In early 1981, the JFK Library began the process of declassifying the Cuban missile crisis ExComm tapes; as the Library’s Historian, the responsibility for reviewing these recordings was mine—and it changed my life. I spent most of the next two years listening to the tapes from the legendary 13 Days (and subsequently from the November “post-crisis”). I was the first non-ExComm participant and professional historian to hear and evaluate these unique and definitive historical recordings. After the tapes were declassified in the late 1990s, I wrote three books (published by Stanford University Press) about their historical importance.
At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy met with the Pentagon’s head of civil defense, Steuart Pittman, to assess plans for protecting the American civilian population in the event of nuclear war. JFK mistakenly claimed that rural America could be better protected from radiation than urban America; Pittman, however, bluntly told the president that he was wrong: insisting that, “the only protection today is in the cities and there is little or no protection in the rural areas.” Kennedy became quite irritated, but unfortunately, his harsh reply was largely lost because the sound quality of the tape recording suddenly went from poor to inaudible. The fact that the President himself was so misinformed about civil defense sums up the research and conclusions of Alice George’s sobering book: planning for civil defense had been chaotic and inadequate and if nuclear war had come the results would have been…
For thirteen days in October 1962, America stood at the brink of nuclear war. Nikita Khrushchev's decision to place nuclear missiles in Cuba and John F. Kennedy's defiant response introduced the possibility of unprecedented cataclysm. The immediate threat of destruction entered America's classrooms and its living rooms. Awaiting Armageddon provides the first in-depth look at this crisis as it roiled outside of government offices, where ordinary Americans realized their government was unprepared to protect either itself or its citizens from the dangers of nuclear war.
During the seven days between Kennedy's announcement of a naval blockade and Khrushchev's decision to…
I’m passionate about spying. It was an absolute privilege for me to have been able to spend my life in the shadows, so to speak. I was undercover my entire career doing espionage and covert action operations for our country and the CIA. I discovered very early on that I had a particular fascination for the arcane and Byzantine subspecialty of counterintelligence. It’s hard to describe the exhilaration I felt when we nabbed an American traitor and brought him or her to justice. It doesn’t get any better than that.
This book is the best example I can come up with of how good counterintelligence must be patient and tenacious. Ana Montes was the senior analyst on Cuba for the Defense Intelligence Agency---and also a spy for Cuban intelligence. Scott Carmichael led the DIA’s investigative team, which overcame countless delays and roadblocks to get the job done and eventually caught her. This was US counterintelligence at its best.
Ana Montes appeared to be a model employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), advancing quickly through the ranks to become its top analyst on Cuban affairs.
But for sixteen years Montes sent Castro some of America's most closely guarded secrets and at the same time influenced what the United States thought it knew about Cuba. She is the only member of the U.S. intelligence community ever convicted of espionage for the Cuban government, yet her arrest ten days after 9/11 went largely unnoticed.
This book calls attention to the grave damage Montes inflicted on U.S. security--Carmichael even implicates her…
Both my parents worked for the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s. On May 1, 1960 my father was shot down over the Soviet Union while on a CIA U-2 spy flight and spent nearly 2 years in a Soviet prison before being exchanged for Soviet KGB Spy Colonel Rudolph Abel in 1962 as recently depicted in Steven Spielberg’s Cold War thriller, Bridge of Spies. As a result of growing up in this family I have always been interested in espionage and the Cold War. In 1996, I founded The Cold War Museum to honor Cold War veterans, preserve Cold War history, and educate future generations about this time period.
Norman Polmar and I have been colleagues and friends for over 20 years. Not only have we served together on several Cold War history panels including the DIA’s 60th-anniversary conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis in 2022, but we also co-authored the Epilog for my father’s book, Operation Overflight, when it was republished in 2004. Polmar’s book is an in-depth study of the personalities that orchestrated the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even the title, DEFCON-2, emphasizes exactly how close we came to launching an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union in October 1962.
The closest we've ever come to the end of the world
"DEFCON-2 is the best single volume on the Cuban Missile Crisis published and is an important contribution to the history of the Cold War. Beyond the military and political facts of the crisis, Polmar and Gresham sketch the personalities that created and coped with the crisis. They also show us how close we came to the edge without becoming sensationalistic."—Larry Bond, bestselling author of Dangerous Ground
Spy-satellite and aerial-reconnaissance photos reveal that one of the United States's bitterest enemies may be acquiring weapons of mass destruction and the means…
I’m a historian and professor in Louisiana, in the southern United States. When I was an undergraduate in college (many years ago!), I embraced the opportunity to study diverse subjects, ranging from the natural sciences to the humanities. I became fascinated by medicine and health and their relationship to history, society, and international relations–and have remained fascinated ever since. These interests led me to study humanitarianism and its place in 20th-century US foreign relations and international history. Over the years, I have researched and written two books and more than 20 articles on these subjects, and I love sharing this history with readers and students alike.
This book opened my eyes to the long and fraught history of humanitarian interventions–that is, military operations conducted in the name of protecting people from harm and suffering.
In recent decades, we have witnessed fierce debates over the legitimacy of these activities (in places like Rwanda, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria). Yet, as this book persuasively shows, such concerns are nothing new. Across the nineteenth century, government leaders and citizens debated–and undertook–many so-called “wars for humanity.”
With examples stretching from the Middle East to Africa to the Americas, this book raises provocative and important ethical questions about humanitarianism and human rights, both historically and today.
In the Cause of Humanity is a major new history of the emergence of the theory and practice of humanitarian intervention during the nineteenth century when the question of whether, when and how the international community should react to violations of humanitarian norms and humanitarian crises first emerged as a key topic of controversy and debate. Fabian Klose investigates the emergence of legal debates on the protection of humanitarian norms by violent means, revealing how military intervention under the banner of humanitarianism became closely intertwined with imperial and colonial projects. Through case studies including the international fight against the slave…
I’ve been researching and writing with my co-author husband Jared Brown about spirits and mixed drinks for three decades. After writing more than three dozen books plus hundreds of articles about the history and origins of alcoholic beverages, you could say I am addicted to the topic in a big way. While we’ve travelled and tasted drinks around the world we’ve also amassed a few thousand books on the subject. It’s served as a launch point of our secondary careers as drinks consultants and master distillers for global spirits brands. I'm currently finishing my doctoral thesis on early-modern English brewing at the University of Bristol to put a feather on the cap of my long career.
Privately published in 1928 by Horace Liveright, British playwright and journalist Basil Woon captured the energy that took hold of Havana during Prohibition in the USA, as Americans flocked by the thousands to drink, gamble, and party served by hundreds of Cuban and self-exiled American bartenders amid the tropical beauty that is Cuba. This book opened my eyes to clues that helped me sort out the true origins of the Mary Pickford, the Mojito, and the El Presidente. While my husband and I travelled to Havana once a year for ten years, this book guided us to the places we wanted to visit to capture the spirit and essence of Cuban cocktails.
I write historical YA in verse—pretty much the niche of the niche. Before I was published, I spent many years writing and querying various YA projects in prose, but it wasn’t until I decided to try a project in verse that I really found my groove. Nowadays, everything I write falls under that same (small) umbrella, so I really looked to novels like the ones here to learn from the best. These days, I still love reading YA historicals and anything in verse, but YA historicals in verse remain forever my favorite.
Your Heart, My Sky is a gorgeous book set on the island of Cuba during a terrible period of starvation in the 1990s. The points of view of two young lovers and a stray dog work together to paint a full picture of both the bleak situation and their heightened emotions during this desperate time.
I found the romance to be the perfect bright spot as the protagonists and their families struggle to survive on the island they love. As always, Engle’s poetry sings as the perfect vehicle for this very personal story that YA fans will surely devour.
Acclaimed author Margarita Engle tells a “deeply felt and engrossing” (Horn Book Magazine) story of love in a time of hunger inspired by her own family’s struggles during a dark period in Cuba’s history.
The people of Cuba are living in el período especial en tiempos de paz—the special period in times of peace. That’s what the government insists that this era must be called, but the reality behind these words is starvation.
Liana is struggling to find enough to eat. Yet hunger has also made her brave: she finds the courage to skip a summer of so-called volunteer farm…
My expertise and passion for the theme of children’s dreams for themselves and how they achieve them began with reading wonderful children’s picture books to my kids and grandkids when they were very young. After writing one young adult novel and four cozy mysteries for adults, I realize my true calling as a writer is to create books that little readers will not only love but return to again and again to reinforce their own dreams and sense of worth as well as awareness of others. Many picture books dwell on what elders dream for their children rather than what young ones wish for themselves.
I loved this children’s picture book because it involves a little girl with a big dream—to play drums in public—which was forbidden to girls in Cuba at the time.
Despite many obstacles, she practiced and practiced and finally reached her goal. I also love that this story was inspired by a Chinese-African-Cuban girl who broke Cuba’s tradition of the taboo on female drummers.
Girls cannot be drummers. Long ago on an island filled with music, no one questioned that rule—until the drum dream girl. In her city of drumbeats, she dreamed of pounding tall congas and tapping small bongós. She had to keep quiet. She had to practice in secret. But when at last her dream-bright music was heard, everyone sang and danced and decided that both girls and boys should be free to drum and dream.
Inspired by the childhood of Millo Castro Zaldarriaga, a Chinese-African-Cuban girl who broke Cuba's traditional taboo against female drummers, Drum Dream Girl tells an inspiring true…
My grandparents played a pivotal role in my childhood, living with us and raising my brother and me while my parents worked long hours. Some of my favorite memories of those years are lying in bed as Abuelo told me stories that made me laugh instead of making me sleepy, cooking picadillo with my abuela in the kitchen, and going on long walks along the beach with my abuelo. Though they didn’t speak to me in Spanish, they taught me to sing nursery rhymes and enticed me with sticks of Big Red gum to get me to learn how to roll my r’s.
I love this book because it reminds me of cooking with my grandmother. But I especially love it because it expertly deals with a classic struggle facing young children: what do you do when you make a mistake with significant consequences?
Hernández-Bergstrom deftly addresses this in an accessible and fun way (I love humor!) and shows how children can ask for help from trusted loved ones. I love it when picture books deliver these lessons without being preachy! The illustrations heighten the casual, fun mood. The recipe for flan at the end is an added bonus and something that grandparents and grandchildren can make together.
Anita loves to bake with her abuela, especially when they are using her grandmother’s special recipes for Cuban desserts like flan!
Anita is making flan for Abuelo’s birthday, but when she accidentally breaks Abuelita’s treasured flan serving plate from Cuba, she struggles with what to do. Anita knows it’s right to tell the truth, but what if Abuelita gets upset? Worried that she has already ruined the day, Anita tries to be the best helper. After cooking the flan, they need a serving dish! Anita comes up with a wonderful solution.
I was a history major when I left for a Havana study abroad semester in 2003, but I had not studied Cuba. My introduction was a University of Havana class on the period of the Cuban Republic, in which I sat surrounded by Cuban students. My classroom learning was aided by the public history representations all around me in the city. I was hooked. I wrote my undergraduate thesis at Yale on Cuban activist intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and a few years later went on the begin my doctorate in Latin American History at Columbia. I have been a historian of Cuba ever since, 20 years.
Robert Whitney’s classic work on popular politics in Cuba from 1920 to 1940 is a must for the reader interested in the history of Cuba’s 1930s, especially Cuba’s “other revolution,” the Revolution of 1933. The book covers an absolutely crucial time in the island’s political evolution, and yet this time period is too often glossed over between interest in the Cuban Wars of Independence on the one hand and the Cuban Revolution of 1959 on the other. Whitney’s book, however, follows the politics of the island from the high corruption of 1920, through anti-dictatorial and anti-imperialist struggles, to the triumphant (if short-lived) arrival of constitutional democracy in 1940. An important scholar of Fulgencio Batista, Whitney traces the Cuban leader’s political twists and turns during the era, beginning with his critical role as a revolutionary in the 1933 uprising.
Illuminates a critical period in Cuba's political evolution Between 1920 and 1940, Cuba underwent a remarkable transition, moving from oligarchic rule to a nominal constitutional democracy. The events of this period are crucial to a full understanding of the nation's political evolution, yet they are often glossed over in accounts that focus more heavily on the revolution of 1959. With this book, Robert Whitney accords much-needed attention to a critical stage in Cuban history. Closely examining the upheavals of the period, which included a social revolution in 1933 and a military coup led by Fulgencio Batista one year later, Whitney…
My entire life I’ve been a historian, a treasure hunter, and a crime solver, which is likely why I became a broadcast journalist and investigative reporter. Having worked cases, worked with police, and asked the questions I believe the public wanted answered, there isn’t much which gets by me. I see every story as a movie and every scene in life as a story that needs telling. One of my passions has always been genealogy which fits right into all of the above. I live by a simple saying, “Be a student of history, not a victim of it.”
Polk was one of the most important presidents, considered Top 10, and he only served one term. He didn’t set out to be president. He got nominated because the bigwigs at the time couldn’t win their party's votes. Polk kept getting more votes as the ballots were turned in and became his party’s nominee. He won the election and set out three goals; get rid of the bank of the US, which was ripping the country off, expand the country to the west coast, and get rid of tariffs, all three of which he accomplished. He did it all in four years, chose not to run again, went home, and died. Talk about logical? Get it done, get it over with, and leave the future to someone else.
Soon after winning the presidency in 1845, according to the oft-repeated anecdote, James K. Polk slapped his thigh and predicted what would be the ""four great measures"" of his administration: the acquisition of some or all of the Oregon Country, the acquisition of California, a reduction in tariffs, and the establishment of a permanent independent treasury. Over the next four years, the Tennessee Democrat achieved all four goals. And those milestones--along with his purported enunciation of them--have come to define his presidency. Indeed, repeated ad infinitum in U.S. history textbooks, Polk's bold listing of goals has become U.S. political history's…
