Stackpole Books

06/06/2024

80 years ago, the Allied Expeditionary Forces landed in Normandy on the French coast, launching the invasion that became the beginning of the end of World War II in Europe. Dive deeper into the story of D-Day with these accounts from Lyons Press and Stackpole Books.

06/07/2023

War in Europe began with the first human migrants. Rival bands fought for thousands of years before the Greeks and Romans began writing about their military history, first as legend—for instance, the hero Achilles battling the Trojans—and then as fact. War developed from sticks and stones to bronze, iron, and steel, including armor and edged weapons. Then came gunpowder, guns, and cannons, which eventually replaced edged weapons. Finally, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, technology exploded: railroads, steamships, telegraphs, machine guns, automobiles, airplanes, and tanks enabled European states to muster, equip, arm, transport, and command more men than ever before, with more firepower than ever before. In the past seventy-five years, atomic weapons changed the military landscape of Europe—as have the internet and cyber warfare.

In Land of War, a colorful new telling of European warfare—and indeed European history through the continent’s all too numerous wars and conflicts—William Nester describes millennia of armed conflict. He covers the “greatest hits” of military history both ancient and current: Thermopylae, the Peloponnesian War, the wars of the Roman Empire across the continent, the Battle of Hastings, the Crusades, Agincourt, Waterloo, Napoleon and Wellington, the Somme, the Spanish Civil War, Stalingrad and Normandy, Churchill, Hi**er, and Stalin, Bosnia, and up through Putin’s attempts to redraw the map of Europe. Nester highlights how warfare has been deeply entwined with European statesmanship and undergirds modern institutions such as NATO and the European Union. Europe’s sense of itself is bound up in its military history.
Land of War is an epic odyssey from Europe’s mythic origins through its latest violent conflicts.

Land of War: A History of European Warfare from Achilles to Putin by William Nestor is available NOW, find it wherever books are sold!

06/01/2023

We experience, learn about, and enjoy nature throughout our lifetimes in woods close to home. In the spirit of Walden, author Kevin Patrick spent a year connecting with White's Woods, a 500-acre tract in an Allegheny forest adjacent to his home in Indiana, Pennsylvania. He captured in prose and photographs the four seasons of this near-woods paradise, weaving natural history with human experience to create a geography of place to stand for all similar near-woods places.

Near Woods: A Year in an Allegheny Forest by Kevin Patrick is available now, find it wherever books are sold!

05/24/2023

Daryln Brewer Hoffstot has observed the fields and forests of her Western Pennsylvania farm for thirty-five years. This collection of twenty-seven essays explores birds, mammals, bees, fungi, trees, and other aspects of the natural world. She is a keen observer who delights in sharing what she sees as well as what she learns from naturalists. Her discoveries have strengthened her commitment to protecting the plants and animals that surround us.

Daryln is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Boston Globe and Pittsburgh Quarterly. Her essay in the New York Times, “On a Pennsylvania Farm, Nature Is Not Just Carrying On,” won a Notable Mention in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2021.

A Farm Life: Observations from Fields and Forests is available NOW, find it wherever books are sold!

05/24/2023

https://www.indianagazette.com/news/local-author-professor-releases-book-on-whites-woods/article_4d81acd6-745f-5d74-8f57-335dfc805206.html?fbclid=IwAR2lprKXmrC_iWgrfZpXeTRnvzdKNrctEvU6V8fUFavvy9QVWQhxmU36Rbs

If you missed it, be sure to check out this great article on Near Woods: A Year in an Allegheny Forest by Kevin Patrick!

“I walked into White’s Woods and found what Henry David Thoreau discovered at Walden. The natural splendor and solitude attributed to famous faraway forests could also be found in the

05/10/2023

The air route, known by pilots as "the Hump," was a treacherous one. The Allies lost nearly 600 aircraft over the course of the three-and-a-half-year airlift. One 24-hour period however was particularly deadly.

04/28/2023

Guess what? Tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of Independent Bookstore Day!

Celebrate by supporting your local bookstore! You can participate by:
-Sharing your local bookstore's content
-Showing off your book stash
-Joining a book club
-Attending an event
-Buying a book!

Check out indiebound.org to find your local bookstore!

04/05/2023

Unique among Union army corps, the Ninth fought in both the Eastern and Western theaters of the Civil War. The corps’ veterans called their service a “geography class,” and others have called the Ninth “a wandering corps” because it covered more ground than any corps in the Union armies. With the same attention to detail that he gave to the First Corps in First for the Union, Darin Wipperman vividly reconstructs life—and death—in the Ninth Corps, with Burnside's Boys.

The roots of the Ninth Corps lay in the early 1862 coastal expeditions in the Carolinas under Ambrose Burnside. After this successful campaign—a master class in Civil War amphibious warfare that turned Burnside into a star—Burnside’s units coalesced into a corps, part of which reinforced Pope’s Army of Virginia at Second Bull Run during the summer of 1862. The Ninth fought with the Army of the Potomac in the Maryland campaign in September 1862, first at the Battle of South Mountain and then, in its most famous action, at Antietam, where it suffered 25 percent casualties attempting to seize what became known as Burnside’s Bridge. Three months later, the corps was lightly engaged at the Battle of Fredericksburg, during which Burnside commanded the entire Army of the Potomac.

After the disaster of Fredericksburg, the Ninth—again under Burnside—spent much of 1863 in the West with the Army of the Ohio, performing occupation duty in Kentucky and then in Grant’s campaign to take Vicksburg, Mississippi. It fought in Tennessee and helped take Knoxville before returning East, a shell of itself thanks largely to disease. Reorganized, the Ninth joined Grant’s Overland Campaign in Virginia, fighting—with horrifying losses—at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania. It joined the siege of Petersburg, including the infamous Battle of the Crater in July 1864, and remained at Petersburg through the end of the war, where it participated in the assault that broke the siege in April 1865, forcing Lee’s army into retreat, and final defeat, at Appomattox.

From the Carolinas to Maryland, from Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee to Virginia, the Ninth Corps sacrificed for the Union—and burnished its place in the annals of the American Civil War.

Burnside's Boys: The Union's Ninth Corps and the Civil War in the East by Darrin Wipperman is available NOW, find it wherever books are sold!

03/29/2023

Now in paperback!

In this riveting book, Steven Zaloga describes how American foot soldiers faced down Hi**er’s elite armored spearhead—the Hi**er Youth Panzer Division—in the snowy Ardennes forest during one of World War II’s biggest battles, the Battle of the Bulge.

The Hi**er Youth division was assigned one of the most important missions of Hi**er’s Ardennes offensive: the capture of the main highway to the primary objective of Antwerp, the seizure of which Hi**er believed would end the war. Had the Germans taken the Belgian port, it would have cut off the Americans from the British and perhaps led to a second, more devastating Dunkirk.

In Zaloga’s careful reconstruction, a succession of American infantry units—the 99th Division, the 2nd Division, and the 1st Division (the famous Big Red One)—fought a series of battles that denied Hi**er the best roads to Antwerp and doomed his offensive. American GIs—some of them seeing combat for the very first time—had stymied Hi**er’s panzers and grand plans.

Available now in hardback AND paperback, find it wherever books are sold!

03/23/2023

It’s one of the last overlooked parts of American military history: the significant role African Americans played in the wars of America. Their story is more than just the 54th Massachusetts in the Civil War, more than just a tank battalion in World War II: African Americans contributed to every war in American history. In Unsung Patriots, Gene Bétit tells this important story with verve and gusto, as well as respect. By their brave deeds, African Americans have secured a place in American military history, and Bétit makes sure they receive their due.

In the colonial wars, the Revolution, and the War of 1812, African Americans served as seamen, gunners, and marine sharpshooters in the Navy and served as 15 percent of the Continental Army. During the Civil War, blacks constituted nearly 200,000 soldiers of the Union Army and served in some of the war’s most celebrated regiments and toughest battles, and their service inspired the farthest-reaching of the Union’s emancipation policies.

In the decades after the Civil War, Black soldiers formed an important part of the U.S. Army, fighting as Buffalo Soldiers in the Indian Wars of the 1870s, up through the Spanish-American War. In World War I, the segregated 92nd and 93rd Divisions fought hard and received the Croix de Guerre from France. In World War II, more than 1 million Blacks served the United States—and more than 100,000 were assigned to combat duty, not only in the Black Panther tank battalion and the Tuskegee Airmen, but in other combat units and units that kept the American war effort supplied.

In the years since World War II, Truman integrated the military during the Korean War, but the African-American soldiers remain a class apart—during Korea, during Vietnam, and beyond.

This is a story with importance not only for military history, but for all of American history. And Gene Bétit does it careful, exciting justice.

Unsung Patriots: African Americans in America's Wars is available NOW, find it wherever books are sold!

03/15/2023

PT boats loom large in the popular imagination of World War II. In March 1942, a PT boat evacuated Gen. Douglas MacArthur, his family, and top staff from the Philippines, which inspired the war movie They Were Expendable, directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne. John F. Kennedy became a war hero while commanding PT-109, which collided with a Japanese destroyer and was sunk in August 1943. But the story of PT boats has never been told in the depth and detail that their exemplary service deserves. Naval historian C. J. Skamarakas uses one Pacific PT boat squadron to tell the story of PT boats in action in World War II.

Eighty feet long, PT boats were designed to launch torpedoes against enemy ships five and ten times their own size. But defects in the torpedoes and the boats’ speed and maneuverability ultimately shifted the boats’ mission to patrolling and breaking up Japanese shipping and reinforcements. In the waters of the Southwest Pacific as part of MacArthur’s offensives in New Guinea and the Philippines, Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 25 completed these missions and also executed other operations for which they weren’t specifically trained, including inserting commandos behind enemy lines, air-sea rescue, raids on enemy positions, reconnaissance of potential sites for amphibious landings, coordination of air strikes in support of ground forces, meetings with guerrilla leaders, recovery of prisoners of war, diversionary activities, and psychological operations. Today we would call many of their missions “special ops.” The Japanese called PT boats “mosquitoes” and “devil boats.”

The Devil Boats: A U.S. Navy PT Squadron in World War II by C.J. Skamarakas recounts the unique contributions of one motor torpedo boat squadron and through it tells the story of PT boats in the Pacific War. With drama and excitement, as well as careful attention to detail, the book fills a void in the history of the U.S. Navy in World War II.

The Devil Boats is available now, find it wherever books are sold!

03/13/2023

The rough-and-tumble life of Special Forces vet and Sixties pop star Barry Sadler.

The top Billboard Hot 100 single of 1966 wasn’t The Rolling Stones' “Paint It Black” or the Beatles' “Yellow Submarine”--it was “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” a hyper-patriotic tribute to the men of the Special Forces by Vietnam veteran, U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler.

But Sadler’s clean-cut, all-American image hid a darker side, a Hunter Thompson-esque life of booze, girls, and guns. Unable to score another hit song, he wrote a string of popular pulp fiction paperbacks that made “Rambo look like a stroll through Disneyland.” He killed a lover’s ex-boyfriend in Tennessee. Settling in Central America, Sadler ran guns, allegedly trained guerrillas, provided medical care to residents, and caroused at his villa. In 1988 he was shot in the head in Guatemala and died a year later.

This life-and-times biography of an American pop culture phenomenon recounts the sensational details of Sadler’s life vividly but soberly, setting his meteoric rise and tragic fall against the big picture of American society and culture during and after the Vietnam War.

The paperback edition of Ballad of the Green Beret by Marc Leepson is available now wherever books are sold!