A top historian offers a compelling history of perhaps the most remarkable holiday season in 20th-century history--December 1941--a Christmas season that played out in the shadows of the Pearl Harbor attack and the start of America's involvement in World War II. Christmas 1941 came little more than two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The shock--in some cases overseas, elation--was worldwide. While Americans attempted to go about celebrating...

Explores the period in which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill held the world's fate in their hands, and the holiday visit that sealed their friendship and steered the course of World War II.

In The King and the Cowboy, renowned historian David Fromkin reveals how two unlikely world leaders-Edward the Seventh of England and Theodore Roosevelt-recast themselves as respected political players and established a friendship that would shape the course of the twentieth century in ways never anticipated.In 1901, these two colorful public figures inherited the leadership of the English-speaking countries. Following the death of his mother, Queen...

"Between the Confederacy and recognition by Great Britain stood one unlikely Englishman who hated the slave trade. His actions helped determine the fate of a nation. When Robert Bunch arrived in Charleston to take up the post of British consul in 1853, he was young and full of ambition, but even he couldn't have imagined the incredible role he would play in the history-making events to unfold. In an age when diplomats often were spies, Bunch's job...

In early 1815, Secretary of State James Monroe reviewed the treaty with Britain that would end the War of 1812. The United States Navy was blockaded in port; much of the army had not been paid for nearly a year; the capital had been burned. The treaty offered an unexpected escape from disaster. Yet it incensed Monroe, for the name of Great Britain and its negotiators consistently appeared before those of the United States. "The United States have...

"Even before the first rumblings of secession shook the halls of Congress, British involvement in the coming schism was inevitable. Britain was dependent on the South for cotton, and in turn the Confederacy relied almost exclusively on Britain for guns, bullets, and ships. The Union sought to block any diplomacy between the two and consistently teetered on the brink of war with Britain. For four years the complex web of relationships between the countries...