Download or read book This War So Horrible written by Hiram Smith Williams and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2006-09-03 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hiram Smith Williams, born in New Jersey, was an unusual individual. A skilled carriagemaker and carpenter, he traveled throughout the Midwest in the 1850s as an organizer for the Know Nothing Party and the candidacy of Martin Van Buren. When Van Buren failed to win the presidency in 1856, Williams spent two years wandering around Missouri, teaching school and writing poetry. In addition to his political activities, he served as a correspondent for several midwestern newspapers." "In 1859, Williams settled in Livingston, Alabama, where he worked as a carriagemaker. He quickly identified with the people around him and when the Civil War erupted in 1861, he supported the Southern cause. In 1862, he enlisted in the 40th Alabama Infantry Regiment, and through 1863 he served on detached duty as a skilled naval carpenter in Mobile. While in Mobile, Williams was active in the cultural and social life of the city and frequently appeared in plays as a semi-professional actor." "In 1864, he was reassigned to his regiment, part of the Army of Tennessee, which was camped in Dalton, Georgia. From February 1864 until autumn of that year, he participated in the Atlanta campaign as a member of a Pioneer unit, which was composed of men with construction skills. In that capacity he helped build bridges, roads, and fortifications, came in close contact with various headquarters, and sometimes worked as a hospital orderly. In late 1864, he accompanied the remnants of the Army of Tennessee on its retreat from Atlanta into Alabama. He then rejoined the 40th on duty in defense of Mobile harbor until March 1865, when he rejoined the Army of Tennessee in its attempt to stop Sherman." "Williams was taken prisoner just a few days before the end of the war, and spent three months in a prison camp at Point Lookout, Maryland. His diary records the anxiety of the prisoners in Federal camps immediately after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the harsh living conditions, and the continual desire for repatriation." "This War So Horrible is a remarkable diary. It provides a rare look at the concerns, activities, and experiences of the common soldier in a major Confederate Army during a critical campaign. What makes it so unusual is that Williams was well educated and literate. He did not write terse entries in his diary, but rather expounded at length on what he saw, felt, and hoped. While not anti-Southern, Williams was intensely anti-war and anti-military. Civil War students will find this diary useful because it is the only fully descriptive record of a member of the Pioneer Corps. Little is known about how these units operated and what the internal organization was like. The editors have deliberately chosen to let Williams speak for himself ... and the readers will find him lucid, cogent, compelling, and always interesting."--Jacket.
Download or read book Horrible Histories Woeful Second World War written by Terry Deary and published by Scholastic UK. This book was released on 2011-11-03 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you ever hear old folk moaning on about the world today, just remind them how woeful things were in World War II. When Hitler's horrid army were goose-stepping round the globe, nearly everything in Europe was totally AWFUL! Read on to discover... * The dreadful truth about Dad's Army * What happened when an elephant got loose in the blackout * Who made a meal out of maggots * Which smelly soldiers were sniffed out by their enemies * Why wearing white knickers could kill you What with doodlebug bombs dropping out of the sky and sweet rationing driving kids (and teachers) mad, life in the Second World War was truly wicked. So from snow-bound cities under siege to fly-infested jungle trenches, and from rotten rationing recipes to awful invasions, discover all the dire details about the worst war EVER!
Download or read book Horrible Histories Frightful First World War written by Terry Deary and published by Scholastic UK. This book was released on 2015-11-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readers can discover all the foul facts about the FRIGHTFUL FIRST WORLD WAR, including what the 'Fat King' did with food scraps and dead horses, how sniffing your own pee could save your life in a gas attack and why a pair of old socks gave away top German secrets. With a bold, accessible new look and a heap of extra-horrible bits, these bestselling titles are sure to be a huge hit with yet another generation of Terry Deary fans. Revised by the author to make HORRIBLE HISTORIES more accessible to young readers. www.horrible-histories.co.uk
Download or read book Looking for the Good War written by Elizabeth D. Samet and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A remarkable book, from its title and subtitle to its last words . . . A stirring indictment of American sentimentality about war.” —Robert G. Kaiser, The Washington Post In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans—all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States’ “exceptional” history and destiny. Samet finds the war's ambivalent legacy in some of its most heavily mythologized figures: the war correspondent epitomized by Ernie Pyle, the character of the erstwhile G.I. turned either cop or criminal in the pulp fiction and feature films of the late 1940s, the disaffected Civil War veteran who looms so large on the screen in the Cold War Western, and the resurgent military hero of the post-Vietnam period. Taken together, these figures reveal key elements of postwar attitudes toward violence, liberty, and nation—attitudes that have shaped domestic and foreign policy and that respond in various ways to various assumptions about national identity and purpose established or affirmed by World War II. As the United States reassesses its roles in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the time has come to rethink our national mythology: the way that World War II shaped our sense of national destiny, our beliefs about the use of American military force throughout the world, and our inability to accept the realities of the twenty-first century’s decades of devastating conflict.
Download or read book War of the Spark Forsaken Magic The Gathering written by Greg Weisman and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Return to the multiverse of Magic: The Gathering as the hunt for Liliana Vess is on in the aftermath of the War of the Spark. The Planeswalkers have defeated Nicol Bolas and saved the Multiverse—though at grave cost. The living have been left to pick up the pieces and mourn the dead. But one loss is almost too great to bear: Gideon Jura, champion of justice and shield of the Gatewatch, is gone. As his former comrades Jace and Chandra struggle to rebuild from this tragedy, their future, like the future of the Gatewatch, remains uncertain. As the Gatewatch’s newest member, Kaya aims to help write that future. In joining, she pledged an oath to protect the living and the dead, but now that oath will be tested. The grieving guild masters of Ravnica have tasked her with a grave mission suited to her talents as a hunter and assassin—a mission she is ordered to keep secret from the Gatewatch. She must track down and exact retribution on the traitor Liliana Vess. But Liliana Vess has no interest in being found. Forsaken by her friends, she fled Ravnica after the defeat of Bolas. She was hostage to his wicked will, forced to assist in his terrible atrocities on pain of death—until Gideon, the last one who believed in her goodness, died in her place. Haunted by Gideon’s final gift, and hunted by former allies, Liliana now returns to a place she’d thought she’d never see again, the only place she has left: home.
Download or read book Savage Continent written by Keith Lowe and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2012-07-03 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Second World War might have officially ended in May 1945, but in reality it rumbled on for another ten years... The end of the Second World War in Europe is one of the twentieth century's most iconic moments. It is fondly remembered as a time when cheering crowds filled the streets, danced, drank and made love until the small hours. These images of victory and celebration are so strong in our minds that the period of anarchy and civil war that followed has been forgotten. Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed and more than thirty million people had been killed in the war. The institutions that we now take for granted - such as the police, the media, transport, local and national government - were either entirely absent or hopelessly compromised. Crime rates were soaring, economies collapsing, and the European population was hovering on the brink of starvation. In Savage Continent, Keith Lowe describes a continent still racked by violence, where large sections of the population had yet to accept that the war was over. Individuals, communities and sometimes whole nations sought vengeance for the wrongs that had been done to them during the war. Germans and collaborators everywhere were rounded up, tormented and summarily executed. Concentration camps were reopened and filled with new victims who were tortured and starved. Violent anti-Semitism was reborn, sparking murders and new pogroms across Europe. Massacres were an integral part of the chaos and in some places – particularly Greece, Yugoslavia and Poland, as well as parts of Italy and France – they led to brutal civil wars. In some of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen, tens of millions were expelled from their ancestral homelands, often with the implicit blessing of the Allied authorities. Savage Continent is the story of post WWII Europe, in all its ugly detail, from the end of the war right up until the establishment of an uneasy stability across Europe towards the end of the 1940s. Based principally on primary sources from a dozen countries, Savage Continent is a frightening and thrilling chronicle of a world gone mad, the standard history of post WWII Europe for years to come.
Download or read book Moral Combat written by Michael Burleigh and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-03-22 with total page 1197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Magnificent. . . . Seldom has a study of the past combined such erudition with such exuberance." —The Guardian "No-one with an interest in the Second World War should be without this book; and indeed nor should anyone who cares about how our world has come about." —The Daily Telegraph Pre-eminent WWII historian Michael Burleigh delivers a brilliant new examination of the day-to-day moral crises underpinning the momentous conflicts of the Second World War. A magisterial counterpart to his award-winning and internationally bestselling The Third Reich, winner of the Samuel Johnson prize, Moral Combat offers a unique and riveting look at, in the words of The Times (London), "not just the war planners faced with the prospect of bombing Dresden or the atrocities of the Holocaust, but also the individuals working at the coalface of war, killing or murdering, resisting or collaborating."
Download or read book Close Quarters written by Larry Heinemann and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-03-31 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the moment his first novel was published, Larry Heinemann joined the ranks of the great chroniclers of the Vietnam conflict--Philip Caputo, Tim O’Brien, and Gustav Hasford.In the stripped-down, unsullied patois of an ordinary soldier, draftee Philip Dosier tells the story of his war. Straight from high school, too young to vote or buy himself a drink, he enters a world of mud and heat, blood and body counts, ambushes and firefights. It is here that he embarks on the brutal downward path to wisdom that awaits every soldier. In the tradition of Naked and the Dead and The Thin Red Line, Close Quarters is the harrowing story of how a decent kid from Chicago endures an extraordinary trial-- and returns profoundly altered to a world on the threshold of change.
Download or read book This Republic of Suffering written by Drew Gilpin Faust and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Download or read book Acts of Faith written by Philip Caputo and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2006-05-09 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philip Caputo’s tragic and epically ambitious new novel is set in Sudan, where war is a permanent condition. Into this desolate theater come aid workers, missionaries, and mercenaries of conscience whose courage and idealism sometimes coexist with treacherous moral blindness. There’s the entrepreneurial American pilot who goes from flying food and medicine to smuggling arms, the Kenyan aid worker who can’t help seeing the tawdry underside of his enterprise, and the evangelical Christian who comes to Sudan to redeem slaves and falls in love with a charismatic rebel commander. As their fates intersect and our understanding of their characters deepens, it becomes apparent that Acts of Faith is one of those rare novels that combine high moral seriousness with irresistible narrative wizardry.
Download or read book The Worth of War written by Benjamin Ginsberg and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2014-09-02 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although war is terrible and brutal, history shows that it has been a great driver of human progress. So argues political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg in this incisive, well-researched study of the benefits to civilization derived from armed conflict. Ginsberg makes a convincing case that war selects for and promotes certain features of societies that are generally held to represent progress. These include rationality, technological and economic development, and liberal forms of government. Contrary to common perceptions that war is the height of irrationality, Ginsberg persuasively demonstrates that in fact it is the ultimate test of rationality. He points out that those societies best able to assess threats from enemies rationally and objectively are usually the survivors of warfare. History also clearly reveals the technological benefits that result from war—ranging from the sundial to nuclear power. And in regard to economics, preparation for war often spurs on economic development; by the same token, nations with economic clout in peacetime usually have a huge advantage in times of war. Finally, war and the threat of war have encouraged governments to become more congenial to the needs and wants of their citizens because of the increasing reliance of governments on their citizens’ full cooperation in times of war. However deplorable the realities of war are, the many fascinating examples and astute analysis in this thought-provoking book will make readers reconsider the unmistakable connection between war and progress.
Download or read book War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning written by Chris Hedges and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a veteran war correspondent, Chris Hedges has survived ambushes in Central America, imprisonment in Sudan, and a beating by Saudi military police. He has seen children murdered for sport in Gaza and petty thugs elevated into war heroes in the Balkans. Hedges, who is also a former divinity student, has seen war at its worst and knows too well that to those who pass through it, war can be exhilarating and even addictive: “It gives us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.” Drawing on his own experience and on the literature of combat from Homer to Michael Herr, Hedges shows how war seduces not just those on the front lines but entire societies—corrupting politics, destroying culture, and perverting basic human desires. Mixing hard-nosed realism with profound moral and philosophical insight, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning is a work of terrible power and redemptive clarity whose truths have never been more necessary.
Download or read book A Stranger to Myself written by Willy Peter Reese and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2005-11-02 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War, Russia 1941-44 is the haunting memoir of a young German soldier on the Russian front during World War II. Willy Peter Reese was only twenty years old when he found himself marching through Russia with orders to take no prisoners. Three years later he was dead. Bearing witness to--and participating in--the atrocities of war, Reese recorded his reflections in his diary, leaving behind an intelligent, touching, and illuminating perspective on life on the eastern front. He documented the carnage perpetrated by both sides, the destruction which was exacerbated by the young soldiers' hunger, frostbite, exhaustion, and their daily struggle to survive. And he wrestled with his own sins, with the realization that what he and his fellow soldiers had done to civilians and enemies alike was unforgivable, with his growing awareness of the Nazi policies toward Jews, and with his deep disillusionment with himself and his fellow men. An international sensation, A Stranger to Myself is an unforgettable account of men at war.
Download or read book Johnny Got His Gun written by Dalton Trumbo and published by Kensington Publishing Corp.. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Searing Portrayal Of War That Has Stunned And Galvanized Generations Of Readers An immediate bestseller upon its original publication in 1939, Dalton Trumbo?s stark, profoundly troubling masterpiece about the horrors of World War I brilliantly crystallized the uncompromising brutality of war and became the most influential protest novel of the Vietnam era. Johnny Got His Gun is an undisputed classic of antiwar literature that?s as timely as ever. ?A terrifying book, of an extraordinary emotional intensity.?--The Washington Post "Powerful. . . an eye-opener." --Michael Moore "Mr. Trumbo sets this story down almost without pause or punctuation and with a fury amounting to eloquence."--The New York Times "A book that can never be forgotten by anyone who reads it."--Saturday Review
Download or read book Generals Die in Bed written by Charles Yale Harrison and published by Annick Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Yale Harrison draws on his own experiences in the First World War to tell the story of a young man sent to fight on the Western Front.
Download or read book A More Beautiful and Terrible History written by Jeanne Theoharis and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praised by The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Bitch Magazine; Slate; Publishers Weekly; and more, this is “a bracing corrective to a national mythology” (New York Times) around the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement has become national legend, lauded by presidents from Reagan to Obama to Trump, as proof of the power of American democracy. This fable, featuring dreamy heroes and accidental heroines, has shuttered the movement firmly in the past, whitewashed the forces that stood in its way, and diminished its scope. And it is used perniciously in our own times to chastise present-day movements and obscure contemporary injustice. In A More Beautiful and Terrible History award-winning historian Jeanne Theoharis dissects this national myth-making, teasing apart the accepted stories to show them in a strikingly different light. We see Rosa Parks not simply as a bus lady but a lifelong criminal justice activist and radical; Martin Luther King, Jr. as not only challenging Southern sheriffs but Northern liberals, too; and Coretta Scott King not only as a “helpmate” but a lifelong economic justice and peace activist who pushed her husband’s activism in these directions. Moving from “the histories we get” to “the histories we need,” Theoharis challenges nine key aspects of the fable to reveal the diversity of people, especially women and young people, who led the movement; the work and disruption it took; the role of the media and “polite racism” in maintaining injustice; and the immense barriers and repression activists faced. Theoharis makes us reckon with the fact that far from being acceptable, passive or unified, the civil rights movement was unpopular, disruptive, and courageously persevering. Activists embraced an expansive vision of justice—which a majority of Americans opposed and which the federal government feared. By showing us the complex reality of the movement, the power of its organizing, and the beauty and scope of the vision, Theoharis proves that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the progress that occurred. A More Beautiful and Terrible History will change our historical frame, revealing the richness of our civil rights legacy, the uncomfortable mirror it holds to the nation, and the crucial work that remains to be done. Winner of the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize in Nonfiction
Download or read book The Great Big Book of Horrible Things written by Matthew White and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compulsively readable and utterly original account of world history—from an atrocitologist’s point of view. Evangelists of human progress meet their opposite in Matthew White's epic examination of history's one hundred most violent events, or, in White's piquant phrasing, "the numbers that people want to argue about." Reaching back to 480 BCE's second Persian War, White moves chronologically through history to this century's war in the Congo and devotes chapters to each event, where he surrounds hard facts (time and place) and succinct takeaways (who usually gets the blame?) with lively military, social, and political histories. With the eye of a seasoned statistician, White assigns each entry a ranking based on body count, and in doing so he gives voice to the suffering of ordinary people that, inexorably, has defined every historical epoch. By turns droll, insightful, matter-of-fact, and ultimately sympathetic to those who died, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things gives readers a chance to reach their own conclusions while offering a stark reminder of the darkness of the human heart.
