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H. C. C. Astwood: minister and missionary, diplomat and politician, enigma in the annals of US history. In Dominican Crossroads, Christina Cecelia Davidson explores Astwood's extraordinary and complicated life and career. Born in 1844 in the British Caribbean, Astwood later moved to Reconstruction-era New Orleans, where he became a Republican activist and preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. In 1882 he became the first Black man named US consul to the Dominican Republic. Davidson tracks the challenges that Astwood faced as a Black politician in an era of rampant racism and ongoing cross-border debates over Black men's capacity for citizenship. As a US representative and AME missionary, Astwood epitomized Black masculine respectability. But as Davidson shows, Astwood became a duplicitous, scheming figure who used deception and engaged in racist moral politics to command authority. His methods, Davidson demonstrates, show a bleaker side of Black international politics and illustrate the varied contours of transnational moral discourse as people of all colors vied for power during the ongoing debate over Black rights in Santo Domingo and beyond.

“This is hard to put down.” ~ Publishers Weekly Starred ReviewA top negotiator in countless high-stakes missions to free Americans captured abroad and held in the world's scariest prisons takes readers inside the dramatic and shadowy world of international hostage rescue. Brittney Griner, Danny Fenster, Otto Warmbier, Trevor Reed, Paul Whelan, Kenneth Bae…When an American citizen is unjustly imprisoned overseas, that's when Mickey Bergman's phone starts to ring. Who else are their desperate loved ones supposed to call? Mickey and his tight team of savvy negotiators at the Richardson Center for Global Engagement are the go-to rescuers of last resort, carrying on the high-stakes, round-the-world mission of master negotiator Bill Richardson. Mickey and his team do what U.S. government officials are often unable or unwilling to do: sit down with America's toughest adversaries and find creative ways to bring our people home. That's life In the Shadows. This is the heart-pounding story of these urgent negotiations, what it's like to climb inside the minds of some of the world's most notorious strongmen, where the clear divisions between good and evil are replaced by a thousand shades of gray. The hard work is done far from the glare of media publicity. The negotiations don't follow traditional diplomatic rules. As innocent Americans sit behind bars in hellhole foreign prisons, Mickey and his colleagues stop at nothing to get our people home. And these cases almost never go as smoothly as they should, as the independent negotiators navigate between U.S. government officials and some of the world's most headstrong leaders. And as soon as one American is freed, Mickey is off on another dicey mission to Moscow, Caracas, Naypyidaw, Pyongyang, or some other complex foreign capital. These painstaking campaigns require creative thinking, hardball pressure tactics, excruciating patience, and a genuine sense of compassion for the anxious families whose lives are thrown into turmoil when a loved one is imprisoned abroad. In Mickey Bergman's own words, In the Shadows tells the hidden story of these high-drama rescue campaigns. The crafty negotiating strategies. The strong-willed foreign leaders. The emotional rollercoaster of being responsible for innocent American lives. The exhilaration when another American is released from a foreign prison—and the terrible letdown when a promising effort hits another maddening roadblock. Mickey recounts his unique relationship with his mentor, the late, great Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, ambassador to the United Nations and legendary negotiator. He shares the wrenching closeness he develops with the desperate families he serves, who often have nowhere else to turn. He offers a detailed account of his one-on-one interactions with Washington's top power players, both Democrats and Republicans, and some of the world's most isolated and misunderstood heads of state. For readers who want the full, searing story of these life-or-death rescue missions and the fascinating people behind them, it's all In the Shadows. As Mickey Bergman and New York Times bestselling author Ellis Henican make clear on every page, international diplomacy isn't just for government officials anymore.

For two Americans in Saigon in 1963, the personal and the political combine to spark the drama of a lifetime Before it spread into a tragic war that defined a generation, the conflict in Vietnam smoldered as a guerrilla insurgency and a diplomatic nightmare. Into this volatile country stepped Frederick “Fritz” Nolting, the US ambassador, and his second-in-command, William “Bill” Trueheart, immortalized in David Halberstam's landmark work The Best and the Brightest and accidental players in a pivotal juncture in modern US history.Diplomats at War is a personal memoir by former Washington Post reporter Charles Trueheart—Bill's son and Nolting's godson—who grew up amid the events that traumatized two families and an entire nation. The book embeds the reader at the US embassy and dissects the fateful rift between Nolting and Trueheart over their divergent assessments of the South Vietnamese regime under Ngo Dinh Diem, who would ultimately be assassinated in a coup backed by the United States. Charles Trueheart retells the story of the United States'headlong plunge into war from an entirely new vantage point—that of a son piecing together how his father and godfather participated in, and were deeply damaged by, this historic flashpoint. Their critical rupture, which also destroyed their close friendship, served as a dramatic preface to the United States'disastrous involvement in the Vietnam conflict.Winner of the American Academy of Diplomacy Douglas Dillon Award

The wit and charm that marked Our Man in Belize enlivens Richard Timothy Conroy's new'diplomatic memoir,'in a posting that couldn't have a more different location. But the wheels of lower-level diplomacy, it turns out, turn at the same rate whatever the setting. Plucked from the cost of Central America and put down in post-World-War II Vienna, land of Der Rosencavalier and whipped cream cakes, Conroy still was'not mentioned in dispatches'(or at least, not complimentary ones) but even a lowly vice-consul could do some good in people's lives. Take, for example, his effort to help a woman flee Vienna after she reported that someone was sneaking into her room and slicing off a bit of her foot each night. Or the unfortunate Austrian whose visa application had been rejected three previous times, with no explanation. Conroy discovered that there was a picture of the man in a Red Army sergeant's uniform. Turned out the man had conned a gullible Red Army soldier to lend him the uniform for a snapshot, and an equally gullible group of Russian border guards that he was an undercover Red agent posing as (what he really was) an export-import businessman. Nobody before Conroy had bothered to ask for an explanation. In between similar tales of deep diplomatic deed and misdeed, the author gives his readers an imitable take on the Vienna of those days. Want to buy a second-hand piano? Some inexpensive paintings? How about -- above all -- that famous Viennese food and beer? You could have found it there with Conroy as your guide; failing that, his account of those days is just as rewarding and not nearly as fattening.

This biography of “African explorer” Richard Dorsey Mohun, written by one of his descendants, reveals how American greed and state power helped shape the new imperial order in Africa. Richard Dorsey Mohun spent his career circulating among the eastern United States, the cities and courts of Europe, and the African continent, as he served the US State Department at some points and King Leopold of Belgium at others. A freelance imperialist, he implemented the schemes of American investors and the Congo Free State alike. Without men like him, Africa's history might have unfolded very differently. How did an ordinary son of a Washington bookseller become the agent of American corporate greed and European imperial ambition? Why did he choose to act in ways that ranged from thoughtless and amoral to criminal and unforgivable? With unblinking clarity and precision, historian Arwen P. Mohun interrogates the life and actions of her great-grandfather in American Imperialist. She seeks not to excuse the man known as Dorsey but to understand how individual ambition and imperial lust fueled each other, to catastrophic ends. Ultimately, she offers a nuanced portrait of how her great-grandfather's pursuit of career success and financial security for his family came at a tragic cost to countless Africans.

Young American Foreign Service officers are accustomed to being teased by friends and relatives as to what they do in the “Foreign Legion” or the “Forest Service.” In the United States, unlike in many countries, the role of a professional diplomat is little known or understood. In A Professional Foreigner Edward Marks describes his life as an American diplomat who served during the last four decades of the twentieth century, from 1959 to 2001. Serving primarily in Africa and Asia, Marks was present during the era of decolonization in Africa (but always seemed to be at the opposite end of the continent from the hottest developments), was intimately involved in the early days of the U.S. government's antiterrorism programs, observed the unfolding of a nasty and tragic ethnic conflict in one of the most charming countries in the world, and saw the end of the Cold War at UN headquarters in New York. Along the way Marks served as the U.S. ambassador to two African nations. In this memoir Marks depicts a Foreign Service officer's daily life, providing insight into the profession itself and what it was like to play a role in the steady stream of history, in a world of quotidian events often out of the view of the media and the attention of the world. Marks's stories—such as rescuing an American citizen from a house of ill repute in Mexico and the attempt to recruit mongooses for drug intervention in Sri Lanka—are both entertaining and instructive on the work of diplomats and their contributions to the American story.

WINNER of the Journal of American Revolution's Book of the Year for 2023!In 1785, just a few years after U.S. Independence, a young American named James Leander Cathcart is kidnapped at sea and carried as prisoner to the maverick North African statelet of Algiers, where he is held as a political hostage along with hundreds of other seamen captured on the open seas. The piratical corsairs of Algiers have decided, without any warning, to exploit the vulnerability of the newborn United States by seizing its mariners and holding them for ransom while ruthlessly exploiting their free labor. Today, the name of James Leander Cathcart has been all but forgotten by history. And yet he was one of the most remarkable figures in the early story of the fledgling United States.The Lionkeeper of Algiers reveals the extraordinary and unlikely story of Cathcart, who, thanks to his flair for languages and his formidable human intuition, rose steadily up the ranks from lionkeeper at the Dey's private zoo to become Chief Clerk at the Palace, along the way amassing a chain of taverns in Algiers that functioned as safe houses and food banks for American prisoners. Eleven years later, just one among more than one hundred US hostages in Algiers, Cathcart was paroled back to America and charged with delivering a vital letter to President George Washington, saving a tenuous peace deal and bringing the other captives home. Remarkably, his sense of honor compelled him to go back to Algiers – where he had never formally been made free – to see the peace project through. Cathcart would go on to become a U.S. diplomat in the lands where he was held captive for more than a decade. Featuring some of the most prominent Americans of the era like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, as well as ordinary citizens like Hannah Stephens, the wife of a sea captain who tirelessly lobbied Congress until she was finally reunited with her husband after more than a decade, author Des Ekin's captivating storytelling brings this adventure to life. This page-turning narrative follows the twists and turns of Cathcart's own life upon the international stage of diplomacy, trade, and maritime statecraft at a time when America's place in the world was hanging in the balance.

The relationship between Thomas Jefferson and William Short, the eldest son of an established Virginia family and relative of Martha Jefferson, began as a patron-protégé arrangement conventional for the era. Jefferson encouraged Short's legal career and gave him his first legal work. Thus began a bond of forty years that that both men characterized in paternal and filial terms and that sheds considerable light on the enigmatic Founding Father. In the aftermath of Jefferson's precipitous'flight from Monticello,'Short underwrote substantial short-term loans to him. Jefferson took the younger man to France as his private secretary in 1784 but, quickly concluding that his moral well-being and political judgment were at risk, he urged Short to return to America and settle down. Short, however, wished to pursue a foreign service career and a long affair with a French aristocrat. Jefferson wanted Short to embrace a Virginia way of looking at the world, even buying him a farm near Monticello. Short resisted--and rejected Jefferson's ideas about slavery, economics, marriage, the practice of democratic government, and republican morality, but without rejecting his'friend and father.'He showed little respect for Jefferson's political achievements, viewing him as a well-meaning'visionary,'yet he was conscious of living in the statesman's shadow. William Short was not Thomas Jefferson's intellectual equal, was not a political collaborator, and never became a neighbor, yet the elder man invested considerable emotional energy and time in his'adoptive son,'even during his vice-presidency and presidency. By efficiently managing the younger man's financial affairs Jefferson enabled his extended stay in France, but also diverted Short's money for his own use. Although he believed Short's political judgment had been clouded by his enjoyment of French society and savagely criticized his reaction to the French Revolution, he never gave up on Short the private individual. Heir through Hope reveals a figure who served as a unique sounding board to a Founder, while underscoring the distinct ways Jefferson envisioned the United States'destiny vis à vis Europe. Fascinating in its own right, their complex relationship highlights the tensions between the founding generation and its successors while illuminating the operation of political power in early national America and Revolutionary Europe.

The Vatican Code recounts the unique experience of being the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See during the time of Pope Francis.