Politicians, the Press, and Propaganda represents the most recent and most extensive research on Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe), one of the “press lords” who influenced British politics and policy during the First World War. Thompson’s is the only study to deal with Northcliffe and the inseparable quality of his public and political career from his journalism. Politicians, the Press, and Propaganda addresses a wide range of topics—the Great War, journalism, propaganda, censorship, the use and misuse of power, his preoccupation with America, and Northcliffe’s influence on David Lloyd George—and will appeal to those interested in the history of modern journalism as well as twentieth-century British history.

This innovative study investigates how Japan grew from an economically limited country to the threshold of industrial power. The author describes Japanese economic development in the 1950s as one of the major achievements of the Eisenhower administration. In her admirably-clear account of this chapter in U.S.-Japanese relations, Sayuri Shimizu incorporates Japanese as well as American sources. In the process she explains how and why the United States became so intractably involved in Southeast Asia. Not least, she tells an ironic and instructive story of how the United States helped build an economy that later it so bitterly resented.

General William V. Judson was Military Attaché and Chief of the American Military Mission in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. His letters, memoranda, and reports constitute one of the most informed eye-witness accounts of war and revolutionary conditions under the Provisional and Bolshevik Governments of Russia after the February Uprising and abdication of Czar Nicholas II and shed light on the initiation of U.S.-Soviet relations.

The five armistices arranged in the fall of 1918 determined the course of diplomatic events for many years. The armistice with Germany, the most important of the five, was really a peace treaty in miniature. Bullitt Lowry, basing his account on a close study of newly available archives in Great Britain, France, and the United States, offers a detailed examination of the process by which what might have been only simple orders to cease fire instead became extensive diplomatic and military instructions to armies and governments. He also assesses the work of the leading figures in the profess, as well as supporting casts of generals, admirals, and diplomatic advisors.

OSS Against the Reich presents the previously unpublished World War II diaries of Colonel David K.E. Bruce, London branch chief of America’s first secret intelligence agency, as he observed the war against Hitler. The entries include eyewitness accounts of D-Day, the rocket attacks on England, and the liberation of Paris. As a top deputy of William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, founder of the Office of Strategic Services, Bruce kept his diary sporadically in 1942 and made daily entries from the invasion of Normandy until the Battle of the Bulge. Bruce had served in World War I and, as Andrew Mellon’s son-in-law, moved easily in the world of corporate and museum boardrooms and New York society. However, World War II gave him a more serious and satisfying purpose in life; the experience of running the OSS’s most important overseas branch confirmed his lifelong interest in foreign service. After the war, in partnership with his second wife, Evangeline, Bruce headed the Marshall Plan in France and was ambassador to Paris, Bonn, and London. He further served as head of negotiations at the Paris peace talks on Vietnam, first American emissary to China and ambassador to NATO.

The Danse Macabre of Women is a 15th-century French poem found in a lavishly illuminated late medieval manuscript. The only Dance of Death devoted entirely to women, it was written by an anonymous author and subsequently expanded by several poet/editors. In this version, one of the later productions, 36 women are called in the midst of their bustling daily lives to join the eternal Dance of Death. Young and old, rich and poor, widow, matron, and child—each is the focus of two short poelms written in the form of a dialogue (Death calls and the victim replies) and accompanied by an illumination (or a miniature).

Containing Coexistence: America, Russia, and the “Finnish Solution,” 1945–1956, is the first full-scale study of Finland’s role in Soviet-American relations during the onset of the cold war. Cold war Finland was an enigma. Defeated by the Soviet Union in World War II, the country appeared ripe for joining the “people’s democracies” in 1945, when the […]

In Spoilsmen in a “Flowery Fairyland,” Jack L. Hammersmith examines in detail the first eleven American ministers to Japan, exploring the information, expectations, and values they took with them and how they shaped U.S. diplomacy with Japan in the late nineteenth century. Of particular interest, he shows that the issue of trade, a dominant contemporary concern, was an ongoing nineteenth-century problem as well.

One of the most important funerary monuments in Europe is the tomb of Napoleon, built in the Church of the Invalides in Paris between 1840 and 1861. As Befits a Legend is the first comprehensive examination of its construction process, historical context, and political and social meanings. It also is the only work published in English about this unique structure. Michael Paul Driskel’s study, based on extensive archival research in France, documents the problems inherent in building the appropriate monument for such a controversial figure and the public debate it generated. Following a detailed and illuminating account of the range of proposals put forward, Driskel concludes that the form of the structure represents a symbolic mediation of conflicting demands.

Based upon extensive multi-archival research, John Dreifort provides clear evidence that France was not as pro-appeasement toward the Japanese as conventionally thought, and that French policymakers frequently had clearer insight into the dangers and opportunities which exited in the Far East than did statesmen of other major Western powers in the area.