History - Ferrand Library

Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race

Richard Rhodes’s third volume on the nuclear age asks a question the first two did not: not how the weapons were made, but why there came to be seventy thousand of them, and how the making finally stopped. He begins at Chernobyl, because the reactor that exploded was a military design, because the cover-up was…

Energy: A Human History

Four hundred years of how the world got its power, told through the people who found it. Shakespeare’s company steals a playhouse for its timber because London is running out of wood. A Devon ironmonger’s cracked cylinder accidentally invents the condenser. Nantucket whalers chase the sperm whale to the far side of the world for…

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

The book that won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has not been superseded in forty years. Richard Rhodes begins with a Hungarian physicist crossing a London street in 1933 and ends with a Japanese doctor’s nightmare, and in between builds three books into one: how physics…

The Federalist Papers

Eighty-five newspaper essays written under deadline to swing one state’s ratifying vote — and the most durable account ever written of why free governments fail. Faction is incurable, so multiply it. Parchment limits are worthless, so set ambition against ambition. Men are not angels, so build for the men you have. Published anonymously as “Publius,”…

Command and Control

A dropped socket, a nine-megaton warhead, and nine hours in which nobody in the chain of command could decide what to do. Schlosser reconstructs the 1980 Titan II accident at Damascus, Arkansas minute by minute — and braids it with seventy years of near-misses, burned bombs and bureaucratic denial in the American nuclear arsenal. Built…

A Higher Call

20 December 1943, over the German coast: a Messerschmitt closes on a B-17 so badly shot up it should not be flying, sees the dead tail gunner at his silent guns — and does not fire. Instead the German escorts the American bomber past his own flak batteries, points him toward neutral Sweden, salutes, and…

The American Civil War

Why did two populations more alike than different fight one of history’s most ferocious wars — 237 named battles across a theatre larger than Napoleon’s Europe, murderous yet strangely indecisive? Keegan opens by inverting his most famous verdict: the First World War was cruel and unnecessary; this war was cruel, but it was not unnecessary.…

The First World War

Keegan opens at the war memorial cross in his own West Country village, where one man in four never came back, and asks how a prosperous, interdependent Europe talked itself into a tragic and unnecessary war. His answer indicts no donkeys: the generals commanded armies of millions without eyes, ears, or voices — the power…

The Iraq War

A war whose casus belli was never found, whose 400,000-man army simply faded away, and whose government vanished without surrendering a single general: Keegan wrote this within a year of Baghdad’s fall and calls it a mysterious war. His answer is that Iraq was an artificial state whose ruler had waged war on Iraq itself…

Reset

Why are America’s oldest Middle East partnerships — Saudi Arabia and Israel — still standing, and what would replace them? Kinzer’s answer is heresy told as history: the natural allies for the twenty-first century are Turkey and Iran, the only two Muslim powers in the region with a century of democratic struggle in their bones.…