The extraordinary story of the Civil War soldier and legal thinker who became the U.S. Supreme Court's most influential justice.Oliver Wendell Holmes escaped death by a fraction of an inch at the Battle of Ball's Bluff and Antietam. Thereafter he lived with unwavering moral courage, unremitting scorn for dogmas, and insatiable intellectual curiosity. As a pioneering legal scholar, Holmes revolutionized the understanding of common law by showing how it always evolved to meet the changing needs of society.Named to the Supreme Court by Theodore Roosevelt at age 61, he served for nearly three decades, writing a series of famous, eloquent, and often dissenting opinions that would prove prophetic in securing freedom of speech, protecting the rights of criminal defendants, and putting an end to the Court's reactionary resistance to social and economic reforms.Based on previously unpublished letters and records, Oliver Wendell Holmes offers...

The exciting, little-known story of the small group of British and American scientists who, during the years of 1941 to 1943 and almost entirely without military experience, revolutionized the way wars are waged and won.Here are the civilian intellectuals -- the kind that many military men viewed with contempt--who helped to change the nature of twentieth-century warfare. Foremost among them was Patrick Blackett, British physicist, ex-naval officer, future Nobel winner, ardent socialist, who, though little remembered today, did more to win the war against Nazi Germany than almost anyone else. Budiansky makes clear how, as director of the World War II anti-submarine effort for Britain's air force and navy, Blackett founded a new science of operational research. We see how, using little more than simple mathematics and probability theory--and a steadfast belief in the utility of science--Blackett and his colleagues demonstrated to disbelieving military brass ways...

Queen Elizabeth I and England's First SpymasterSir Francis Walsingham's official title was principal secretary to Queen Elizabeth I, but in fact this pious, tight-lipped Puritan was England's first spymaster. A ruthless, fiercely loyal civil servant, Walsingham worked brilliantly behind the scenes to foil Elizabeth's rival Mary Queen of Scots and outwit Catholic Spain and France, which had arrayed their forces behind her. Though he cut an incongruous figure in Elizabeth's worldly court, Walsingham managed to win the trust of key players like William Cecil and the Earl of Leicester before launching his own secret campaign against the queen's enemies. Covert operations were Walsingham's genius; he pioneered techniques for exploiting double agents, spreading disinformation, and deciphering codes with the latest code-breaking science that remain staples of international espionage.

A sweeping, in-depth history of NSA, whose famous "cult of silence" has left the agency shrouded in mystery for decades The National Security Agency was born out of the legendary codebreaking programs of World War II that cracked the famed Enigma machine and other German and Japanese codes, thereby turning the tide of Allied victory. In the postwar years, as the United States developed a new enemy in the Soviet Union, our intelligence community found itself targeting not soldiers on the battlefield, but suspected spies, foreign leaders, and even American citizens. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, NSA played a vital, often fraught and controversial role in the major events of the Cold War, from the Korean War to the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam and beyond. In Code Warriors, Stephen Budiansky—a longtime expert in cryptology—tells the fascinating story of how NSA came to be, from its roots in World War II through the fall...