Mexico's relationship with the world during the 1930s is revealed as a fascinating series of calculated responses to domestic political changes and international economic shifts.

A gripping and groundbreaking account of how all but one of FDR's ambassadors in Europe misjudged Hitler and his intentions As German tanks rolled toward Paris in late May 1940, the U.S. Ambassador to France, William Bullitt, was determined to stay put, holed up in the Chateau St. Firmin in Chantilly, his country residence. Bullitt told the president that he would neither evacuate the embassy nor his chateau, an eighteenth Renaissance manse with a wine cellar of over 18,000 bottles, even though “we have only two revolvers in this entire mission with only forty bullets.” As German forces closed in on the French capital, Bullitt wrote the president, “In case I should get blown up before I see you again, I want you to know that it has been marvelous to work for you.” As the fighting raged in France, across the English Channel, Ambassador to Great Britain Joseph P. Kennedy wrote to his wife Rose, “The situation is more than critical. It means a terrible finish for the allies.” David McKean's Watching Darkness Fall will recount the rise of the Third Reich in Germany and the road to war from the perspective of four American diplomats in Europe who witnessed it firsthand: Joseph Kennedy, William Dodd, Breckinridge Long, and William Bullitt, who all served in key Western European capitals—London, Berlin, Rome, Paris, and Moscow—in the years prior to World War II. In many ways they were America’s first line of defense and they often communicated with the president directly, as Roosevelt's eyes and ears on the ground. Unfortunately, most of them underestimated the power and resolve of Adolf Hitler and Germany’s Third Reich. Watching Darkness Fall is a gripping new history of the years leading up to and the beginning of WWII in Europe told through the lives of five well-educated and mostly wealthy men all vying for the attention of the man in the Oval Office.

While broadly concerned about the nature of New Deal diplomacy, Patrick J. Hearden's Roosevelt Confronts Hitler pays special attention to American policy toward Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1941. Basing his conclusions on information gathered from his extensive research in various archives and private collections, Hearden presents a persuasive reinterpretation of how and why the United States went to war with Germany in 1941. Although President Roosevelt repeatedly claimed in public speeches that Hitler was bent upon world conquest, the question of strategic defense was not the primary factor underlying the American decision to enter the war. Moreover, despite the genuine concern of Roosevelt and his advisors for the plight of the Jews inside the Third Reich, this ethical question was even less important than the issue of national security in prompting the preparation for war. The American decision to enter the war, Hearden argues, was actually based much more upon economic considerations and ideological commitments than on either moral aspirations or military apprehensions. Roosevelt, his advisors, and influential business leaders were primarily concerned about the menace that triumphant Germany would present the free enterprise system in the United States. If Hitler and the Axis powers succeeded in dividing the world into exclusive trade zones, the New Deal planners would have to regulate the American economy to create an internal balance between supply and demand. Convinced that capitalism could not function within the framework of only one country, they chose to fight to keep foreign markets open for surplus American commodities and thereby to preserve entrepreneurial freedom in the United States.

A contentious debate lingers over whether Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned his back on the Jews of Hitler’s Europe. FDR and the Jews reveals a concerned leader whose efforts on behalf of Jews were far greater than those of any other world figure but whose moral leadership was tempered by the political realities of depression and war.

Joining the U.S.’ war effort in 1942, Mexican President Manuel Ávila Camacho ordered the dislocation of Japanese Mexican communities and approved the creation of internment camps and zones of confinement. Under this relocation program, a new pro-American nationalism developed in Mexico that scripted Japanese Mexicans as an internal racial enemy. In spite of the broad resistance presented by the communities wherein they were valued members, Japanese Mexicans lost their freedom, property, and lives. In Uprooting Community, Selfa A. Chew examines the lived experience of Japanese Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during World War II. Studying the collaboration of Latin American nation-states with the U.S. government, Chew illuminates the efforts to detain, deport, and confine Japanese residents and Japanese-descent citizens of Latin American countries during World War II. These narratives challenge the notion that Japanese Mexicans enjoyed the protection of the Mexican government during the war and refute the mistaken idea that Japanese immigrants and their descendants were not subjected to internment in Mexico during this period. Through her research, Chew provides evidence that, despite the principles of racial democracy espoused by the Mexican elite, Japanese Mexicans were in fact victims of racial prejudice bolstered by the political alliances between the United States and Mexico. The treatment of the ethnic Japanese in Mexico was even harsher than what Japanese immigrants and their children in the United States endured during the war, according to Chew. She argues that the number of persons affected during World War II extended beyond the first-generation Japanese immigrants “handled” by the Mexican government during this period, noting instead that the entire multiethnic social fabric of the borderlands was reconfigured by the absence of Japanese Mexicans.

Unwelcome Exiles. Mexico and the Jewish Refugees from Nazism, 1933–1945 reconstructs a largely unknown history: during the Second World War, the Mexican government closed its doors to Jewish refugees expelled by the Nazis. In this comprehensive investigation, based on archives in Mexico and the United States, Daniela Gleizer emphasizes the selectiveness and discretionary implementation of post-revolutionary Mexican immigration policy, which sought to preserve mestizaje—the country’s blend of Spanish and Indigenous people and the ideological basis of national identity—by turning away foreigners considered “inassimilable” and therefore “undesirable.” Through her analysis of Mexico’s role in the rescue of refugees in the 1930s and 40s, Gleizer challenges the country’s traditional image of itself as a nation that welcomes the persecuted. This book is a revised and expanded translation of the Spanish El exilio incómodo. México y los refugiados judíos, 1933-1945, which received an Honorable Mention in the LAJSA Book Prize Award 2013.

Despite all that has already been written on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph Persico has uncovered a hitherto overlooked dimension of FDR's wartime leadership: his involvement in intelligence and espionage operations. Roosevelt's Secret War is crowded with remarkable revelations: -FDR wanted to bomb Tokyo before Pearl Harbor -A defector from Hitler's inner circle reported directly to the Oval Office -Roosevelt knew before any other world leader of Hitler's plan to invade Russia -Roosevelt and Churchill concealed a disaster costing hundreds of British soldiers' lives in order to protect Ultra, the British codebreaking secret -An unwitting Japanese diplomat provided the President with a direct pipeline into Hitler's councils Roosevelt's Secret War also describes how much FDR had been told--before the Holocaust--about the coming fate of Europe's Jews. And Persico also provides a definitive answer to the perennial question Did FDR know in advance about the attack on Pearl Harbor? By temperament and character, no American president was better suited for secret warfare than FDR. He manipulated, compartmentalized, dissembled, and misled, demonstrating a spymaster's talent for intrigue. He once remarked, "I never let my right hand know what my left hand does." Not only did Roosevelt create America's first central intelligence agency, the OSS, under "Wild Bill" Donovan, but he ran spy rings directly from the Oval Office, enlisting well-placed socialite friends. FDR was also spied against. Roosevelt's Secret War presents evidence that the Soviet Union had a source inside the Roosevelt White House; that British agents fed FDR total fabrications to draw the United States into war; and that Roosevelt, by yielding to Churchill's demand that British scientists be allowed to work on the Manhattan Project, enabled the secrets of the bomb to be stolen. And these are only a few of the scores of revelations in this constantly surprising story of Roosevelt's hidden role in World War II.