantages. The study also discusses the battle in a wider context,
including politics, memory, and battlefield preservation, highlights the role played by African American
soldiers in a brilliantly executed night assault that nearly won the battle, and provides a detailed retelling
of the famed attack of the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery, which lost more men than any other Civil War
regiment in a single battle. While the latter phase of the war, dominated by entrenchments and attacks on
civilians, was one that veterans and the public alike wanted to forget, Chick demonstrates the lasting
significance of the Battle of Petersburg in our understanding of the Civil War.
Rights: All
Territory: World
David W. Jourdan
The Search for the Japanese Fleet: USS Nautilus and the Battle of Midway
In the extensive literature about the Battle of Midway, the role of American submarines has not received
adequate attention. In The Search for the Japanese Fleet: USS Nautilus and the Battle of Midway, David
W. Jourdan, one of the world's experts in undersea exploration, has reconstructed the critical part subs
played in the action that many chroniclers of World War II consider to be the turning point of the war in
the Pacific.
In the direct line of fire was one of the oldest submarines in the navy, USS Nautilus. On their first war
patrol, Lieutenant Commander William Brockman and his ninety-three-man crew wondered what would
war be like, and as events unfolded, their actions during an eight-hour period early in that voyage would
rank among the most important contributions of a submarine to the most decisive engagement in U.S.
Navy history.
Fifty-seven years later, Jourdan’s team of deep sea explorers set out to discover the history of the famous
Battle of Midway and find the ships the allied fleet sank. Key to the mystery was the Nautilus and her
underwater exploits. Relying on logs, diaries, chronologies, manuals, sound recordings, and interviews
with veterans of the battle, including men who spent most of the day of June 4th in the submarine conning
tower, the story breathes new life into the history of the epic engagement. Woven into the tale of World
War II is the modern drama of deep sea discovery as explorers deploy technological marvels to the
seafloor, over three miles down, to reveal the relics of history and commemorate fallen heroes.
Rights: All
Territory: World
Pub Month – July, 2015
Robert Jordan with Steve Fiffer
Desert Diplomat: Inside Saudi Arabia Following 9/11
In the spring of 2001, Robert Jordan was a Dallas attorney whom George Bush wanted for the
ambassadorship in Saudi Arabia. Not yet confirmed on 9/11, Jordan’s nomination sped through Congress
for approval and he found himself on the ground in the Kingdom by early October. Jordan had no prior
diplomatic experience—Saudi Arabia mandates that the U.S. Ambassador be a political appointee with
the ear of the president—and was forced to learn to run an embassy, deal with a foreign culture, and
protect U.S. interests on the job all in the wake of the most significant terrorist attack on the United States
in history. Furthermore, Jordan arrived in Saudi Arabia shortly after it became clear that the country had
spawned not only the mastermind Osama bin Laden, but also 15 of the 19 hijackers.
Desert Diplomat: Inside Saudi Arabia following 9/11 gives an inside account of the fascinating and
historic ambassadorship of Robert Jordan from 2001 through 2003. As the newly-installed ambassador,
he had to press the Saudis on terrorism while maintaining a positive relationship to ensure their
cooperation with the war in Afghanistan and invasion of Iraq. Throughout his appointment he had
first-hand dealings with the uppermost echelon of Washington power including President Bush, Dick
Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, and Tommy Franks while
working with the Crown Prince Abdullah and other top Saudi leaders. Desert Diplomat provides a honest
portrait of working with these prominent individuals, details of the historic decisions of Jordan’s tenure,
and a candid assessment the distressing amount of dysfunction in the way American foreign policy,
warfare, and intelligence-gathering was conducted.
Rights: All
Territory: World
Paul H. Robinson and Sarah M. Robinson
Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers: Lessons from Life Outside the Law
It has long been a commonly shared wisdom that humans need government to bring social order to what
would otherwise be a chaotic and dangerous world. But recent thinking suggests that governmental law is
not the wellspring of social order--after all, thousands of years ago early humans on the Serengeti Plain,
surrounded by faster, stronger, and bigger predators, had no government or law yet produced the most
successful species in the history of the planet. Presumably they found ways to cooperate and survive what
was a harsh and forbidding environment.
Does modern man retain this same cooperative inclination, or has it atrophied in humans' modern
conditions? Living Beyond the Law: Lessons from Pirates, Prisoners, Lepers, and Survivors mines the
amazing natural experiments and accidents of modern human history: shipwrecks, plane crashes, leper
colonies, pirate crews, escaped slaves, Gold Rush prospectors, prison uprisings, utopian hippie
communes, Nazi concentration camps, and a host of other situations in which modern man has been
thrown into a situation beyond the reach of law, to explore the fundamental nature of human beings and
how we act when we don’t necessarily have to behave.
History is rife with examples of how people perform when rules of civility collapse and here, Sarah and
Paul Robinson explain that humans in such situations are neither devils nor angels. The real stories
included in this book show that modern individuals naturally incline toward reasonable action, even in
desperate conditions where survival is at issue. Applying insights from psychology, biology, political
science, and social science to these historical and contemproary examples demonstrates that an innate
cooperative spirit prevails only in the presence of a system to punish serious wrongdoing within the group
and only when that punishment is perceived as just. Living Beyond the Law provides an optimistic picture
of human nature--wherein humans are predisposed to be cooperative within limits--that is essential to
understanding our contemporary society and to formulate modern criminal law and policy.
Rights: All
Territory: World
Bruce E. Stanley
Outsourcing Security: Private Military Contractors and U.S. Foreign Policy
The use of private security contractors by the United States is not a recent phenomenon. In a
post-Vietnam world, as political leaders reduce their nations' military force structure, they face conflicts
beyond their anticipated scope and duration. Finding themselves faced with a decreasing supply of
national troops, dwindling national defense budgets, and the ever-rising demand for boots on the ground
in global conflicts and humanitarian emergencies, decision-makers are left with no choice but to legalize
and legitimize the use of private military contractors or PMCs. Outsourcing Security: Private Military
Contractors and U.S. Foreign Policy examines the impact that bureaucratic controls and the
permissiveness of security environments have on the US military's use of PMCs and analyzes the courses
for growth of PMCs during the late 20th and early 21st century by examining the relationship between the
increase of the private security industry and five potential explanatory variables tied to
supply-and-demand theory.
Using a structured, focus comparison method to examine six historical cases, including the U.S.
intervention in Iraq in 1991 (Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm), the U.S. intervention in Bosnia in
1995 (Operation Joint Endeavor), and the U.S, Intervention in Iraq in 2003 (Operations Iraqi
Freedom), Outsourcing Security reveals a supply-and-demand framework consistent with the government
prescribed appointment of private military contractors. Author Bruce Edwin Stanley provides the only
work that moves beyond a descriptive account of the rise of PMCs and lays out a precise theory to explain
the phenomenon.
Rights: All
Territory: World
D. Robert Worley
Orchestrating the Instruments of Power : A Critical Examination of the U.S. National Security
System
National security, a topic routinely discussed behind the closed doors of Washington's political
scientists and policymakers, is believed to be an insider's game. All too often, such highly specialized
knowledge is assumed to place issues beyond the grasp--and interest--of the American public. Author D.
Robert Worley disagrees. The US national security system, designed after World War II and
institutionalized through a decades-long power conflict with the Soviet Union, is inadequate for the needs
of the twenty-first century; and while general consensus for a metamorphosis of the system is no longer in
dispute, a clear and direct route for a new national security strategy proves elusive.
Furnishing both specialists and interested citizens with the tools to assist in future national security
reforms and discussion about reform, Orchestrating the Instruments of Power: A Critical Examination of
the U.S. National Security System collects and synthesizes the concepts of America's economic, political,
and military instruments of power.
Rights: All
Territory: World
Pub Month – August, 2015
Diane Kiesel
She Can Bring Us Home : The Life of Dorothy Boulding Ferebee
Long before it became the slogan of the Obama campaign, Dr. Dorothy Ferebee (1898-1980) lived by the
motto “Yes, We Can.” An African American elite descended from lawyers, journalists, politicians, and
possibly a white governor of Virginia, Ferebee was an obstetrician and civil rights activist from
Washington, D.C. She was articulate, attractive, and effective as well as relentlessly self-promoting and
tragically flawed. At a time when African Americans faced Jim Crow segregation, menial job
opportunities and lynch mobs, Dorothy Ferebee advised presidents on civil rights and assisted foreign
governments on public health issues. In high heels and a silk dress, she stood up to gun toting plantation
owners, determined to bring health care to sharecroppers during the Great Depression through her famous
Mississippi Health Project. She was president of the powerful National Council of Negro Women in the
nascent civil rights era and later ran the 200,000 member Alpha Kappa Alpha black service sorority.
A household name in black America for 40 years, known to presidents from FDR through Jimmy Carter,
Ferebee was the media darling of the thriving black press. Ironically, her fame faded and her relevance
waned as African Americans achieved the political power for which she fought. In She Can Bring Us
Home: The Life of Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, Diane Kiesel brings Ferebee’s extraordinary story of
struggle and sacrifice to a new generation.
Rights: All
Territory: World
Drew Pearson
Washington Merry-Go-Round : The Drew Pearson Diaries, 1960-1969
For most of three decades, Drew Pearson was the most familiar journalist in the United States. In his daily
newspaper column—the most widely syndicated in the nation—and on radio and television broadcasts, he
chronicled the political and public policy news of the nation. Meanwhile, he also worked his way into the
inner circles of policy makers in the White House and Congress, lobbying for issues he believed would
promote better government and world peace.
Pearson, however, still found time to record his thoughts and observations in his personal diary. Published
here for the first time, Washington Merry-Go-Round presents Pearson’s private impressions on life inside
the Beltway. Pearson held the confidence of presidents—especially Lyndon B. Johnson—congressional
leaders, media moguls, political insiders, and dozens of otherwise unknown sources of information. His
direct interactions with the DC glitterati, including Bobby Kennedy and Douglas MacArthur, are featured
throughout his diary, drawing the reader into the compelling political intrigues of 1960s Washington and
providing the mysterious backstory on the famous and the notorious of the era.
Rights: All
Territory: World