The Battle of Petersburg was the culmination of the Virginia Overland Campaign, which pitted the Army of the Potomac, led by Ulysses S. Grant and George Gordon Meade, against Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. In spite of having outmaneuvered...

While the specificities of individual wars vary, they share a ubiquitous aftermath: the task of finding and identifying the "disappeared". The Bosnian war of the early 1990s that destroyed the sovereign state of Yugoslavia is no exception. In Working...

"Needle in the Bone" highlights the astonishing stories of two Poles – a Holocaust survivor, Lou Frydman, and a Polish resistance fighter, Jarek Piekalkewicz. As mere teenagers during World War II, they defied daunting odds, lost everything and nearl...

The orthodox view of Vyacheslav Molotov is that he was no more than Stalin's faithful servant; a dogmatic conservative communist of little or no imagination. Molotov was, indeed, Stalin's right-hand man while from the 1920s the two men presided over...

As the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008 demonstrated in no uncertain terms, Russia has developed into a neo-imperialist power seeking to restore its spheres of dominance, to undermine the emergence of a wider Europe, and to prevent the deve...

With the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia launched itself on a fitful transition to Western-style democracy and a market economy. But a decade later, Boris Yeltsin's handpicked successor – Vladimir Putin, a self-described childhood hooligan...

Ever since the caveman gazed longingly at the winged creatures above him, mankind has been enamoured with the idea of flight – of just taking off and soaring away. Steven A. Ruffin celebrates that spirit, that sense of wonder, with "Aviation's Most W...

On August 1, 1943, an enormous armada of America B-24 Liberator bombers roared at nearly treetop level over the peaceful farms and villages of Romania. This mission was Operation Tidal Wave. Its target – "the taproot of German might", Hitler's giant...

After Germany's surrender in World War II, Jim Milano, a young U.S. army intelligence officer, led a small, independent group of soldiers charged with carrying out some of the first intelligence efforts of the postwar era. Inventing the techniques of...