Download or read book A Distant War Comes Home written by Donald A. Beattie and published by Down East Books. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing upon original sources and published material, A Distant War Comes Home is a fascinating survey of the many individual stories that linked Maine with the war hundreds of miles away.
Download or read book The Hell of War Comes Home written by Owen W. Gilman and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2018-02-09 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Owen W. Gilman Jr. stresses the US experience of war in the twenty-first century and argues that wherever and whenever there is war, there will be imaginative responses to it, especially the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since the trauma of September 11, the experience of Americans at war has been rendered honestly and fully in a wide range of texts--creative nonfiction and journalism, film, poetry, and fiction. These responses, Gilman contends, have packed a lot of power and measure up even to World War II's literature and film. Like few other books, Gilman's volume studies these new texts--among them Kevin Powers's debut novel The Yellow Birds and Phil Klay's short stories Redeployment, along with the films The Hurt Locker, American Sniper, and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. For perspective, Gilman also looks at some touchstones from the Vietnam War. Compared to a few of the big Vietnam books and films, this new material has mostly been read and watched by small audiences and generated less discussion. Gilman exposes the circumstances in American culture currently preventing literature and film of our recent wars from making a significant impact. He contends that Americans" inclination to demand distraction limits learning from these compelling responses to war in the past decade. According to Gilman, where there should be clarity and depth of knowledge, we instead face misunderstanding and the anguish endured by veterans betrayed by war and our lack of understanding.
Download or read book Once Upon a Distant War written by William W. Prochnau and published by Crown. This book was released on 1995 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of young war correspondents and the early Vietnam battles.
Download or read book The War Comes Home written by Aaron Glantz and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-01-15 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The War Comes Home is the first book to systematically document the U.S. government's neglect of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Aaron Glantz, who reported extensively from Iraq during the first three years of this war and has been reporting on the plight of veterans ever since, levels a devastating indictment against the Bush administration for its bald neglect of soldiers and its disingenuous reneging on their benefits. Glantz interviewed more than one hundred recent war veterans, and here he intersperses their haunting first-person accounts with investigations into specific concerns, such as the scandal at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. This timely book does more than provide us with a personal connection to those whose service has cost them so dearly. It compels us to confront how America treats its veterans and to consider what kind of nation deifies its soldiers and then casts them off as damaged goods.
Download or read book Civil War Comes Home written by Jake McKenzie and published by Author House. This book was released on 2012-07-24 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highly Recommended by Dr. J. Hindman, School of Education, College of William & Mary What was it like living in a small sleepy Southern town when the war suddenly arrived on the doorstep 150 years ago? Th ese are the stories of residents from various walks of life, and the struggles they face as the Unions Peninsula Campaign deploys forces to Fort Monroe, engages just east of Williamsburg, then continues, On to Richmond! as their battle cry went. For example, -William & Mary students, like Th omas Barlow, face life-changing decisions: to return home, or enlist with his classmates? Some of them would become heroes, but many more casualties. -Slaves, like W.B. Nelson, must decide as well: should he remain with his master or runaway? While some remain, many become contrabands, and later freedmen, and colored troops. -Politicians, like Benjamin Butler of Boston, are given the rank of Major General despite the lack of any military experience, while General George B. McClellan, who despised President Lincoln and Washington politics, later runs for national offi ce. Neither transformation is particularly successful. -Williamsburg residents, like shopkeeper William W. Vest and family must decide between fl eeing as refugees, or staying, like William Peachy, lawyer, to endure Federal occupation. -Williamsburgs women, like Letitia Tyler Semple, lead efforts to improve soldier medical care, opening their homes to thousands of wounded. Others, like Mary Payne, persevere to be at her husbands bedside, while Miss Margaret Durfey falls in love with her patient.
Download or read book 4000 Bowls of Rice A Prisoner of War Comes Home written by Linda Goetz Holmes and published by Brick Tower Press. This book was released on 2009-05-21 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A respected historian and researcher” —Publishers Weekly “A prize is waiting somewhere out there, which Linda Holmes richly deserves for revisiting some appalling realities in a positive way fifty years after the fact.” —Nancy Steffens Seaman, Smithsonian Magazine’s Board of Editors “A tribute to courage and determination of the men who endured it...I ate the book up, and was disappointed to come to the end so fast, and this hasn’t happened to me in a long time.” —Otto Schwarz, Burma Railway survivor and founder, USS Houston Survivors’ Association. ”Linda Goetz Holmes has focused on a most interesting, and somewhat neglected, period of the Allied POW experience — the hiatus between the end of the war and the return home... A useful addition to the growing body of literature on the Allied POW experience in Asia.”—Tim Bowden, Australian author and documentary producer. During the early days of World War II, Cecil Dickson and much of the 2/2 Australian Pioneer Battalion were forced to surrender to the Japanese. This group of POWs, along with captured American National Guard soldiers from Texas and California, and survivors from the sunk USS Houston, were shipped to Burma and Thailand to construct the infamous “Railway of Death” immortalized in the film Bridge Over the River Kwai. 16,000 Allied POWs would die toiling on the railway, and those who lived endured over three years of harsh slave labor until they were released to journey home. Respected military historian Linda Goetz Holmes tells Dickson’s story of his experiences in Japanese labor camps and his determined plan to survive and return to a normal life. Amazing photographs, taken secretly by other prisoners, and personal letters help chronicle this dark chapter in the history of Allied troops in the Pacific.
Download or read book Who Will Cry For The Soldiers Tears From Distant Wars written by International War Veterans Poetry Archives and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Anthology of Modern War Poetry and Prose written by contributors (veterans, veterans families, and supporters) to the International War Veterans Poetry Archives (IWVPA). This book is dedicated to the Men and Women of the Armed Forces of the Free World who have been, are now, and will be placed in harm's way. For many of those who find it difficult to come to terms with personal war experiences, whether it is first hand or as a loved one or friend, writing is almost like a magical pill. Within the structured framework of the written word, emotions can be haltered and led to a point where the writer is enabled to manifest and relate to the gamut of emotions engendered by the experiences and consequences of war.
Download or read book War Stuff written by Joan E. Cashin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this path-breaking work on the American Civil War, Joan E. Cashin explores the struggle between armies and civilians over the human and material resources necessary to wage war. This war 'stuff' included the skills of white Southern civilians, as well as such material resources as food, timber, and housing. At first, civilians were willing to help Confederate or Union forces, but the war took such a toll that all civilians, regardless of politics, began focusing on their own survival. Both armies took whatever they needed from human beings and the material world, which eventually destroyed the region's ability to wage war. In this fierce contest between civilians and armies, the civilian population lost. Cashin draws on a wide range of documents, as well as the perspectives of environmental history and material culture studies. This book provides an entirely new perspective on the war era.
Download or read book My Thoughts Be Bloody written by Nora Titone and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-10-19 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The scene of John Wilkes Booth shooting Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre is among the most vivid and indelible images in American history. The literal story of what happened on April 14, 1865, is familiar: Lincoln was killed by John Wilkes Booth, a lunatic enraged by the Union victory and the prospect of black citizenship. Yet who Booth really was—besides a killer—is less well known. The magnitude of his crime has obscured for generations a startling personal story that was integral to his motivation. My Thoughts Be Bloody, a sweeping family saga, revives an extraordinary figure whose name has been missing, until now, from the story of President Lincoln’s death. Edwin Booth, John Wilkes’s older brother by four years, was in his day the biggest star of the American stage. He won his celebrity at the precocious age of nineteen, before the Civil War began, when John Wilkes was a schoolboy. Without an account of Edwin Booth, author Nora Titone argues, the real story of Lincoln’s assassin has never been told. Using an array of private letters, diaries, and reminiscences of the Booth family, Titone has uncovered a hidden history that reveals the reasons why John Wilkes Booth became this country’s most notorious assassin. These ambitious brothers, born to theatrical parents, enacted a tale of mutual jealousy and resentment worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy. From childhood, the stage-struck brothers were rivals for the approval of their father, legendary British actor Junius Brutus Booth. After his death, Edwin and John Wilkes were locked in a fierce contest to claim his legacy of fame. This strange family history and powerful sibling rivalry were the crucibles of John Wilkes’s character, exacerbating his political passions and driving him into a life of conspiracy. To re-create the lost world of Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, this book takes readers on a panoramic tour of nineteenth-century America, from the streets of 1840s Baltimore to the gold fields of California, from the jungles of the Isthmus of Panama to the glittering mansions of Gilded Age New York. Edwin, ruthlessly competitive and gifted, did everything he could to lock his younger brother out of the theatrical game. As he came of age, John Wilkes found his plans for stardom thwarted by his older sibling’s meteoric rise. Their divergent paths—Edwin’s an upward race to riches and social prominence, and John’s a downward spiral into failure and obscurity—kept pace with the hardening of their opposite political views and their mutual dislike. The details of the conspiracy to kill Lincoln have been well documented elsewhere. My Thoughts Be Bloody tells a new story, one that explains for the first time why Lincoln’s assassin decided to conspire against the president in the first place, and sets that decision in the context of a bitterly divided family—and nation. By the end of this riveting journey, readers will see Abraham Lincoln’s death less as the result of the war between the North and South and more as the climax of a dark struggle between two brothers who never wore the uniform of soldiers, except on stage.
Download or read book Words at War written by David B. Sachsman and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes the various ways in which the nation's newspaper editors, reporters, and war correspondents covered the biggest story of their lives - the Civil War - and in doing so both reflected and shaped the responses of their readers. This book contains sections including Fighting Words, Confederates and Copperheads, and The Union Forever.
Download or read book Turning Points written by Douglas Smock and published by Page Publishing Inc. This book was released on 2024-04-17 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, the third in a series on forgotten battles, challenges some of the most sacred myths taught in American schools. One is the concept that the US Constitution was conceived by idealists for the public good. New research, however, shows that most of the Founding Fathers were strongly motivated by their own financial self-interest and a desire to suppress highly democratic state legislatures that had provided relief to citizens facing taxes that were triple the rate charged under British rule. Turning Points also presents a fresh perspective on Indian tribes in Ohio and Indiana, who defeated two American armies sent to deny their claims to land that had been told was theirs forever. Modern archaeological research redefined the scope of a battle on the Ohio/Indiana line that represented the high water mark for Indian power in America. Another chapter upends the way the story of the Pacific air war has always been told. Douglas Smock focuses on the role of the aircraft engineers and the amazing, rapid conversion of a General Motors assembly plant in Newark, New Jersey, to a factory that produced twenty-four redesigned Wildcat naval fighters a day. Another narrative flips the typical Civil War storytelling on its head by looking at the experiences of one battery of one hundred Maine farm boys and laborers. A fifth chapter reexamines the myth of Teddy Roosevelt and the Spanish-American War. Each story represents a turning point in American history.
Download or read book Maine at 200 written by Tom Huntington and published by Down East Books. This book was released on 2020-07-22 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrate the bicentennial of Maine statehood. Historian Tom Huntington covers the course of Maine’s often turbulent history, decade by decade. He writes about the death of Congressman Jonathan Cilley in a duel; the Portland Rum Riot and the birth of Prohibition; the Confederate raid on Portland Harbor; James G. Blaine’s scandal-ridden try for the presidency; the triumph and tragedy of Louis Sockalexis, the first Native American to play major league baseball; Sangerville native Hiram Maxim’s transformation of modern war; Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 visit to Maine (and the Portland resident who became the first person to stowaway on a transatlantic flight); the bloody shootout that killed gangster Al Brady in Bangor; the German saboteurs who came ashore on Mt. Desert Island during World War II; Margaret Chase Smith’s principled stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy; Samantha Smith’s plea for world peace; the arrival of Somali immigrants in Lewiston; and much, much more. It’s an entertaining and informative look at key events, milestones and personalities from two fascinating centuries of statehood.
Download or read book Maine Roads to Gettysburg written by Tom Huntington and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-06-14 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Searching for George Gordon Meade, a study of how troops from Maine aided the Union Army’s victory at the Battle of Gettysburg. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and his 20th Maine regiment made a legendary stand on Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. But Maine’s role in the battle includes much more than that. Soldiers from the Pine Tree State contributed mightily during the three days of fighting. Pious general Oliver Otis Howard secured the high ground of Cemetery Ridge for the Union on the first day. Adelbert Ames—the stern taskmaster who had transformed the 20th Maine into a fighting regiment—commanded a brigade and then a division at Gettysburg. The 17th Maine fought ably in the confused and bloody action in the Wheatfield; a sea captain turned artilleryman named Freeman McGilvery cobbled together a defensive line that proved decisive on July 2; and the 19th Maine helped stop Pickett’s Charge during the battle’s climax. Maine soldiers had fought and died for two bloody years even before they reached Gettysburg. They had fallen on battlefields in Virginia and Maryland. They had died in front of Richmond, in the Shenandoah Valley, on the bloody fields of Antietam, in the Slaughter Pen at Fredericksburg, and in the tangled Wilderness around Chancellorsville. And the survivors kept fighting, even as they followed Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania. In Maine Roads to Gettysburg, author Tom Huntington tells their stories. Praise for Searching for George Gordon Meade “An engrossing narrative that the reader can scarcely put down.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James M. McPherson “Unique and irresistible.” —Lincoln Prize-winning historian Harold Holzer
Download or read book Frontier to Industrial City written by Douglas I. Hodgkin and published by Just Write Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Its history, location, people and industry--all serve as an example of small riverside settlements that grew into industrial cities over the course of a century early in our country's history. From schools, to factories, to founding families, to all the minutiae that create a town--it provides a clear picture of the many facets of Lewiston during its transformation.
Download or read book Dismal Freedom written by J. Brent Morris and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2022-03-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal frustrated settlement. However, what may have been an impediment to the expansion of slave society became an essential sanctuary for many of those who sought to escape it. In the depths of the Dismal, thousands of maroons—people who had emancipated themselves from enslavement and settled beyond the reach of enslavers—established new lives of freedom in a landscape deemed worthless and inaccessible by whites. Dismal Freedom unearths the stories of these maroons, their lives, and their struggles for liberation. Drawing from newly discovered primary sources and archeological evidence that suggests far more extensive maroon settlement than historians have previously imagined, award-winning author J. Brent Morris uncovers one of the most exciting yet neglected stories of American history. This is the story of resilient, proud, and determined people who made the Great Dismal Swamp their free home and sanctuary and who played an outsized role in undermining slavery through the Civil War.
Download or read book On Great Fields written by Ronald C. White and published by Random House. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of A. Lincoln and American Ulysses comes the dramatic and definitive biography of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the history-altering professor turned Civil War hero. “A vital and vivid portrait of an unlikely military hero who played a key role in the preservation of the Union and therefore in the making of modern America.”—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of And There Was Light SHORTLISTED FOR THE GILDER LEHRMAN LINCOLN PRIZE • A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Before 1862, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had rarely left his home state of Maine, where he was a trained minister and mild-mannered professor at Bowdoin College. His colleagues were shocked when he volunteered for the Union army, but he was undeterred and later became known as one of the North’s greatest heroes: On the second day at Gettysburg, after running out of ammunition at Little Round Top, he ordered his men to wield their bayonets in a desperate charge down a rocky slope that routed the Confederate attackers. Despite being wounded at Petersburg—and told by two surgeons he would die—Chamberlain survived the war, going on to be elected governor of Maine four times and serve as president of Bowdoin College. How did a stuttering young boy come to be fluent in nine languages and even teach speech and rhetoric? How did a trained minister find his way to the battlefield? Award-winning historian Ronald C. White delves into these contradictions in this cradle-to-grave biography of General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, from his upbringing in rural Maine to his tenacious, empathetic military leadership and his influential postwar public service, exploring a question that still plagues so many veterans: How do you make a civilian life of meaning after having experienced the extreme highs and lows of war? Chamberlain is familiar to millions from Michael Shaara’s now-classic novel of the Civil War, The Killer Angels, and Ken Burns’s timeless miniseries The Civil War, but in this book, White captures the complex and inspiring man behind the hero. Heavily illustrated and featuring nine detailed maps, this gripping, impeccably researched portrait illuminates one of the most admired but least known figures in our nation’s bloodiest conflict.
Download or read book Turning the Tide at Gettysburg written by Jerry Desmond and published by Down East Books. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One hundred and fifty years ago, the United States was saved at the Battle of Gettysburg. At most of the decisive points of the battle, it was soldiers from Maine that stopped the Rebel army in its tracks. While Joshua Chamberlain and his 20th Maine Regiment are perhaps the most well known, in fact eleven infantry and cavalry regiments, plus three artillery batteries and a company of sharpshooters--comprising some 3,700 volunteers--represented the state of Maine in the battle. Historian Jerry Desmond details, location by location around the battlefield, the heroic actions of the volunteer regiments from Maine.
