In March 1896 a well-disciplined and massive Ethiopian army did the unthinkable-it routed an invading Italian force and brought Italy's war of conquest in Africa to an end. In an age of relentless European expansion, Ethiopia had successfully defended its independence and cast doubt upon an unshakable certainty of the age-that sooner or later all Africans would fall under the rule of Europeans. This event opened a breach that would lead, in the aftermath of world war fifty years later, to the continent's painful struggle for freedom from colonial rule.

Raymond Jonas offers the first comprehensive account of this singular episode in modern world history. The narrative is peopled by the ambitious and vain, the creative and the coarse, across Africa, Europe, and the Americas-personalities like Menelik, a biblically inspired provincial monarch who consolidated Ethiopia's throne; Taytu, his quick-witted and aggressive wife; and the Swiss engineer Alfred Ilg, the emperor's close advisor. The Ethiopians' brilliant gamesmanship and savvy public relations campaign helped roll back the Europeanization of Africa.

Figures throughout the African diaspora immediately grasped the significance of Adwa, Menelik, and an independent Ethiopia. Writing deftly from a transnational perspective, Jonas puts Adwa in the context of manifest destiny and Jim Crow, signaling a challenge to the very concept of white dominance. By reopening seemingly settled questions of race and empire, the Battle of Adwa was thus a harbinger of the global, unsettled century about to unfold.

During the morning hours of September 17, 1868, on a sandbar in the middle of the Arikaree Fork of the Republican River in eastern Colorado, a large group of Cheyenne Dog Men, Arapaho, and Sioux attacked about fifty civilian scouts under the command of Major George A. Forsyth. For two days the scouts held off repeated charges before the Indian warriors departed. For nine days, the scouts lived off the meat of their horses until additional forces arrived to relieve them. Five scouts were killed and eighteen wounded during the encounter that later came to be known as the Battle of Beecher Island.

Monnett’s compelling study, a finalist for the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award in 1993, was the first to examine the Beecher Island battle and its relationship to the overall conflict between American Indians and Euroamericans on the central plains of Colorado and Kansas during the late 1860s. Focusing on the struggle of the Cheyenne Dog Men warrior society to defend the lands between the Republican River valley and the Smoky Hill River valley from Euroamerican encroachment, Monnett presents original reminiscences of American Indian and Euroamerican participants.

Since its original release several developments and an important original source document have come to light and offer new information. The second edition presents and examines these new discoveries and developments that moderate the original interpretive causes and more modern effects of this historical episode. Scholars and general readers alike interested in this important episode in the post–Civil War conflicts on the Great Plains and western history will find this new edition of The Battle of Beecher Island and the Indian War of 1867–1869 illuminating, surprising, and perhaps even controversial.
 

The Marquis de Lafayette, a nineteen-year-old French youth, arrived in Philadelphia at the end of July 1777. He was a rich aristocrat, but he was unpretentious, charming, and eager to learn. Introduced to George Washington, he joined the commander-in-chief at the Battle of Brandywine in September, where he proved that he was courageous. Soon after, the British occupied Philadelphia and prepared to control the Delaware River, vital as a supply route. In November, the marquis volunteered to go to New Jersey with Major General Nathanael Greene and a detachment sent to defend Fort Mercer, a Delaware River fort controlling shipping access to Philadelphia. Mercer was threatened by an approaching enemy column led by Lord Charles Cornwallis. The Continentals were unable to reach Fort Mercer in time to save it, but Lafayette had ridden ahead of Greene to reconnoiter. He discovered a 350-man picket of German riflemen (jägers) guarding Cornwallis’s camp, and with ten light dragoons, 150 riflemen from Daniel Morgan’s Rifle Corps, and perhaps 200 New Jersey militia, he attacked. In forty-five minutes, Lafayette’s little band drove the jägers back two and a half miles, almost to Cornwallis’s camp. When the news of Lafayette’s small victory reached the Continental Congress at York, Pennsylvania, the delegates were elated—this was the only good news amid the gloom over the loss of Philadelphia and control of the Delaware River. Massachusetts delegate James Lovell relayed a glowing account of the skirmish to John Adams, concluding with “Genl. Greene says the Marquis seems determined to court Danger. I wish more were so determined.” 
In The Battle of Gloucester, 1777, archaeological historian Garry Wheeler Stone, with the assistance of historian Paul W. Schopp, recreates this minor but important clash during the Philadelphia campaign. Relying on both primary source documents and the latest archaeological interpretations, the authors have determined the course of this fascinating “battle,” as Benjamin Franklin later proclaimed it to be. As a result of this action, when Washington requested that Lafayette be given a division, Congress agreed. On December 4, 1777, the marquis, promoted to major-general, took command of the brigades of Generals Woodford and Scott to begin what would be a glorious career in American service.

Small Battles: Military History as Local History
Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin, Series Editors
Small Battles offers a fresh and important new perspective on the story of America’s early conflicts. It was the small battles, not the clash of major armies, that truly defined the fighting during the colonial wars, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the hostilities on the frontiers. This is dramatic military history as seen through the prism of local history—history with a depth of detail, a feeling for place, people, and the impact of battle and its consequences that the story of major battles often cannot convey. The Small Battles series focuses on America’s military conflicts at their most intimate and revealing level.

The Battle of Harlem Heights is an underappreciated milestone in American military history. The engagement on upper Manhattan Island on September 16, 1776, was the first successful battle for George Washington’s troops in the quest for independence from Great Britain and presaged the emergence of an effective fighting force among the citizen-soldiers who made up the Continental Army. The cooperative effort of regiments from New England, Maryland, and Virginia—whose men lacked any sense of national identity before the Revolution—indicated the potential for this fledgling army to cohere around a common national purpose and affiliation and become the primary instrument for securing America’s right to self-rule.
The action began when a contingent of rangers led by Col. Thomas Knowlton of Connecticut encountered British light infantry while conducting a reconnaissance mission on Washington’s orders. What began as a skirmish transformed into a full-fledged battle as both sides reinforced, and a heavy engagement continued for several hours until, with ammunition running low, the British withdrew. Washington decided not to pursue and risk confrontation with a larger force, thereby keeping his army intact. In The Battle of Harlem Heights, 1776, David Price conveys the significance of the Continental Army’s first victory and highlights the role of one of its key participants, the largely forgotten Knowlton—the “father of American military intelligence”—who gave his life during the action while urging his rangers forward. No matter how many times U.S. Army troops have recorded a battlefield success over the past two and a half centuries—whether on American soil, in a European wood, across a Middle Eastern desert, or on a Pacific island—one thing about that history remains indisputable. They did it first at Harlem Heights.

Small Battles: Military History as Local History
Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin, Series Editors
Small Battles offers a fresh and important new perspective on the story of America’s early conflicts. It was the small battles, not the clash of major armies, that truly defined the fighting during the colonial wars, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the hostilities on the frontiers. This is dramatic military history as seen through the prism of local history—history with a depth of detail, a feeling for place, people, and the impact of battle and its consequences that the story of major battles often cannot convey. The Small Battles series focuses on America’s military conflicts at their most intimate and revealing level.

The defeat of the Ottomans by the Holy League fleet at the Battle of Lepanto (1571) was among the most celebrated international events of the sixteenth century. This volume anthologizes the work of twenty-two poets from diverse social and geographical backgrounds who composed Latin poetry, often modeled on Vergil and other Roman poets, in response to the news of the battle, the largest Mediterranean naval encounter since antiquity. Among the poems included is the two-book Austrias Carmen by the remarkable Juan Latino, a black African former slave who became a professor of Latin in Granada. The poems, including two previously unpublished, are here translated into English for the first time, along with fresh editions of the Latin texts.

On August 19, 1780, near a ford of the Enoree River in northwest South Carolina, a short and savage encounter occurred between Rebel militia and a combined force of Loyalist militia and Provincial regulars. Despite the Rebel’s being outnumbered more than two to one, it was an overwhelming victory for the American cause. The Rebels defended from the top of a ridge, inflicted heavy casualties on the Loyalist force as it advanced, then charged and drove the enemy from the field of battle. Just as Bunker Hill had done on a larger scale in Massachusetts, this clash of hundreds of soldiers in the Carolina backwoods invigorated the Rebel cause and led directly to the Battle of King's Mountain, the turning point of the war in the South. This battle is also remarkable because instead of one leader the Rebel force was directed by a joint command of three colonels.
The Battle of Musgrove’s Mill, 1780, by award-winning historian John Buchanan, begins by describing the situation in South Carolina following the British invasion of 1780 before introducing the three colonels: Isaac Shelby, James Williams, and Elijah Clarke. These men led Rebel militia from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia in an effort to disrupt British operations and their Loyalist support. The colonels and other leaders led mounted Rebel militia in a sweeping and bloody guerilla war that played an essential role in opening a path to the eventual British surrender at Yorktown and Britain’s loss of America.

Small Battles: Military History as Local History
Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin, Series Editors
Small Battles offers a fresh and important new perspective on the story of America’s early conflicts. It was the small battles, not the clash of major armies, that truly defined the fighting during the colonial wars, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the hostilities on the frontiers. This is dramatic military history as seen through the prism of local history—history with a depth of detail, a feeling for place, people, and the impact of battle and its consequences that the story of major battles often cannot convey. The Small Battles series focuses on America’s military conflicts at their most intimate and revealing level.

Difficult as it is to imagine today, in 1937 America’s two leading media companies fought over which had the better claim to Shakespeare. The Battle of the Bard explores this episode in US cultural history when NBC and CBS competed to perform Shakespeare for an American audience in a low-risk setting that they hoped would bring prestige to their networks. The resulting fourteen broadcasts are among the more remarkable recreations of Shakespeare of their time. This lively and engaging book shows the cultural dominance of radio at the time, and tells the story of why the networks each wanted to lord Shakespeare’s prestige over the other, how they put their series together, the critical reception, and the cultural impact and legacies of the broadcasts.

“Excellent.”—Steven Poole, The Wall Street Journal • “Terrific.”—Liz Else, New Scientist (Best Popular Science Books of 2025 So Far) • “A brilliant overview of the state of modern cosmology.”—Alex O'Connor, alexoconnor.com • “This will expand readers’ minds.”—Publishers Weekly • One of Smithsonian's Ten Best Science Books of 2025
 
“An intellectual feast.”—Carlo Rovelli • “A must-read.”—Sabine Hossenfelder • “Wonderfully broad and open-minded.”—Roger Penrose • “Remarkable.”—Brian Keating

A thrilling exploration of competing cosmological origin stories, comparing new scientific ideas that upend our very notions of space, time, and reality.
 
By most popular accounts, the universe started with a bang some 13.8 billion years ago. But what happened before the Big Bang? And how do we know it happened at all? Here prominent cosmologist Niayesh Afshordi and science communicator Phil Halper offer a tour of the peculiar possibilities: bouncing and cyclic universes, time loops, creations from nothing, multiverses, black hole births, string theories, and holograms. Along the way, they offer both a call for new physics and a riveting story of scientific debate.
 
Incorporating insights from Afshordi’s cutting-edge research and Halper’s original interviews with scientists like Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and Alan Guth, Battle of the Big Bang compares these models for the origin of our origins, showing each theory’s strengths and weaknesses and explaining new attempts to test these notions. Battle of the Big Bang is a tale of rivalries and intrigue, of clashes of ideas that have raged from Greek antiquity to the present day over whether the universe is eternal or had a beginning, whether it is unique or one of many. But most of all, Afshordi and Halper show that this search is filled with wonder, discovery, and community—all essential for remembering a forgotten cosmic past.

In May 1782, Colonel William Crawford led over 450 volunteers across Ohio to attack British-allied Native Americans who had been raiding the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia for years. An experienced yet reluctant commander, Crawford and his men clashed with a similarly sized force of British Rangers and Wyandot, Delaware, and Shawnee Indians on the Sandusky River in early June. After three days, the Americans were routed in one of the worst defeats American arms suffered on the frontier during the American Revolution. During the retreat, Native American warriors captured dozens of men, including Colonel Crawford. Many were horrifically tortured to death in revenge for the Gnadenhutten massacre earlier that spring, when American volunteers bludgeoned nearly one hundred unarmed and unresisting Delaware Indians to death. 
   The Battle of Upper Sandusky, 1782 places military operations at the forefront of events in the waning months of the American Revolution on the frontier. Importantly, it gives long-deserved credit to Native American leaders, particularly Dunquat of the Wyandot and Hopocan of the Delaware, for their roles and commands on the battlefield. For over two centuries, their victory was attributed to the presence of British Rangers and a few officers, but Dunquat and Hopocan made the critical decisions before and after the battle while Native American warriors constituted the bulk of their army. 
   The book also reconsiders the effectiveness of American operations. Crawford was an unenthusiastic commander who had to be talked into leading the campaign to help prevent a repeat of the Gnadenhutten massacre. Despite his long service on the frontier and experience in the Continental Army, Crawford failed to unite his ad hoc command, suffered from constant indecision, and could not put his own stamp on the campaign. The unprofessional nature of his army also contributed to its defeat as it lacked organization, experience, leadership, training, and standardization.
   The presence of Simon Girty, demonized by Americans on the frontier as a turncoat, and the gruesomeness of Crawford’s execution focused stories about the campaign on those two individuals, rather than the military operations themselves or the Indians who won the victory. Myths were accepted as fact. Afterward, interest in the campaign and the combatants faded. The Battle of Upper Sandusky, 1782 gives Crawford’s campaign its proper place as one of the largest battles between frontier forces and Native Americans during the Revolutionary War.

In summer of 1361, the Danish king conquered the island of Gotland, the centre of Baltic communication and trade. The invaders clashed with local forces outside the walls of Visby. The battle is well known from the excavated mass graves with human skeletons and large quantities of armour, which reveal the savage reality of the medieval battlefield. How was victory possible? Did Danish hyper-professional armies with mercenaries slaughter ill-equipped Gotlandic peasants, while German merchants were passive spectators from the walls of the main city, as historians have claimed? This book challenges traditional interpretations by investigating the human remains and equipment from their societal position, and puts the conquest of Gotland into a broader historical context of the medieval battle for dominium over the Baltic. It also discusses contemporary interpretations of the battle in museums, literature, media, and legends.

The Civil War history of Galveston is one of the last untold stories from America's bloodiest war, despite the fact that Galveston was a focal point of hostilities throughout the conflict. As other Southern ports fell to the Union, Galveston emerged as one of the Confederacy's only lifelines to the outside world. When the war ended in 1865, Galveston was the only major port still in Confederate hands.

In this beautifully written narrative history, Ed Cotham draws upon years of archival and on-site research, as well as rare historical photographs, drawings, and maps, to chronicle the Civil War years in Galveston. His story encompasses all the military engagements that took place in the city and on Galveston Bay, including the dramatic Battle of Galveston, in which Confederate forces retook the city on New Year's Day, 1863.

Cotham sets the events in Galveston within the overall conduct of the war, revealing how the city's loss was a great strategic impediment to the North. Through his pages pass major figures of the era, as well as ordinary soldiers, sailors, and citizens of Galveston, whose courage in the face of privation and danger adds an inspiring dimension to the story.

2020 Foreword INDIE awards winner

The Battle to Stay in America is the story of a community coming to grips with the federal government’s crackdown on immigrants, and learning how to defend itself. Informative and personal, this is a story about mothers and fathers, lawyers and activists, local police and federal agencies, and a struggle for the identity of a nation. This is the quintessential story of the war on immigrants, as fought and felt on the front lines in the heart of America.
 

The Battle of Manzikert on August 26, 1071 is widely regarded as one of the most significant turning points in medieval history, frequently presented as the culmination of a Turco-Islamic assault upon the Byzantine bulwark of a Christian world struggling for survival. Emperor Romanus IV’s campaigns between 1068 and 1071 do, in many ways, represent the empire’s fightback against an enemy that for decades had penetrated deep into Asia Minor, its heartland and strategic bulwark. Yet Manzikert was not a disaster. This book examines the geopolitical background and the origins of the campaign that led to the battle, the main protagonists, and their strategies and battle tactics. It also evaluates the primary sources and the enduring legacy of the battle, for both the Greek and Turkish historiography of the twentieth century.

A detailed study of the turning point in one of the most important battles in American history
The Battle of Brandywine, fought on September 11, 1777, along its namesake creek in the bucolic Pennsylvania countryside, was one of the largest engagements of the Revolutionary War. To those who participated in this massive battle, spread out over ten square miles and lasting from late afternoon until dark, it was unforgettable. Soon after the action, Major Joseph Bloomfield of the 3rd New Jersey recorded that it was “the grandest scene I ever saw, a sight beyond description.” Brandywine was the first major battle for the recently reorganized Continental Army. Units had fought in small engagements, but not until Brandywine did the army fight as a whole against the British. As the two armies clashed, a ferocious and desperate action developed on a hill at the heart of the battlefield, and it was here where the battle’s outcome was determined.  
    Despite its size and significance—Brandywine was the third bloodiest engagement of the war, with 1,300 American and 581 British casualties—the battle has been the subject of very few studies. In Decision at Brandywine: The Battle on Birmingham Hill, historian Robert M. Dunkerly analyzes the fighting near the Birmingham Meeting House where the battle turned. By dissecting the struggle on Birmingham Hill in detail, he offers a case study in weapons, tactics, and terrain analysis critical to a holistic understanding of the entire battle and what it would mean for the future of the Continental Army. In the process he not only explains how the Continental Army’s lack of uniformed training and inexperience in large open-field battles played a major role in their defeat, but also provides important information about Revolutionary War combat in general. 

Long before the Supreme Court ruled that impoverished defendants in criminal cases have a right to free counsel, Philadelphia’s public defenders were working to ensure fair trials for all. In 1934, when penniless defendants were routinely railroaded through the courts without ever seeing a lawyer, Philadelphia attorney Francis Fisher Kane helped create the Voluntary Defender Association, supported by charity and free from political interference, to represent poor people accused of crime. 

When the Supreme Court’s 1963 decision Gideonv. Wainwright mandated free counsel for indigent defendants, the Defender (as it is now known) became more essential than ever, representing at least 70 percent of those caught in the machinery of justice in the city. Its groundbreaking work in juvenile advocacy, homicide representation, death-row habeas corpus petitions, parole issues, and alternative sentencing has earned a national reputation.

In The Defender, Edward Madeira, past president of the Defender’s Board of Directors, and former Philadelphia Inquirer journalist Michael Schaffer chart the 80-plus-year history of the organization as it grew from two lawyers in 1934 to a staff of nearly 500 in 2015.

This is a compelling story about securing justice for those who need it most.

From Lexington and Gettysburg to Normandy and Iraq, the wars of the United States have defined the nation. But after the guns fall silent, the army searches the lessons of past conflicts in order to prepare for the next clash of arms. In the echo of battle, the army develops the strategies, weapons, doctrine, and commanders that it hopes will guarantee a future victory.

In the face of radically new ways of waging war, Brian Linn surveys the past assumptions--and errors--that underlie the army's many visions of warfare up to the present day. He explores the army's forgotten heritage of deterrence, its long experience with counter-guerrilla operations, and its successive efforts to transform itself. Distinguishing three martial traditions--each with its own concept of warfare, its own strategic views, and its own excuses for failure--he locates the visionaries who prepared the army for its battlefield triumphs and the reactionaries whose mistakes contributed to its defeats.

Discussing commanders as diverse as Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and Colin Powell, and technologies from coastal artillery to the Abrams tank, he shows how leadership and weaponry have continually altered the army's approach to conflict. And he demonstrates the army's habit of preparing for wars that seldom occur, while ignoring those it must actually fight. Based on exhaustive research and interviews, The Echo of Battle provides an unprecedented reinterpretation of how the U.S. Army has waged war in the past and how it is meeting the new challenges of tomorrow.

They crossed the ocean to fight in someone else's war. They came for glory, honor, and plunder. Instead, they became America's most famous captives.

In Steven Bier's groundbreaking book, Facing Washington's Crossing: The Hessians at the Battle of Trenton, old stereotypes are shattered and new information emerges. Using newly translated documents, rare hard-to-find material, and obscure nearly-forgotten sources, Facing Washington's Crossing rewrites our understanding of the Battle of Trenton.

Bier maintains a gripping narrative, following the military exploits of a Hessian Brigade through six brutal battles. From their crushing victories in New York to the shocking reversal in the snow-covered village of Trenton, witness how professional European soldiers faced an enemy unlike any they had encountered.Bier offers a fresh perspective by narrating the story through Hessian eyes, presenting fascinating details: shipboard cockfights, St. Elmo's fires, how the militaristic Hessians were influenced by the peaceful philosopher Voltaire, when the Royal Navy accidentally landed the Hessians on a deserted island, and how Emanuel Leutze's iconic painting of Washington crossing the Delaware was created in a tavern.The author traces the Hessian Prince's decision to hire out his army, the army’s harrowing voyage across the Atlantic, and the numerous clashes leading up to Trenton. Washington’s Crossing and the subsequent battle itself are fully recounted, providing a much-needed understanding of the Hessian experience.

For 250 years, the story has been told mostly from one side. Now the essential counterpoint is finally revealed.

In June 1219 Danish crusaders fought a vicious battle against local pagan warriors at the place in northern Estonia where Tallinn now lies. The battle—known then as the Battle of Lyndanise—was a narrow victory for the crusaders and eventually turned out to be a pivotal event in the national histories of both Denmark and Estonia as a milestone in the overall military conquest of the entire region by (mostly) western military powers. The main scope of this book is to present a study of this military conquest of Estonia around 1200 with a special focus on the Scandinavian involvement, enabling us to better understand the intense political, military, and religious changes that came to influence the region and its many people from the early high medieval period onwards.

In the heart of the DMZ, one Marine faced the war—and the truth behind it.

Impact Zone documents Marine First Lieutenant James S. Brown's intense battle experiences, including those at Khe Sanh and Con Thien, throughout his thirteen months of service on the DMZ during 1967-68. This high-action account also reflects Brown's growing belief that the Vietnam War was mis-fought due to the unproductive political leadership of President Johnson and his administration. Brown's naiveté developed into hardening skepticism and cynicism as he faced the harsh realities of war, though he still managed to retain a sense of honor, pride, and patriotism for his country.

Impact Zone is a distinctive book on the Vietnam War because it is told from the perspective of an artilleryman, and the increasingly dangerous events gain momentum as they progress from one adventure to the next. Impact Zone is not only an important historical document of the Vietnam conflict, but also a moving record of the personal and emotional costs of war.

Reasonable people disagree about the reach of the federal government, but there is near-universal consensus that it should protect us from such dangers as bacteria-infested food, harmful drugs, toxic pollution, crumbling bridges, and unsafe toys. And yet, the agencies that shoulder these responsibilities are in shambles; if they continue to decline, lives will be lost and natural resources will be squandered. In this timely book, Rena Steinzor and Sidney Shapiro take a hard look at the tangled web of problems that have led to this dire state of affairs.

It turns out that the agencies are not primarily to blame and that regulatory failure actually stems from a host of overlooked causes. Steinzor and Shapiro discover that unrelenting funding cuts, a breakdown of the legislative process, an increase in the number of political appointees, a concurrent loss of experienced personnel, chaotic White House oversight, and ceaseless political attacks on the bureaucracy all have contributed to the broken system. But while the news is troubling, the authors also propose a host of reforms, including a new model for measuring the success of the agencies and a revitalization of the civil service. The People’s Agents and the Battle to Protect the American Public is an urgent and compelling appeal to renew America’s best traditions of public service.

The Battle of Poltava has long been recognized as a crucial event in the geopolitical history of Europe and a decisive point in the Great Northern War between Sweden and the Russian Empire. The Russian victory at Poltava contributed to the decline of Sweden as a Great Power and was a major setback to Ukrainian independence. Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who joined forces with the Swedish king Charles XII against Tsar Peter I, remains a controversial figure even today.

In 2009, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute gathered scholars from around the globe and from many fields of study—history, military affairs, philology, linguistics, literature, art history, music—to mark the 300th anniversary of the battle. This book is a collection of their papers on such topics as the international, Russian, and Ukrainian contexts of the battle; Mazepa in European culture; the language and literature of the period; art and architecture; history and memory; and fact, fiction, and the literary imagination. Mazepa himself is the focus of many of the articles—a hero to Ukrainians but a treacherous figure to Russians. This book provides a fresh look at this watershed event and sheds new light on the legacies of the battle’s major players.

Every day, Internet users interact with technologies designed to undermine their privacy. Social media apps, surveillance technologies, and the Internet of Things are all built in ways that make it hard to guard personal information. And the law says this is okay because it is up to users to protect themselves—even when the odds are deliberately stacked against them.

In Privacy’s Blueprint, Woodrow Hartzog pushes back against this state of affairs, arguing that the law should require software and hardware makers to respect privacy in the design of their products. Current legal doctrine treats technology as though it were value-neutral: only the user decides whether it functions for good or ill. But this is not so. As Hartzog explains, popular digital tools are designed to expose people and manipulate users into disclosing personal information.

Against the often self-serving optimism of Silicon Valley and the inertia of tech evangelism, Hartzog contends that privacy gains will come from better rules for products, not users. The current model of regulating use fosters exploitation. Privacy’s Blueprint aims to correct this by developing the theoretical underpinnings of a new kind of privacy law responsive to the way people actually perceive and use digital technologies. The law can demand encryption. It can prohibit malicious interfaces that deceive users and leave them vulnerable. It can require safeguards against abuses of biometric surveillance. It can, in short, make the technology itself worthy of our trust.

In August 1812, under threat from the Potawatomi, Captain Nathan Heald began the evacuation of ninety-four people from the isolated outpost of Fort Dearborn to Fort Wayne. The group included several dozen soldiers, as well as nine women and eighteen children. After traveling only a mile and a half, they were attacked by five hundred Potawatomi warriors. In under an hour, fifty-two members of Heald’s party were killed, and the rest were taken prisoner; the Potawatomi then burned Fort Dearborn before returning to their villages.

Along the Wabash River near present-day Fort Recovery, Ohio, on November 4, 1791, the Maumee Confederation of Indigenous tribes destroyed a superior American army led by Revolutionary War veteran General Arthur St. Clair. The victory was so complete, that the Shawnee recalled that the “the ground was covered with the dead and the dying.” Also known as “St. Clair’s Defeat” and “The Battle With No Name”—since the US forces did not know where they were—the Battle of the Wabashwas the United States military’s worst disaster in the history of the Indian wars. This, despite the army having artillery and outnumbering the confederation warriors by almost two to one. It was both the new Republic’s first war and its first undeclared war. Ordered on the offensive by President George Washington in an attempt to exert control of the frontier, the defeat triggered the first Congressional investigation and the first assertion of executive privilege. Often overlooked is thatno other Native American battle in three centuries, from colonial times to Geronimo, affected somany lives. The Maumee Confederation’s victory largely stymied American expansion into the rest of the Northwest Territory, and ultimately into the Great Plains for almost four years. For the Native Peoples this was a respite from the incessant deforestation that accompanied western settlements. While Ohio and the rest of the Old Northwest ultimately succumbed to US control, President James Madison would later warn his fellow Americans that the unchecked destruction of the natural environment was as much of a threat to national security as any enemy along its borders.
            The Soldiers Fell Like Autumn Leaves: The Battle of the Wabash, the United States’ Greatest Defeat in the Wars Against Indigenous Peoples by Rick M. Schoenfield places this important war into its cultural, racial, economic, and political context. For the first time, the ecological impact is explored, for at stake in the clash between Woodland Native Americans and white, agrarian settlement, was the fate of a vast forest eco-system. The issue echoes today in the debate over climate change, deforestation, and indigenous control of forest habitats. Based on primary sources, some of which are consulted here for the first time, including a newly discovered muster roll and the recent archaeological study of the battlefield, the author provides the most accurate description of the battle while capturing the drama of what occurred. He also critically examines the information gathering,planning, and tacticsof both the Maumee Confederation and the United States, from the conception of the campaign through the battlefield decisions. By skillfully weaving together the disparate but related parts of the larger history of this battle,The Soldiers Fell Like Autumn Leaves allows the reader to better understand the motivations and long-term consequences of the war against Native peoples in the Americas.

Examination of the Creek War which integrates that struggle into the larger conflict that broke out in 1812 between Great Britain and the United States
 
Using American, British, and Spanish documents, many previously unknown, Frank Owsley’s study establishes the Creek War and the struggle to control the Gulf borderlands as integral parts of the War of 1812. The war between the United States and a large part of the Creek nation is usually studied as local or regional history. These documentary sources, however, show the larger picture. They show Spain to have been a major influence in the Creek War and indicate the extent to which the British were aiding the Indians and using them to redirect American troops. On the other hand, Andrew Jackson, in charge of the American forces on the Gulf Coast, emerged from the conflict as a first-rate military commander. His victories on the Gulf gave the West a leader and aided in shifting political power from the eastern seaboard to the South and West.
 
Owsley concludes that the victories in the Gulf region were of sufficient magnitude to justify the claim that the War of 1812 was not a draw but a decisive American victory and that had there been a general of Jackson's caliber on the northern frontier, the United States might have had a clear-cut victory there.
 
As a result of the war, the United States held its claim on Louisiana, annexed the Mobile district, forced Spain out of Florida, and broke the power of the southern Indians, thus opening vast lands for settlement from the new nation on the eastern seaboard.
 

 
 

Today, war is considered a last resort for resolving disagreements. But a day of staged slaughter on the battlefield was once seen as a legitimate means of settling political disputes. James Whitman argues that pitched battle was essentially a trial with a lawful verdict. And when this contained form of battle ceased to exist, the law of victory gave way to the rule of unbridled force. The Verdict of Battle explains why the ritualized violence of the past was more effective than modern warfare in bringing carnage to an end, and why humanitarian laws that cling to a notion of war as evil have led to longer, more barbaric conflicts.

Belief that sovereigns could, by rights, wage war for profit made the eighteenth century battle’s golden age. A pitched battle was understood as a kind of legal proceeding in which both sides agreed to be bound by the result. To the victor went the spoils, including the fate of kingdoms. But with the nineteenth-century decline of monarchical legitimacy and the rise of republican sentiment, the public no longer accepted the verdict of pitched battles. Ideology rather than politics became war’s just cause. And because modern humanitarian law provided no means for declaring a victor or dispensing spoils at the end of battle, the violence of war dragged on.

The most dangerous wars, Whitman asserts in this iconoclastic tour de force, are the lawless wars we wage today to remake the world in the name of higher moral imperatives.