In the bleak and bitter cold of a copper mine in northern Japan, U.S. Marine Sergeant Major Charles Jackson was allowed to send a postcard his wife. He was allowed ten words—he used three: “I AM ALIVE!” This message, classic in its poignancy of suffering and despair captures only too well what it meant to be a Japanese prisoner-of-war in World War II.

Orthodox Christianity is one of the world’s major religions, and the Russian Orthodox Church is by far its largest denomination. Few know its history and spiritual richness, however. Neil Kent’s comprehensive new book fills that gap. The Russian Orthodox Church’s Eastern roots, including its dogma, canons, and practices, are explored, along with the political and military contexts in which it carried out its mission over the centuries.

In May 1945, as World War II drew to a close in Europe, some 30,000 Russian Cossacks surrendered to British forces in Austria, believing they would be spared repatriation to the Soviet Union. The fate of those among them who were Soviet citizens had been sealed by the Yalta Agreement, signed by the Allied leaders a few months earlier. Ever since, mystery has surrounded Britain’s decision to include among those returned to Stalin a substantial number of White Russians, who had fled their country after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and found refuge in various European countries.

In this intrepid study, noted Nigerian historian Onianwa Oluchukwu Ignatus investigates the air war component of the Nigerian-Biafran War, a crucial postcolonial conflict in Africa. It focuses on the Biafra’s air operations against oil installations and facilities owned by multinational oil companies in Nigeria. In addition to exploring global airpower historiography, this study explores the tactical aspects of how the renewed air war changed the military equation of the conflict when both sides were at loggerheads in peace settlement and relief arrangements.

A History of International Oil Politics is both an argument for multi-theoretical pluralism and a proposal for a theory-synergetic approach in international relations. Murad Gassanly, a distinguished international relations scholar and rising British politician, explores how international relations paradigms could be utilized in approaching the vital field of international oil politics, specifically historical issues of international energy politics and comparative case studies of energy transmission networks – the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline and the Southern Gas Corridor.

While much historiography has assumed that the period from 1890 to 1930 was liberal in Argentina, Agustina González Nuñez forcefully argues in Catholicism and Nation in Argentina that the Society of Jesus – the Jesuit order of the Roman Catholic Church - proved a powerful force in shaping an alternate discourse of Argentinian nationhood.

This book presents the most accurate picture of the United States Marine Corps at the onset of the American Civil War and describes the actions of the Marines at the Battle of First Manassas, or as the Union called it, Bull Run. To tell the story of the actions of the U.S. Marines in the Manassas Campaign, distinguished Marine Corps historians Bruce H. Norton and Phillip Gibbons begin with Marine actions in October 1859 at Harpers Ferry, where they were instrumental in suppressing John Brown’s raid on the town’s Federal Armory and attempted slave insurrection.

The point of departure for distinguished historian Richard C. Thornton’s insightful new assessment of the Reagan administration is Reagan’s overwhelming re-election in 1984. His first-term policies had placed the United States in the ascendancy over the Soviet Union, and he sought to capitalize on that success by bringing the Cold War to an end on favorable terms. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, proved increasingly unable to bear the costs of supporting its empire and client state and adopted a strategy of détente.

When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, he found America’s economy, defense, and global position weakened to the point of collapse. The previous seven years of attempted détente with the Soviet Union had resulted in the worst foreign policy failures in American history. As the distinguished diplomatic historian Richard C. Thornton shows in this thorough reassessment of Reagan’s presidency, written for the 40th anniversary of his election, the new president was determined to rebuild American economic and military power and to restore the Western Alliance.

Letters From a Yankee Doughboy is a collection of more than 125 letters written by Private 1st Class Raymond W. Maker, to his sister, Eva, a county nurse living in Framingham, Massachusetts, describing his everyday service in combat during World War 1. These letters, edited by Private Maker’s grandson, Major Bruce H. Norton (USMC retired) are accompanied by 365 pocket-diary entries that Raymond religiously kept throughout the year 1918.