LMC---Start old school with Alfred Thayer Mahan's Influence of Seapower on History, read together with the collection of essays of Frederick Jackson Turner The Frontier in American History. Batt Sparrow's The Insular Cases and the rise of American Empire is a great work on the Spanish American war and the intersection of military strategy, grand strategy, and constitutional law. Great book that came out last year called Six Frigates, about the early Navy and the Tripolitan Wars. I would also heartily suggest Max Boot's The Savage Wars of Peace.

Anne Coulter's "Godless," is a hoot of read (she is genuinely witty on paper). And a highly recommended read of, count 'em if you can believe it, 1518 pages in one volume of Vincen Bugliosi's "Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy." I'm about 1/3 through (and I'm a wellknown fast reader), and I realize how little I really knew about this event from my childhood, and how it cast a pall over our country to this very day. Bugliosi in an interview made the point that most Americans in surveys and in his personal inquiries have bought into believing in some kind of conspiracy, most mildly as more than one gunman. The first 300 pages of the book are worth reading even if one cannot finish the book since it begins with the principals on November 22nd, 1963 and runs hour by hour (almost) until late November 25, 1963, with a leap forward into 1964 on the last two pages of said section.

Jon