Publisher description: This book is the first full-scale treatment of the only instance in history in which African blacks, seized by slave dealers, won their freedom and returned home. In 1839, Joseph Cinque led other blacks in a revolt on the Spanish slave ship, Amistad, in the Caribbean. They steered the ship northward to Montauk, Long Island, where it was seized by an American naval vessel. With the Africans jailed in Connecticut and the Spaniards...

The author delivers a a narrative documenting a popular theory of JFK and Vietnam advanced previously by such writers as Richard Mahoney and Richard Reeves: that had Kennedy lived, US involvement in Vietnam would not have escalated as it did.

In an examination of Union and Confederate foreign relations during the Civil War from both European and American perspectives, Howard Jones explores a number of themes, including the international economic and political dimensions of the war, the North's attempts to block the South from winning foreign recognition as a nation, Napoleon III's meddling in the war and his attempt to restore French power in the New World, and the inability of Europeans...

Jones provides an account of President Eisenhower's disastrous attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. He examines the train of missteps and self-deceptions that led to the invasion of the Bay of Pigs by U.S.-trained exiles.

Tom Paine and republican religion -- Landscape as religion: Irving, Bryant, Cooper -- Transcendentalism and Emerson -- The cosmic optimism of Walt Whitman -- The pessimism of Mark Twain -- The cosmic loneliness of Robert Frost.