Download or read book The War Outside My Window written by Janet Elizabeth Croon and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2018-06-01 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A remarkable account of the collapse of the Old South and the final years of a young boy’s privileged but afflicted life. LeRoy Wiley Gresham was born in 1847 to an affluent slave-holding family in Macon, Georgia. After a horrific leg injury left him an invalid, the educated, inquisitive, perceptive, and exceptionally witty twelve-year-old began keeping a diary in 1860—just as secession and the Civil War began tearing the country and his world apart. He continued to write even as his health deteriorated until both the war and his life ended in 1865. His unique manuscript of the demise of the Old South is published here for the first time in The War Outside My Window. LeRoy read books, devoured newspapers and magazines, listened to gossip, and discussed and debated important social and military issues with his parents and others. He wrote daily for five years, putting pen to paper with a vim and tongue-in-cheek vigor that impresses even now, more than 150 years later. His practical, philosophical, and occasionally Twain-like hilarious observations cover politics and the secession movement, the long and increasingly destructive Civil War, family pets, a wide variety of hobbies and interests, and what life was like at the center of a socially prominent wealthy family in the important Confederate manufacturing center of Macon. The young scribe often voiced concern about the family’s pair of plantations outside town, and recorded his interactions and relationships with servants as he pondered the fate of human bondage and his family’s declining fortunes. Unbeknownst to LeRoy, he was chronicling his own slow and painful descent toward death in tandem with the demise of the Southern Confederacy. He recorded—often in horrific detail—an increasingly painful and debilitating disease that robbed him of his childhood. The teenager’s declining health is a consistent thread coursing through his fascinating journals. “I feel more discouraged [and] less hopeful about getting well than I ever did before,” he wrote on March 17, 1863. “I am weaker and more helpless than I ever was.” Morphine and a score of other “remedies” did little to ease his suffering. Abscesses developed; nagging coughs and pain consumed him. Alternating between bouts of euphoria and despondency, he often wrote, “Saw off my leg.” The War Outside My Window, edited and annotated by Janet Croon with helpful footnotes and a detailed family biographical chart, captures the spirit and the character of a young privileged white teenager witnessing the demise of his world even as his own body slowly failed him. Just as Anne Frank has come down to us as the adolescent voice of World War II, LeRoy Gresham will now be remembered as the young voice of the Civil War South. Winner, 2018, The Douglas Southall Freeman Award

Download or read book I Am Perhaps Dying written by Dennis A. Rasbach and published by . This book was released on 2018-04-26 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Invalid teenager Leroy Wiley Gresham left a seven-volume diary spanning the years of secession and the Civil War (1860-1865). He was just 12 when he began and he died at 17, just weeks after the war ended. His remarkable account, recently published as The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865, edited by Janet E. Croon (2018), spans the gamut of life events that were of interest to a precocious and well-educated Southern teenager—including military, political, religious, social, and literary matters of the day. This alone ranks it as an important contribution to our understanding of life and times in the Old South. But it is much more than that. Chronic disease and suffering stalk the young writer, who is never told he is dying until just before his death. Dr. Rasbach, a graduate of Johns Hopkins medical school and a practicing general surgeon with more than three decades of experience, was tasked with solving the mystery of LeRoy’s disease. Like a detective, Dr. Rasbach peels back the layers of mystery by carefully examining the medical-related entries. What were LeRoy’s symptoms? What medicines did doctors prescribe for him? What course did the disease take, month after month, year after year? The author ably explores these and other issues in I Am Perhaps Dying to conclude that the agent responsible for LeRoy’s suffering and demise turns out to be Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a tiny but lethal adversary of humanity since the beginning of recorded time. In the second half of the nineteenth century, tuberculosis was the deadliest disease in the world, accounting for one-third of all deaths. Even today, a quarter of the world’s population is infected with TB, and the disease remains one of the top ten causes of death, claiming 1.7 million lives annually, mostly in poor and underdeveloped countries. While the young man was detailing the decline and fall of the Old South, he was also chronicling his own horrific demise from spinal TB. These five years of detailed entries make LeRoy’s diary an exceedingly rare (and perhaps unique) account from a nineteenth century TB patient. LeRoy’s diary offers an inside look at a fateful journey that robbed an energetic and likeable young man of his youth and life. I Am Perhaps Dying adds considerably to the medical literature by increasing our understanding of how tuberculosis attacked a young body over time, how it was treated in the middle nineteenth century, and the effectiveness of those treatments.

Download or read book War in Val D Orcia written by Iris Origo and published by Allison & Busby. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is quite impossible to attach importance to material possessions now. All that one still clings to is a few vital affections' Iris Origo, October 1943. Marchesa Iris Origo and her husband had been settled at their rural estate of La Foce since 1924. When the Second World War broke out Origo, an Englishwoman married to an Italian landowner, had divided loyalties. But as the war dragged on and the hostilities escalated, the small community of Val d'Orcia found themselves helping evacuees, orphans, refugees, prisoners of war and soldiers from both sides, concerned less with who was fighting whom than caring for those who needed their aid. Origo kept her diary throughout this time, when the risk of betrayal was a fact of life and the penalty for helping the enemy would result in death. Even with German troops occupying her manor house, she wrote at night about her valiant attempts to shelter refugees, burying her diary in the garden each morning. The result is a book which has become a classic, an affirmation in itself of courage and resistance, and an unsentimental, compelling story of the trials and tragedies of wartime.

Download or read book Mary Chesnut s Diary written by Mary Boykin Chesnut and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-04-26 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unrivalled account of the American Civil War from the Confederate perspective. One of the most compelling personal narratives of the Civil War, Mary Chesnut's Diary was written between 1861 and 1865. As the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner and the wife of an aide to the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, Chesnut was well acquainted with the Confederacy's prominent players and-from the very first shots in Charleston, South Carolina-diligently recorded her impressions of the conflict's most significant moments. One of the most frequently cited memoirs of the war, Mary Chesnut's Diary captures the urgency and nuance of the period in an epic rich with commentary on race, status, and power within a nation divided. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Download or read book The Diary of a Rapist written by Evan S. Connell and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spurned by his wife at home and by superiors at work, a young man sits in his cramped San Francisco apartment during the turbulent 1960s and channels everything around him into a diary that is a perfect record of a world going to pieces.

Download or read book My Secret War written by Mary Pope Osborne and published by . This book was released on 2003-11-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen-year-old Madeline's diaries for 1941 and 1942 reveal her experiences living on Long Island during World War II while her father is away in the Navy.

Download or read book All for the Union written by Elisha Hunt Rhodes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-11-17 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All for the Union is the eloquent and moving diary of Elisha Hunt Rhodes, featured throughout Ken Burns' PBS documentary The Civil War. Rhodes enlisted into the Union Army as a private in 1861 and left it four years later as a twenty-three-year-old colonel after fighting hard and honorably in battles from Bull Run to Appomattox. Anyone who heard these diaries excerpted in The Civil War will recognize his accounts of those campaigns, which remain outstanding for their clarity and detail. Most of all, Rhodes's words reveal the motivation of a common Yankee foot soldier, an otherwise ordinary young man who endured the rigors of combat and exhausting marches, short rations, fear, and homesickness for a salary of $13 a month and the satisfaction of giving "all for the union."

Download or read book Diary of King Philip s War 1675 1676 written by Colonel Benjamin Church and published by Globe Pequot Classics. This book was released on 2017-12 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Benjamin Church liked Indians and was liked by them. He studied them, admired them, jollied them, dealt fairly with them. He saw in them splendid fighters. They saw in him a splendid captain. He knew all about the Indian's "savagery," but he is untouched by the hatred and hysteria which fills the conventional history. This is eye-witness history of the first great Indian War in North America, by the most successful guerrilla captain on the English side. Behind his homespun stories of the Pease Field Fight, the Swamp Fight, the parleys with Queen Awashonks and the pursuit of King Philip lies a collision of cultures which set a pattern for almost all future relations between white men and red men in English America. If he could have foreseen the disappearance of the Indian from every swamp and beach in New England, he would have felt saddened. This is the story of a warfare of extermination which nobody had planned; a description of sorties, ambushes, providential escapes and breath-taking victories which is written with all the immediacy and simplicity of folk art. Church's Diary of King Philip's War is one of the earliest and most graphic of American primitives.

Download or read book Hey Buddy written by Gary W. Moore and published by Savas Beatie. This book was released on 2011-01-20 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “thoroughly fun . . . [and] crazy good” memoir about one man’s life and how it was changed by the legacy of a rockabilly legend (Chicago Sun-Times). Buddy Holly, icon: black horn-rimmed glasses, blue jeans, a white T-shirt, white socks, loafers, and “Peggy Sue.” Not so much to Gary W. Moore. Admitting he “grew up in a Rock & Roll vacuum,” Gary favored jazz. He couldn’t name a single Buddy Holly song. Buddy Rich? Yes. But that changed in a single evening when Gary was dragged along to a Winter Dance Party in Cedar Falls, Iowa—a tribute to Buddy’s final, tragic 1959 tour. It was headlined by musician extraordinaire John Mueller, whose uncanny recreation of the legend was hailed by Buddy’s own brother Travis as “the best I’ve ever seen.” It took just one song to seize Gary’s heart and soul. From then on, for Gary, it was everything Buddy. In this inspiring “rock-and-rollercoaster of a read”, Moore shares his personal journey to learn more about Buddy’s life, music, his influence, his impact, and the times in which he lived (Bill Guertin, author of Reality Sells). He’d meet Buddy’s friends and family, celebrities, Buddy Holly fans, and make a new friend himself in John Mueller. The result is “as American as apple pie and as compelling as Don McLean’s legendary hit about The Day the Music Died” (James Riordan, New York Times–bestselling author).

Download or read book My War written by Tracy Sugarman and published by Random House (NY). This book was released on 2000 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On December 7, 1941, when the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor, Tracy Sugarman was a young man studying to be an illustrator--and falling in love with a tawny-haired girl named June. But for Tracy, as for all Americans, everything changed that December dawn. Two years later, now married to June, Tracy was on a troopship bound for England, part of the massive Allied buildup for the liberation of Europe. On D-Day he landed on Utah Beach, one young ensign in the greatest military invasion in history. But Tracy Sugarman was not only a sailor. He was also an artist, who chronicled every aspect of his war in watercolors and sketches and in more than four hundred letters to his wife, who carefully saved everything her new husband sent her. Fifty years later, June Sugarman astonished her husband by showing him his long-forgotten pictures and words: lush watercolors and pen-and-ink drawings set down with breathtaking immediacy in the midst of war, and letters in which the young man poured out his feelings--about the terror and tedium of battle, his own ideals and hopes . . . and, always, his love for his wife. Here, selected from this treasure trove, are the drawings and watercolors that best portray the war Tracy Sugarman experienced. Interspersed throughout are excerpts of his loving and poignant letters home and, as the capstone of this extraordinary book, the single surviving letter from June to her husband. My War is a luminous, powerful account of a world at war--and a beautifully touching love story.

Download or read book The World War I Diary of Jos de la Luz S enz written by J. Luz Sáenz and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I am home, safe and sound, and reviewing all these memories as if in a dream. All of this pleases me. I have been faithful to my duty.” Thus José de la Luz Sáenz ends his account of his military service in France and Germany in 1918. Published in Spanish in 1933, his annotated book of diary entries and letters recounts not only his own war experiences but also those of his fellow Mexican Americans. A skilled and dedicated teacher in South Texas before and after the war, Sáenz’s patriotism, his keen observation of the discrimination he and his friends faced both at home and in the field, and his unwavering dedication to the cause of equality have for years made this book a valuable resource for scholars, though only ten copies are known to exist and it has never before been available in English. Equally clear in these pages are the astute reflections and fierce pride that spurred Sáenz and others to pursue the postwar organization of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). This English edition of one of only two known war diaries of a Mexican American in the Great War is translated with an introduction and annotation by noted Mexican American historian Emilio Zamora.

Download or read book My Experiences in the World War written by John Joseph Pershing and published by . This book was released on 1931 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These two volumes focus on a American Expeditionary Forces soldier's experiences in France during World War I.

Download or read book At the Eleventh Hour written by Hugh Cecil and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 1998-08-12 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following on from the highly acclaimed Facing Armageddon and Passchendaele in Perspective, At the Eleventh Hour recognises that a world was ending in November 1918, and by international collaboration on the 80th Anniversary we learn through this book, what it was like to experience the transition from war to peace. Distinguished historians brilliantly convey a sense of immediacy as the Armistice is recreated and analysed. The reader will not just acquire new areas of information, he will have some of the existing knowledge which he thought was soundly held, strikingly challenged in the pages of this superbly illustrated book.

Download or read book Archie s War written by Marcia Williams and published by . This book was released on 2014-03 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1914, just before the outbreak of the First World War, 10-year-old Archie is sent a scrapbook in the post from his Uncle Colin. In the years that follow, until the war ends in 1918, we experience life through Archie's eyes and learn about his world and family.

Download or read book Anne Frank written by Anne Frank and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the life of a young Jewish girl who kept a diary during the two years she and her family hid from the Germans in an Amsterdam attic.

Download or read book War Diaries written by Jean-Paul Sartre and published by Verso. This book was released on 1999 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the phony war that preceded the invasion of France, between late 1939 and the summer of 1940, the young Jean-Paul Sartre was stationed in his native Alsace as part of a meteorological unit. He used his considerable periods of spare time, between mundane duties like watching weather balloons, to make a series of notes on philosophy, literature, politics, history and autobiography that anticipate the themes of his later masterpieces, and often surpass them in literary verve and directness. These War Diaries form a portrait of Sartre in his most intense and brilliant phase. With them the twentieth century's most remarkable and public philosopher has provided us with a fitting posthumous monument to his honest and creativity.

Download or read book My War Memories 1914 1918 written by General Erich Ludendorff and published by . This book was released on 2005-12-01 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first thing to be made clear is that Ludendorff was NOT a von as he is so often shown, even by reputable historians. Given his enormous prestige and high position in the imperial German Army it is hard to believe he was not von . In his introduction, Ludendorff remarks that he had no time to keep any record of events and the narrative that follows is based chiefly on his memory. He is going to give an account of the "magnificent deeds of the German Army, deeds from which Germany can take heart and "with which my name will for all time be associated . Born on 9 April 1865 in Kruschevnia, Posen district, Ludendorff passed through the Military Academy at Lichterfelde and in 1885 was commissioned into the 57th Infantry Regiment, a Westphalien regiment. After several regimental postings and the Kriegesakademie Ludendorff joined the General Staff being promoted Major in 1900. From March 1904 to January 1913 he was, with only one short interval, in the Operations Department of which he became Chief. In 1913 he was posted to Dusseldorf as CO 39th Fusiliers and in 1914 he moved again, on promotion, to Strasburg as commander 85th Brigade; on the outbreak of war he became Deputy Chief of Staff of General von Bulow s Second Army. Ludendorff first came to notice when he took charge of operations that led to the capture of the fortress of Liege on 7th August 1914, for which he was awarded the Pour le Merite, and which he describes in detail.Two weeks later he was sent to the Eastern Front as Chief of Staff of 8th Army under the newly appointed commander, von Hindenburg. Thus began the partnership that was to last till Ludendorff s resignation over four years later on 26th October 1918. Within a week they had won a crushing victory over the Russians at Tannenberg and became instant heroes. When Hindenburg was appointed Chief of theGeneral Staff in August 1916 and moved to the Western Front, Ludendorff went with him as his deputy in the newly created post of First Quartermaster-General. As the narrative unfolds it is clear how Ludendorff became the driving force though always acknowledging Hindenburg s senior position, and, of course, always paying lip service to the All-Highest. Between they gained control not just of the armed forces but also of Germany s war effort and of the political scene, for example insisting on unrestricted submarine warfare despite the objections of the chancellor, Bethman Hollweg, who resigned. They had become a military dictatorship. Following the failure of the German 1918 offensive Ludendorff suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to resign, just before the end of the war.