Download or read book A Perfect Picture of Hell written by Ted Genoways and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 1998-04 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the shooting of an unarmed prisoner at Montgomery, Alabama, to a successful escape from Belle Isle, from the swelling floodwaters overtaking Cahaba Prison to the inferno that finally engulfed Andersonville, A Perfect Picture of Hell is a collection of harrowing narratives by soldiers from the 12th Iowa Infantry who survived imprisonment in the South during the Civil War. Editors Ted Genoways and Hugh Genoways have collected the soldiers' startling accounts from diaries, letters, speeches, newspaper articles, and remembrances. Arranged chronologically, the eyewitness descriptions of the battles of Shiloh, Corinth, Jackson, and Tupelo, together with accompanying accounts of nearly every famous Confederate prison, create a shared vision

Download or read book Shook Over Hell written by Eric T. Dean and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vietnam still haunts the American conscience. Not only did nearly 58,000 Americans die there, but--by some estimates--1.5 million veterans returned with war-induced Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This psychological syndrome, responsible for anxiety, depression, and a wide array of social pathologies, has never before been placed in historical context. Eric Dean does just that as he relates the psychological problems of veterans of the Vietnam War to the mental and readjustment problems experienced by veterans of the Civil War. Employing a multidisciplinary approach that merges military, medical, and social history, Dean draws on individual case analyses and quantitative methods to trace the reactions of Civil War veterans to combat and death. He seeks to determine whether exuberant parades in the North and sectional adulation in the South helped to wash away memories of violence for the Civil War veteran. His extensive study reveals that Civil War veterans experienced severe persistent psychological problems such as depression, anxiety, and flashbacks with resulting behaviors such as suicide, alcoholism, and domestic violence. By comparing Civil War and Vietnam veterans, Dean demonstrates that Vietnam vets did not suffer exceptionally in the number and degree of their psychiatric illnesses. The politics and culture of the times, Dean argues, were responsible for the claims of singularity for the suffering Vietnam veterans as well as for the development of the modern concept of PTSD. This remarkable and moving book uncovers a hidden chapter of Civil War history and gives new meaning to the Vietnam War.

Download or read book William Tecumseh Sherman In the Service of My Country A Life written by James Lee McDonough and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times best-selling biography of one of America’s most storied military figures. General William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 burning of Atlanta solidified his legacy as a ruthless leader. Evolving from a spirited student at West Point, Sherman became a general who fought in some of the Civil War’s most decisive campaigns—Shiloh, Vicksburg, Atlanta—until finally, seeking a swift ending to the war’s horrendous casualties, he devastated southern resources on his famous March to the Sea across the Carolinas. Later, as general-in-chief of the U.S. Army, Sherman relentlessly paved the way west during the Indian wars. James Lee McDonough’s fresh insight reveals a man tormented by fears that history would pass him by and that he would miss his chance to serve his country. Drawing on years of research, McDonough delves into Sherman’s dramatic personal life, including his strained relationship with his wife, his personal debts, and his young son’s death. The result is a remarkable, illuminating portrait of an American icon.

Download or read book Pathway to Hell written by Dennis W. Brandt and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shell shock, battle fatigue, posttraumatic stress disorder, lack of moral courage: different terms for the same mental condition, formal names that change with observed circumstances and whenever experts feel prompted to coin a more suitable descriptive term for the shredding of the human spirit. Although the specter of psychological dysfunction has marched alongside all soldiers in all wars, always at the ready to ravish minds, rarely is it discussed when the topic is America’s greatest conflict, the Civil War. Yet mind-destroying terror was as present at Gettysburg and Antietam as in Vietnam and today in Iraq and Afghanistan. Drawing almost exclusively from extensive primary accounts, Dennis W. Brandt presents a detailed case study of mental stress that is exceptional in the vast literature of the American Civil War. Pathway to Hell offers sobering insight into the horrors that war wreaked upon one young man and illuminates the psychological aspect of the War Between the States.

Download or read book A Worse Place Than Hell How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation written by John Matteson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize–winning author John Matteson illuminates three harrowing months of the Civil War and their enduring legacy for America. December 1862 drove the United States toward a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln’s government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals whose lives reflect the soul of a nation. The changes they underwent led to profound repercussions in the country’s law, literature, politics, and popular mythology. Taken together, their stories offer a striking restatement of what it means to be American. Guided by patriotism, driven by desire, all five moved toward singular destinies. A young Harvard intellectual steeped in courageous ideals, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. confronted grave challenges to his concept of duty. The one-eyed army chaplain Arthur Fuller pitted his frail body against the evils of slavery. Walt Whitman, a gay Brooklyn poet condemned by the guardians of propriety, and Louisa May Alcott, a struggling writer seeking an authentic voice and her father’s admiration, tended soldiers’ wracked bodies as nurses. On the other side of the national schism, John Pelham, a West Point cadet from Alabama, achieved a unique excellence in artillery tactics as he served a doomed and misbegotten cause. A Worse Place Than Hell brings together the prodigious forces of war with the intimacy of individual lives. Matteson interweaves the historic and the personal in a work as beautiful as it is powerful.

Download or read book And Then All Hell Broke Loose written by Richard Engel and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-02-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When he was just twenty-three, a recent graduate of Stanford University, Richard Engel set off to Cairo with $2,000 and dreams of being a reporter. Shortly thereafter he was working freelance for Arab news sources and got a call that a busload of Italian tourists were massacred at a Cairo museum. This was his first view of the carnage these years would pile on. Over two decades, Engel has been under fire, blown out of hotel beds, and taken hostage. He has watched Mubarak and Morsi in Egypt arrested and condemned, reported from Jerusalem, been through the Lebanese war, covered the whole shooting match in Iraq, interviewed Libyan rebels who toppled Gaddafi, reported from Syria as Al-Qaeda stepped in, and was kidnapped in the Syrian crosscurrents of fighting. He goes into Afghanistan with the Taliban and to Iraq with ISIS. Engel takes chances, though not reckless ones, keeps a level head and a sense of humor, as well as a grasp of history in the making. Reporting as NBC's chief foreign correspondent, he reveals his unparalleled access to the major figures, the gritty soldiers, and the helpless victims in the Middle East during this watershed time.

Download or read book Hell s Broke Loose in Georgia written by Scott Walker and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2007-07-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Darling, I never wanted to gow home as bad in my life as I doo now and if they don’t give mee a furlow I am going any how. Written in December 1862 by Private Wright Vinson in Tennessee to his wife, Christiana, in Georgia, these lines go to the heart of why Scott Walker wrote this history of the Fifty-seventh Georgia Infantry, a unit of the famed Mercer’s Brigade. All but a few members of the Fifty-seventh lived within a close radius of eighty miles from each other. More than just an account of their military engagements, this is a collective biography of a close-knit group. Relatives and neighbors served and died side by side in the Fifty-seventh, and Walker excels at showing how family ties, friendships, and other intimate dynamics played out in wartime settings. Humane but not sentimental, the history abounds in episodes of real feeling: a starving soldier’s theft of a pie; another’s open confession, in a letter to his wife, that he may desert; a slave’s travails as a camp orderly. Drawing on memoirs and a trove of unpublished letters and diaries, Walker follows the soldiers of the Fifty-seventh as they push far into Unionist Kentucky, starve at the siege of Vicksburg, guard Union prisoners at the Andersonville stockade, defend Atlanta from Sherman, and more. Hardened fighters who would wish hell on an incompetent superior but break down at the sight of a dying Yankee, these are real people, as rarely seen in other Civil War histories.

Download or read book Hell Before Breakfast written by Robert H. Patton and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From acclaimed historian Robert H. Patton, author of The Pattons and Patriot Pirates, a rediscovery and celebration of America’s first chroniclers of foreign war. The first war correspondent, William H. Russell of The Times of London, described himself and his profession as “the miserable parent of a luckless tribe.” But it wasn’t long before others saw it differently. Hell Before Breakfast is the spectacular tale of larger-than-life Americans who made it their business to bring back news from the front; from Bull Run to the Paris Commune, from Africa to the Ottoman Empire, through decades of lightning-fast technological progress and high adventure. As America matured into a great power and the monarchies of Europe battled for dominance through a series of brief, bloody imperial wars, with the storm clouds of World War I drawing rapidly closer, these men and their newspapers were at center stage—the vanguard of a golden age of war correspondence.

Download or read book All Hell Breaking Loose written by Michael T. Klare and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All Hell Breaking Loose is an eye-opening examination of climate change from the perspective of the U.S. military. The Pentagon, unsentimental and politically conservative, might not seem likely to be worried about climate change—still linked, for many people, with polar bears and coral reefs. Yet of all the major institutions in American society, none take climate change as seriously as the U.S. military. Both as participants in climate-triggered conflicts abroad, and as first responders to hurricanes and other disasters on American soil, the armed services are already confronting the impacts of global warming. The military now regards climate change as one of the top threats to American national security—and is busy developing strategies to cope with it. Drawing on previously obscure reports and government documents, renowned security expert Michael Klare shows that the U.S. military sees the climate threat as imperiling the country on several fronts at once. Droughts and food shortages are stoking conflicts in ethnically divided nations, with “climate refugees” producing worldwide havoc. Pandemics and other humanitarian disasters will increasingly require extensive military involvement. The melting Arctic is creating new seaways to defend. And rising seas threaten American cities and military bases themselves. While others still debate the causes of global warming, the Pentagon is intensely focused on its effects. Its response makes it clear that where it counts, the immense impact of climate change is not in doubt.

Download or read book The Heart of Hell written by Jeffry D. Wert and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2022-04-04 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The struggle over the fortified Confederate position known as Spotsylvania's Mule Shoe was without parallel during the Civil War. A Union assault that began at 4:30 A.M. on May 12, 1864, sparked brutal combat that lasted nearly twenty-four hours. By the time Grant's forces withdrew, some 55,000 men from Union and Confederate armies had been drawn into the fury, battling in torrential rain along the fieldworks at distances often less than the length of a rifle barrel. One Union private recalled the fighting as a "seething, bubbling, soaring hell of hate and murder." By the time Lee's troops established a new fortified line in the predawn hours of May 13, some 17,500 &8239;officers and men from both sides had been killed, wounded, or captured when the fighting &8239;ceased.&8239;The site of the most intense clashes became forever known as the Bloody Angle.&8239; Here, renowned military historian Jeffry D. Wert draws on the personal narratives of Union and Confederate troops who survived the fight &8239;to offer a gripping story of Civil War combat at its most difficult. Wert's &8239;harrowing tale&8239;reminds us that the war's story, often told through its commanders and campaigns,&8239;truly belonged to the common soldier.

Download or read book Heaven in the Midst of Hell written by and published by Raven Oak Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: War exposes the divide between who we think we are and how we behave in extreme situations. Sheri Snively, who served as a Quaker chaplain with the U.S. Navy, has crafted a vivid, unsettling, and ultimately hopeful personal account of the effects of the Iraq war on soldiers and civilians in Heaven in the Midst of Hell. As she served with the Marines working amid the boredom, ten-sion, and seemingly meaningless carnage at a trauma hospital between Ramadi and Fallujah, Commander Snively experienced first-hand the grim reality of combat. As she recounts the way she and the soldiers around her experience war, she negotiates a compassionate path to healing -- marked not by formulaic answers, but by an open and ques-tioning spirit. Illustrated with the author's own evocative photographs, this is a compelling and unforgettable journey into the human soul.

Download or read book Armies of Deliverance written by Elizabeth R. Varon and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Armies of Deliverance, Elizabeth Varon offers both a sweeping narrative of the Civil War and a bold new interpretation of Union and Confederate war aims.

Download or read book War Isn t the Only Hell written by Keith Gandal and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2018-04-16 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vigorous reappraisal of American literature inspired by the First World War. American World War I literature has long been interpreted as an alienated outcry against modern warfare and government propaganda. This prevailing reading ignores the US army’s unprecedented attempt during World War I to assign men—except, notoriously, African Americans—to positions and ranks based on merit. And it misses the fact that the culture granted masculinity only to combatants, while the noncombatant majority of doughboys experienced a different alienation: that of shame. Drawing on military archives, current research by social-military historians, and his own readings of thirteen major writers, Keith Gandal seeks to put American literature written after the Great War in its proper context—as a response to the shocks of war and meritocracy. The supposedly antiwar texts of noncombatant Lost Generation authors Dos Passos, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cummings, and Faulkner addressed—often in coded ways—the noncombatant failure to measure up. Gandal also examines combat-soldier writers William March, Thomas Boyd, Laurence Stallings, and Hervey Allen. Their works are considered straight-forward antiwar narratives, but they are in addition shaped by experiences of meritocratic recognition, especially meaningful for socially disadvantaged men. Gandal furthermore contextualizes the sole World War I novel by an African American veteran, Victor Daly, revealing a complex experience of both army discrimination and empowerment among the French. Finally, Gandal explores three women writers—Katherine Anne Porter, Willa Cather, and Ellen La Motte—who saw the war create frontline opportunities for women while allowing them to be arbiters of masculinity at home. Ultimately, War Isn’t the Only Hell shows how American World War I literature registered the profound ways in which new military practices and a foreign war unsettled traditional American hierarchies of class, ethnicity, gender, and even race.

Download or read book Sherman s Ghosts written by Matthew Carr and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “thought-provoking” military history considers the influence of General Sherman’s Civil War tactics on American conflicts through the twentieth century (The New York Times). “To know what war is, one should follow our tracks,” Gen. William T. Sherman once wrote to his wife, describing the devastation left by his armies in Georgia. Sherman’s Ghosts is an investigation of those tracks, as well as those left across the globe by the American military in the 150 years since Sherman’s infamous “March to the Sea.” Sherman’s Ghosts opens with an epic retelling of General Sherman’s fateful decision to terrorize the South’s civilian population in order to break the back of the Confederacy. Acclaimed journalist and historian Matthew Carr exposes how this strategy, which Sherman called “indirect warfare,” became the central preoccupation of war planners in the twentieth century and beyond. He offers a lucid assessment of the impact Sherman’s slash-and-burn policies have had on subsequent wars and military conflicts, including World War II and in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and even Iraq and Afghanistan. In riveting accounts of military campaigns and in the words of American soldiers and strategists, Carr finds ample evidence of Sherman’s long shadow. Sherman’s Ghosts is a rare reframing of how we understand our violent history and a call to action for those who hope to change it.

Download or read book To Hell and Back written by Audie Murphy and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2002-05-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic WWII memoir by America’s most decorated soldier shares a “vivid, gripping, mature picture of combat” (The New York Times Book Review). Originally published in 1949, To Hell and Back was a bestselling phenomenon and later became a major motion picture starring Audie Murphy as himself. It remains one of the most harrowing personal narratives of the Second World War and a perennial classic of military nonfiction. Rejected from both the marines and the paratroopers because he was too small, Murphy was desperate to see action and determined to serve his country. Eventually, he found a home with the infantry and fought through campaigns in Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany. Although still under twenty-one years old on V-E Day, he was credited with having killed, captured, or wounded 240 Germans. He emerged from the war as America’s most decorated soldier, having received twenty-one medals, including our highest military decoration, the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Download or read book War Is a Racket written by Smedley D. Butler and published by Wyatt North Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2018-02-18 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: War Is a Racket is a famous anti-war book written by retired Major General Smedley Buter. In the book, Butler discusses how businesses profit from conflict.

Download or read book A Problem from Hell written by Samantha Power and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From former UN Ambassador and author of the New York Times bestseller The Education of an Idealist Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on America's repeated failure to stop genocides around the world In her prizewinning examination of the last century of American history, Samantha Power asks the haunting question: Why do American leaders who vow "never again" repeatedly fail to stop genocide? Power, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the former US Ambassador to the United Nations, draws upon exclusive interviews with Washington's top policymakers, thousands of declassified documents, and her own reporting from modern killing fields to provide the answer. "A Problem from Hell" shows how decent Americans inside and outside government refused to get involved despite chilling warnings, and tells the stories of the courageous Americans who risked their careers and lives in an effort to get the United States to act. A modern classic and "an angry, brilliant, fiercely useful, absolutely essential book" (New Republic), "A Problem from Hell" has forever reshaped debates about American foreign policy. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner of the Raphael Lemkin Award