Representing America: Firsthand Accounts from a Century of U.S. Diplomacy (1924-2024)
Edited by Robin Matthewman
Kennedy’s Coup
By Jack Cheevers
The Nehru Years: An International History of Indian Non-Alignment
By Swapna Kona Nayudu
Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam
By Faisal Devji
Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World
By David Van Reybrouck
China in Iraq After the War: From Underdog to Unassailable
By Shirzad Azad
Representing America: Firsthand Accounts from a Century of U.S. Diplomacy (1924-2024)
Edited by Robin Matthewman
Arlington Hall Press/ Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, December 2025
374 pages
Representing America: One Hundred Years of U.S. Diplomacy (1924-2024) is an anthology of carefully curated oral histories highlighting a century of service by U.S. foreign affairs professionals. Beginning nearly 35 years ago, the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST) began collecting these recollections then steadily expanded beyond the State Department to include foreign affairs professionals in various U.S. government agencies working at all levels in differing specialties. Today the total archive numbers 2700 transcripts and includes remarkable stories about events in the far corners of the world, about the unfolding of U.S. foreign policy and diplomatic initiatives, and about the contributions and sacrifices of the men and women who represented the United States. Over the years, the archive has become the repository for independent diplomatic oral history collections, memoirs, and podcast series. It is the largest diplomatic oral history archive in the United States, and one of the largest in the world.
This well organized anthology contains only a small sampling of ADST’s oral history archive. In twelve chapters starting with excerpts from the 1920s, this primary source material contains stories condensed from the original and edited for readability.
Part I contains diplomats’ stories organized by geographic region, in chronological order, and reflecting State Department’s current organization.
Part II provides readers with behind-the-scene glimpses of the diverse types of work that diplomats undertake, at home and abroad. Examples include consular and public diplomacy, work on war and peace, energy policy, cultural patrimony, environmental negotiations refugee settlement, human rights, arms control, intelligence analysis, and sanction policy. Mixed into this section are stories of the rise of international institutions like NATO as well as the work of USAID, the Departments of Commerce, of Agriculture, and of Treasury which are fully integrated into embassy work.
Current Chair of the ADST Board of Directors, Ambassador Anne Patterson, has said in the foreword to Representing America “The volume spotlights the impressive contributions of America’s diplomats across the history of the modern Foreign Service. Its passages span all regions of the world and illustrate the full variety of foreign affairs professionals’ voices, their involvement in historic events, their service to the American people, and the sacrifices and dangers they have faced. . . .The anthology also highlights the importance of oral history, whether you believe that history occurs in cycles, or repeats itself. . .I would posit that oral history makes a unique and vital contribution to our understanding of what the past can tell us about the present.”
Kennedy’s Coup
By Jack Cheevers
Simon and Schuster, February 2026
680 pages
Kennedy’s Coup is a landmark work that will change readers’ understanding of America’s involvement in one of the most controversial and consequential wars in our history. Based on a decade of research and writing, enriched by eyewitness interviews and revealing documents obtained through dozens of freedom of information requests, Kennedy’s Coup vividly recreates the Kennedy Administration’s secret encouragement of the fatal 1963 military coup against South Vietnam’s defiant president.
The brutal assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem by his own generals—which capped weeks of bitter White House infighting amid JFK’s wavering—led to dreadful consequences for the United States, opening the door to nine years of costly and futile warfare in Vietnam. A meticulous researcher and fluid writer, Jack Cheevers etches unforgettable portraits of the people behind this fascinating drama: the kindly, philosophy-loving American ambassador who tried to save Diem; the powerful Pentagon and State Department figures who battled for JFK’s ear; the hard-driving young American journalists in Saigon who braved police beatings and death threats to dig out the story; the adder-tongued Madame Nhu, Diem’s beautiful sister-in-law, who enraged critics with outrageous insults; the scheming South Vietnamese generals who slowly tightened a noose around their commander in chief; the hard-drinking CIA agent who carried secret US messages to the generals; and Diem and his Machiavellian brother Nhu, head of the feared secret police, who tried but failed to outwit both the Americans and their traitorous generals.
While many Vietnam books mention Diem’s murder in passing, this gripping account delves into the participants’ personalities, motives, and actions in greater detail than ever before. The definitive history of one of the most catastrophic decisions ever made by a US president, shedding new light on events that altered the world, Kennedy’s Coup will be a work of lasting importance.
REVIEWS
Jack Cheevers has done the seemingly impossible: By mining newly declassified documents, memoirs (including unpublished works), and interviews with participants, he has uncovered new information about this epochal event. In the process he has crafted a crackling historical narrative about one of the pivotal events of the 20th century.”– Max Boot, author of Reagan: His Life and Legend and The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam
“The importance of what Jack Cheevers does in this book cannot be overestimated. He presents the first inside account of President John F. Kennedy’s role in the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, considered America’s “Miracle Man” by Life magazine only a few years earlier. Cheevers explains in detail for the first time one of the most important and secret chapters in America’s war in Vietnam and Kennedy’s involvement in it.”
– Christopher Goscha, Professor of International Relations, Université du Québec à Montréal, author of The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam and Vietnam: A New History
“Jack Cheevers’s Kennedy’s Coup combines impeccable research and elegant writing. Cheevers sheds fresh light on an important turning point in America’s war in Vietnam through a tale well-told that combines fascinating characters, intrigue, and the fates of nations.”
– H.R. McMaster, author of Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jack Cheevers is the author of Act of War: Lyndon Johnson, North Korea, and the Capture of the Spy Ship Pueblo, winner of the 2014 Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature. He worked as a newspaper reporter and editor for twenty-seven years, including stints at the Los Angeles Times, The Oakland Tribune, and the Associated Press and United Press.
The Nehru Years: An International History of Indian Non-Alignment
By Swapna Kona Nayudu
Cambridge University Press, April 2025
238 pages
Scholars of international relations, political thought, and India’s international and diplomatic history are increasingly interested in the relevance of non-alignment in Indian foreign policy. The origins of such policies and debates can be traced back to Nehru’s conceptualization of non-alignment at the height of the Cold War. In this deeply researched study of his years as Prime Minister, 1947–64, Swapna Kona Nayudu utilizes archival research in multiple languages to uncover Indian diplomatic influence in four major international events: the Korean War, the Suez Crisis, the Hungarian Revolution, and the Congo Crisis. Through this detailed examination, she explores the contested meaning of non-alignment, a policy almost unique in its ambiguity and its centrality to a nation’s political life. The resulting history is a thoughtful critique of India’s diplomatic position as the only non-aligned founding member of the UN.
REVIEWS
“A compelling argument about non-alignment as a powerfully original mode of considering and reshaping international order. Rather than a way of avoiding Cold War antagonisms in negative fashion, Nayudu demonstrates how Indian ideas and practices of non-alignment constituted a positive and sophisticated vision of the world and its political future.” Faisal Devji, University of Oxford
“This book is a refreshingly original treatment of non-alignment. It eloquently rescues non-alignment from the confines of Cold War historiography. Nayudu embeds non-alignment in a larger ethical vision that is deeply engaged with questions of war and politics. The book also connects non-alignment to a politics of anti-colonial resistance, that was creatively trying to align the imperatives of national self-determination with a more cosmopolitan vision. It is wonderfully written, and will become vital to all discussions of Nehru’s vision of international order.” Pratap Mehta, Princeton University
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Swapna Kona Nayudu is Principal Research Fellow, Global Asia Initiative at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and serves on the Advisory Council of Harvard University’s Centre for Global Political Thought. She is also a Lecturer of Global Affairs, Yale-NUS College.
Her first book The Nehru Years: An International History of Indian Non-Alignment was published by Cambridge University Press, UK and in South Asia by Juggernaut Books
Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam
By Faisal Devji
Yale University Press, August 2025
280 pages
Until the nineteenth century, Islam was variously understood as a set of beliefs and practices. But after Muslims began to see their faith as an historical actor on the world stage, they needed to narrate Islam’s birth anew as well as to imagine its possible death. Faisal Devji argues that this change, sparked by the crisis of Muslim sovereignty in the age of European empire, provided a way of thinking about agency in a global context: an Islam liberated from the authority of kings and clerics had the potential to represent the human race itself as a newly empirical reality.
Ordinary Muslims, now recognized as the privileged representatives of Islam, were freed from traditional forms of Islamic authority. However, their conception of Islam as an impersonal actor in history meant that it could not be defined in either religious or political terms. Its existence as a civilizational and later ideological subject also deprived figures like God and the Prophet of their theological subjectivities while robbing the Muslim community of its political agency. Devji illuminates this history and explores its ramifications for the contemporary Muslim world.
REVIEWS
“Devji’s book casts floods of light on the changes in the Islamic world and the ways in which Muslims understand it. It is indispensable reading if one is to make sense of contemporary developments in Muslim societies.”—Charles Taylor, McGill University
“Every book Faisal Devji writes is important. This biography of Islam as an historical actor is daring, learned, occasionally outrageous, invariably revelatory. Here there is no deference to the Western gaze. Devji gives us not only a study of Islam, but a study of modernity that shifts the world on its axis.”—Anne Norton, University of Pennsylvania
“Waning Crescent forms essential reading for a wide audience that will appreciate its erudition and for those rare acute political observers rightly concerned with the present spell cast by our more oppressing spiritual pasts but also intrigued by the normative resources that may yet be found there.”—Hent de Vries, author of Miracles et Métaphysique and editor of Religion Beyond a Concept
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Faisal Devji is Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History and Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He is the author of The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence and Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea.
Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World
By David Van Reybrouck
W.W. Norton and Company, May 2025
600 pages
Cundill History Prize Finalist
Baillie Gifford Prize Finalist
From the internationally best-selling writer, a masterful account of the epic revolution that sparked the decolonization of the modern world.
In this vivid history, renowned scholar and celebrated author of Congo David Van Reybrouck captures a period of extraordinary tumult and chaos to tell the story of Indonesia’s momentous revolution, known as the “Revolusi.”
Encompassing several hundred years of history, he details the formation of the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese invasion that followed, and the young rebels who engaged in armed resistance once the occupation ended. British and Dutch troops were sent to restore order and keep peace, but instead ignited the first modern war of decolonization. America, too, became embroiled with the Indonesians’ fierce struggle for freedom. That struggle inspired independence movements in Asia, Africa, and the Arab world, especially in the wake of Indonesia’s monumental 1955 Bandung Conference, the first global conference without the West. The whole world had become involved in Revolusi, and the whole world was changed by it.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews and eyewitness testimonies, David Van Reybrouck turns this vast and complex story into an utterly gripping narrative, written with remarkable historical clarity and filled with tragedy and passion. A landmark history, Revolusi cements Indonesia’s struggle for independence as one of the defining dramas of the twentieth century and entirely reframes our understanding of post-colonialism.
REVIEWS
“The strength of Mr. Van Reybrouck’s chronicle lies as much in the hundreds of interviews he conducted with very old participants in (and witnesses to) the war as in his impressive command of historical detail.”
― Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal
“This meticulous history of Indonesia spans several centuries, focusing on Dutch colonization of the archipelago and a drawn-out internal revolution that embroiled British, American and Japanese forces.”
― New York Times Book Review
“[David Van Reybrouck] is a historian who gets his boots dirty. From remote Asian islands to Dutch nursing homes, [he] has tracked down eyewitnesses to Indonesia’s colonial period, producing the definitive account of a neglected epoch.”
― Economist
“[An] immensely readable new history [that] fills an important gap.… Van Reybrouck has visited just about every place that figures in Indonesia’s history, and evokes them with a narrative zest all too rare among historians.”
― Adam Hochschild, Atlantic
“A long overdue and utterly compelling narrative history of the birth of Indonesia.… It is as intricate as the waterways of the archipelago and yet it hums along, like a steamer on the Java Sea, propelled by the stories of its astonishing cast.”
― Alec Russell, Financial Times
“A comprehensive, authoritative, and highly readable history. Seamlessly interwoven with hundreds upon hundreds of personal testimonies, David Van Reybrouck’s narrative is a masterly display of the historian’s craft and a welcome corrective to the fiction that the Dutch in the East Indies were a benign force.”
― J. M. Coetzee, author of The Pole
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Van Reybrouck is a non-fiction author, playwright and poet whose work focuses on colonialism, democracy, and populism. His book Congo: The Epic History of a People, won 20 prizes, sold over 500,000 copies and has been translated into a dozen languages.
He is also one of the most highly regarded literary and political writers of his generation, whose essay ‘Against Elections’ was translated in more than 20 languages and has led to trials in participatory democracy throughout The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and elsewhere.
He holds a doctorate from Leiden University and has taught at Bard College. He lives in Brussels, Belgium.
China in Iraq After the War: From Underdog to Unassailable
By Shirzad Azad
Bloomsbury Academics, July 2025
216 pages
In this in-depth and wide-ranging study, Shirzad Azad explores the changing relationship between post-Saddam Hussein Iraq and the People’s Republic of China. China in Iraq After the War charts the deepening relationship between the two countries since the 2003 American-led invasion, that has seen China become the biggest international stakeholder in Iraq. The book uncovers the scope of China’s and Iraq’s collaboration in a number of sectors, including military, economic, technological and cultural and considers the motivating forces behind this unlikely relationship.
REVIEWS
Foreign Affairs, January/Februray 2026
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shirzad Azad is an associate professor of international relations in the Department of Political Science at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran. Azad’s scholarly works have been published by several peer-reviewed journals, including Asian Affairs, Middle East Policy, The International Spectator, East Asia: An International Quarterly, Asian Politics & Policy, Contemporary Arab Affairs. He has 9 previous publications on Asian-Middle East relations, including Looking East: A Changing Middle East Realigns with a Rising Asia (2020) and China and Iran Readjust.