Books published by Potomac Books Inc

In Touched with Fire, David Lowe chronicles the professional and personal life of this larger-than-life man best known for his fight in the civil rights movement and establishing the "one man, one vote" law.

Imprisoned in luxurious surroundings immediately after Pearl Harbor, Axis diplomats in America anxiously awaited forced repatriation and uncertain futures in a world at war.

A firsthand look at one of the least accessible and yet most politically significant countries on earth, Descendants of Cyrus taps is a beautifully written travelogue full of Iranian culture, history, and politics.

In examining over thirty unlikely presidential candidates from the past two centuries, Mark Stein reveals how fringe candidates have impacted the nation's political landscape.

On Tuesday, November 17, 1942, aircraft C-47 #60 climbed slowly over the Himalayas growing smaller and smaller until finally it faded from sight, never to be seen again-until 70 years later.

During the Cold War, stories of espionage became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imagination of readers and filmgoers alike as secret police quietly engaged in surveillance under the shroud of impenetrable secrecy. And curiously, in the post¿Cold War period there are no signs of this enthusiasm diminishing. The opening of secret police archives in many Eastern European countries has provided the opportunity to excavate and narrate for the first time forgotten spy stories. Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe brings together a wide range of accounts compiled from the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate, and the Ukrainian KGB files. The stories are a complex amalgam of fact and fiction, history and imagination, past and present. These stories of collusion and complicity, betrayal and treason, right and wrong, and good and evil cast surprising new light on the question of Cold War certainties and divides.   Purchase the audio edition.

Over the past couple of decades in America, the enduring, complicated divides of ideology, geography, party, class, religion, and race mutated into something deeper and more ominous. America now houses two distinct tribes, generally balanced in political power, fighting not just to advance their own side, but also to poke, prod, and defeat the other. The opposition between these tribes drowns out their love of country, each side scanning current events to advance their tribe¿s aims and narrative rather than the nation¿s. Recent survey data provides troubling evidence that Americans of both political parties sense the unraveling of a broadly shared consensus of American identity, and about seven in ten Republicans and Democrats fear that the United States is losing its national identity. Our country has lost its ¿story¿ ¿ the narrative that unites us around a common multi-generational project and gives an overarching sense of meaning and purpose to our history. Too often modern American history and political commentary ignores a grand narrative and instead focuses on a series of power conflicts between oppressor and oppressed. With contributions from leading thinkers drawing on expertise within their fields, Our American Story: The Search for a Shared National Narrative, edited by Joshua Claybourn, offers a series of essays providing a framework for the American story. Drawing on their backgrounds as lawyer, historians, and public officials, each contributor will approach it with a unique perspective. Our American Story seeks to feature provocative essays taking up the arduous task of weaving a new national narrative in which all Americans can see themselves.

Late in life, former President Lyndon Johnson told a reporter that he didn¿t believe the Warren Commission¿s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President John Kennedy. Johnson felt Cuban President Fidel Castro was behind it. After all, Johnson continued, Kennedy was running ¿a damned Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean,¿ giving Castro reason to retaliate. Surprisingly, despite continuing public fascination with the CIA and with Kennedy¿s assassination, no one has written about Murder, Inc. and its connection with Kennedy¿s death. James Johnston was a lawyer for the 1975 Senate Intelligence Committee, which investigated and first reported on the assassination plots and their relation to Kennedy¿s murder, and so brings a special expertise to the subject. Murder, Inc. is a chronological narrative of the CIA¿s assassination operations from their start, a few months before Kennedy took office, to their end with Kennedy¿s assassination. It continues through the many subsequent investigations. The book is sourced largely from the National Archives¿ huge holdings on the Kennedy assassination that have been declassified under the Assassination Records Review Act. While some proponents of the Act expected the secret documents would contain bombshells about the assassination, many deal instead with Murder, Inc. n a nutshell, the story is that in 1960, the CIA engaged the Mafia to kill Castro. One CIA officer termed it simply a ¿contract.¿ This arrangement continued through the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Frustrated by the lack of results, Kennedy ordered the Agency to come up with a better plan. By the spring of 1963, it proposed that rather than kill Castro, it would orchestrate a coup to overthrow him. This plan moved into high-gear in September 1963 when the CIA began meeting secretly outside Cuba with a friend of Castro who was willing to lead the coup. But, he also said they would need to kill Castro and asked the CIA to provide him with assassination weapons: rifles with telescopic sights and an exotic poison dart-gun. The CIA put off agreeing until four days before Kennedy was killed. As a result, it was meeting with the Castro assassin to arrange delivery of the weapons at the very moment Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Within weeks of becoming President, Lyndon Johnson ordered the operation stopped. His Murder, Inc. comment is an obvious reference to what he was told before making this decision.

Drawing on government and private World War II archives, Cartron gives the first detailed account of the only failed mission of the smuggler Charbonnier-when 29 Allied soldiers in a group of 35 were captured on their way to freedom over the French Pyrenees.

A Civil War-era fight between father and son, divided by the conflict, and the prison conditions of the period are investigated in relation to deep research in this return from the author of "The Confederate Dirty War".

Brooke King has been asked over and over what it¿s like to be a woman in combat, but she knows her answer is not what the public wants to hear. The answers people seek lie in the graphic details of war¿the sex, death, violence, and reality of it all as she experienced it. In her riveting memoir War Flower, King breaks her silence and reveals the truth about her experience as a soldier in Iraq. Find out what happens when the sex turns into secret affairs, the violence is turned up to eleven, and how King¿s feelings for a country she knew nothing about as a nineteen-year-old become more disturbing to her as a thirty-year-old mother writing it all down before her memories fade into oblivion. The story of a girl who went to war and returned home a woman, War Flower gathers the enduring remembrances of a soldier coming to grips with post-traumatic stress disorder. As King recalls her time in Iraq, she reflects on what violence does to a woman and how the psychic wounds of combat are unwittingly passed down from mother to children. War Flower is ultimately a profound meditation on what it means to have been a woman in a war zone and an unsettling exposé on war and its lingering aftershocks. For veterans such as King, the toughest lesson of service is that in the mind, some wars never end¿even after you come home.  Purchase the audio edition.

Bold Venture tells an important and riveting untold wartime story of the American airmen who flew combat missions over Hong Kong during the Second World War. Steven K. Bailey sheds light on a key narrative about a larger American campaign against Japanese forces throughout occupied China. Bailey begins with the discovery of an unexploded one-thousand-pound bomb in Hong Kong in 2014, which unfolds a rich history of American heavy bombers in World War II. As Bailey fills in the missing gaps of these heavy bombers¿ role in World War II, he reveals the story behind the American air raids and the airmen who were eventually shot down over Hong Kong. Bold Venture¿s exploration of World War II and its aftermath in Hong Kong goes into detail about the British civilians and soldiers who were released from prison and repatriated, and a U.S. military investigative team¿s recovery of the remains of the crew of Bold Venture, the B-25 that went down in Hong Kong in March 1945. Today unexploded aircraft bombs are unearthed with frightening regularity by construction crews in Hong Kong. Residents are eager to know where these bombs originated, who dropped them, when they dropped them, and what--or who--the targets were. Bailey¿s account helps answer some of these questions and also provides a unique historical perspective for Americans seeking to understand our contemporary military context and the complexities of foreign military involvement.

After the death of Joanie Holzer Schirm¿s parents in 2000, she found hundreds of letters, held together by rusted paperclips and stamped with censor marks, sent from Czechoslovakia, Great Britain, China, and South and North America, along with journals, vintage film, taped interviews, and photographs. In working through these various materials documenting the life of her father, Oswald ¿Valdik¿ Holzer, she learned of her family history through his remarkable experiences of exile and loss, resilience and hope. In this posthumous memoir, Schirm elegantly re-creates her father¿s youthful voice as he comes of age as a Jew in interwar Prague, escapes from a Nazi-held army unit, practices medicine in Chinäs war-ravaged interior, and settles in the United States to start a family. Introducing us to a diverse cast of characters ranging from the humorous to the menacing, Holzer¿s life story is an inspirational account of survival during wartime, a cinematic epic spanning multiple continents, and ultimately a tale with a twist¿a book that will move readers for generations to come.  Purchase the audio edition.

Shattered Minds is the first book to investigate how American military bureaucracies have let our troops down by failing to upgrade one of the most important pieces of personal safety equipment - the combat helmet. Two longtime employees of North Dakota defense contractor Sioux Manufacturing discovered that the required density of the Kevlar material woven into netting of combat helmets was being shorted. After bringing their discovery to the attention of management, rather than cleaning up the illegal practice, their boss accused them of stealing company secrets and having an adulterous affair. Both employees were fired, leading to a lawsuit and a judgment they won in court which eventually brought the company¿s bad faith practices to light. Around the same time, a separate whistleblower, retired Navy doctor Robert Meaders, was pulled into a bizarre and irrational struggle with Army and Marine bureaucracies when he found out from his Marine grandson that the protective webbing inside the military helmets provided to troops was inadequate. Why was the military so resistant to upgrading its combat equipment, the most essential gear used to protect from Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) that plagues soldiers long after their days of combat? By interweaving these two sets of whistleblowers¿ stories, authors Robert Bauman and Dina Rasor explain why the military, despite news coverage with revelations about these whistleblowers' personal efforts, continued to do the indefensible. Using their combined 85 years of knowledge covering and investigating the Pentagon, the authors try to explain why such a betrayal of our troops has persisted. They also offer information on how the public, press, and military departments can fix the problem and give U.S. troops a better helmet that will help them survive their service to the United States of America.

On August 6, 1974, a bomb exploded at Los Angeles International Airport, killing three people and injuring thirty-five others. It was the first time an airport had been bombed anywhere in the world. A few days later, police recovered a cassette tape containing a chilling message: “This first bomb was marked with the letter A, which stands for Airport,” said a voice. “The second bomb will be associated with the letter L, the third with the letter I, etc., until our name has been written on the face of this nation in blood.” In The Alphabet Bomber: A Lone Wolf Terrorist Ahead of His Time, internationally renowned terrorism expert Jeffrey D. Simon tells the gripping tale of Muharem Kurbegovic, a bright but emotionally disturbed Yugoslav immigrant who single-handedly brought Los Angeles to a standstill during the summer of 1974. He had conjured up the fictitious group “Aliens of America,” but it was soon discovered that he acted alone in a one-man war against government and society. The story of the Alphabet Bomber is about an extraordinary manhunt to find an elusive killer, a dogged prosecutor determined to bring him to justice, a pioneering female judge, and a devious mastermind whose heinous crimes foreshadowed the ominous threats we face today from lone wolf terrorists.

Common Cause provides a nuanced look at the home-front atmosphere that existed in parts of the United States before and during the Great War, exploring themes of patriotism, jingoism, and exclusion. An introduction and explanatory notes by John Maxwell Hamilton and Amy Solomon Whitehead provide context.