Central Kansas Library System

The story of the man who won the battle of Midway and avenged Pearl Harbor for the United States. During the Battle of Midway in June 1942, US Navy dive bomber pilot Wade McClusky proved himself to be one of the greatest pilots and combat leaders in American history, but his story has never been told-until now.

It was Wade McClusky who remained calm when the Japanese fleet was not where it was expected to be. It was he who made the counterintuitive...

Combining biography and Washington's own writings with his own comments and sidebars, Beck explores our nation's first president and describes how Washington's beliefs and values--beliefs and values which united a country in an age even more fractious than our own--are especially important to remember today.

"Jude Maddox knows nothing of love or even light. He knows only his grim duty as the Hand of Death, to lead the Knights of the Eternal Star into a land filled with nightmares and certain demise. It's only when he sees her--a young woman with wild, amber eyes who's as fierce, defiant, and swift as the shadow beasts themselves--that he feels the warmth of life in his blood. The other Knights may fear their lethal commander, with his hard, merciless...

At the beginning of 1864, the Civil War was far from won; terrible and bloody Union setbacks and casualties lay ahead. Abraham Lincoln was facing a re-election battle as some northern Democrats were ready to start peace talks that could leave the Confederacy a separate slaveholding American nation and as his secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase, challenged him for the Republican nomination. But by the end of the year, the war's end was in sight,...

An account of the 101st Airborne Division during the 2003 Iraq War, from preparations in Kuwait to the occupation of Baghdad.

An epic history of the decline of American military leadership from World War II to Iraq. History has been kinder to the American generals of World War II - Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley - than to the generals of the wars that followed. Is it merely nostalgia? Thomas E. Ricks answers the question definitively: No, it is not, in no small part because of a widening gulf between performance and accountability. During the Second World War,...

"On the morning of November 20, 1776, General Charles Cornwallis overran patriot positions at Fort Lee, on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. The attack threw George Washington's army into turmoil. Thus began an American retreat across the state, which ended only after the battered rebels crossed the Delaware river at Trenton on December 7. It was a three-week campaign that marked the most dramatic and desperate period of the War for Independence."...