San Antonio College Library

"The epic history of the AR-15 rifle, America's most controversial weapon"-- In the 1950s an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. He sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon that could replace the M1s touted by soldiers in World War II. What he did create was a lethal handheld icon of the American century. McWhirter and Elinson track the AR-15 from inception to ubiquity. How did...

"For the first time in our military history, how we wage war is being built around a single strategy: the tracking and elimination of "high value targets"--in other words, assassination by military drone. Kill Chain is the story of how this new paradigm came to be, from WWII to the present; revealing the inner workings of these military technologies; introducing the key figures behind the transformation as well as the people on whom these deadly technologies...

"We have long understood the Industrial Revolution as a triumphant story of innovation and technology. Empire of Guns, a rich and ambitious new book by award-winning historian Priya Satia, upends this conventional wisdom by placing war and Britain's prosperous gun trade at the heart of the Industrial Revolution and the state's imperial expansion. Satia brings to life this bustling industrial society with the story of a scandal: Samuel Galton of Birmingham,...

"This book is a study of the diverse array of chemical weapons that were deployed, prepared for use, or proposed during the Civil War"--

"A chilling account of seventy years of nuclear catastrophes, by the author of the "definitive" (Economist) Cold War history, Nuclear Folly. Nuclear energy was embraced across the globe at the height of the nuclear industry in the 1960s and 1970s; today, there are 440 nuclear reactors operating throughout the world, with nuclear power providing 10 percent of world electricity. Yet as the world seeks to reduce carbon emissions to combat climate change,...

"The familiar image of the British in the Second World War is that of the plucky underdog taking on German might. David Edgerton's bold, compelling new history shows the conflict in a new light, with Britain as a very wealthy country, formidable in arms, ruthless in pursuit of its interests, and in command of a global production system. Rather than belittled by a Nazi behemoth, Britain arguably had the world's most advanced mechanized forces. It had...

Discusses the history of nuclear weapons and their proliferation since the discover of fission in 1938, covering the covert spread of technology around the world and post-Cold War geopolitical issues regarding the programs of countries such as Pakistan, China, and North Korea.

Sun Tzu was a military genius, and his book The Art of War, written 2,400 years ago, is still the essential how-to guide for winning on the battlefield and, many argue, in business. This A & E Special tells the epic story of Sun Tzu as it illustrates a conflict in which his tactics posthumously saved a city from defeat and paved the way toward the unification of China. Examples of historic battles ranging from antiquity to the present day repeatedly...

When the Royal Navy realized that the Bismarck was in the Atlantic, she was hunted down by radar and surrounded by British heavy warships.

This episode reveals the inventive methods used to trick the Nazis in the push to end the war, including bogus invasion plans and fake armies.