“Essential . . . one for the ages . . . a must read for all who care about presidential power.” —The Washington Post “Authoritative . . . The most comprehensive account yet of that smoldering wreck of foreign policy, one that haunts us today.” —LA Times One of BookPage's Best Books of 2020 To Start a War paints a vivid and indelible picture of a decision-making process that was fatally compromised by a combination of post-9/11 fear and paranoia, rank naïveté, craven groupthink, and a set of actors with idées fixes who gamed the process relentlessly. Everything was believed; nothing was true. Robert Draper’s fair-mindedness and deep understanding of the principal actors suffuse his account, as does a storytelling genius that is close to sorcery. There are no cheap shots here, which makes the ultimate conclusion all the more damning. In the spirit of Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Guns of August and Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat, To Start A War will stand as the definitive account of a collective scurrying for evidence that would prove to be not just dubious but entirely false—evidence that was then used to justify a verdict that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and a flood tide of chaos in the Middle East that shows no signs of ebbing.
Since the Gold Rush, San Francisco's Chinatown has been a destination for sojourners, immigrants, locals, and tourists. Despite laws restricting Chinese immigration, Chinatown has thrived as a residential and commercial center. Designed for tourists and bearing little resemblance to real Chinese cityscapes, the streets and buildings have nonetheless been extensively documented in picture postcards, as have the residents, particularly from the 1890s to 1930s, the "Golden Age of Postcards." The cards, relatively few of which survive, were kept as visual souvenirs and mementos, or were mailed to family and friends. Book jacket.
This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
What was once home to the native tribe known as the Ohlone, and functioning as guardian of the San Francisco Bay under Spanish, Mexican, and American flags, the Presidio has served as outpost as well as cultural barometer of the vast changes this country and the state of California have seen. For almost a century and a half, the U.S. military transformed these grounds into a logistical centerpiece for every American conflict and created a pioneering airfield for early flight experiments. The Presidio served as the headquarters for the Western Defense Command during World War II and until its closure in 1994. The Golden Gate National Recreation Area then embraced a unique opportunity to develop the Presidio into a mixed-use area where it once again became an influential icon as development tackled various social, cultural, and environmental issues to point northern California into a new century while simultaneously tracing this country's past.
The golden age of postcards coincided with several momentous events in San Francisco history, including a major earthquake and fire destroying over one third of the city, rapid reconstruction, strikes, political upheaval, parades, festivals, and a worlds fair. From World War I through World War II, jazz-age San Francisco experienced a building boom of houses, skyscrapers, and engineering marvels such as the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge, creating a marvelous Bay Area landscape documented on thousands of ubiquitous, inexpensive picture postcards popular with both visiting tourists and local residents.
The famed period of architecture, design, and style known as Art Deco began in the mid1920s and lasted for a good 20 years. The movement left an indelible stamp all around the Bay Area but nowhere more so than in styleconscious San Francisco. The city's 1925 Diamond Jubilee, coinciding with the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in France, ushered in the Art Deco age to the city by the bay. The Roaring Twenties created a need for thousands of new commercial and residential buildings, and many of these, such as Timothy Pflueger's Pacific Telephone and Telegraph building, were Art Deco masterpieces that embodied the new "moderne" styling sweeping the country. Using a variety of building materials, including terracotta, Vitrolux, and neon, many of the city's graceful and dramatic buildings turned heads 70 years ago just as they do today.
A "look at the unsung men and women of the U.S. Foreign Service whose dedication and sacrifices have been a crucial part of our history for over two centuries. Fifteen years in the making, veteran journalist and historian Moskin has traveled the globe conducting hundreds of interviews both in and out of the State Department to look behind the scenes at America's 'militiamen of diplomacy'"--
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