Author: David S. Heidler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313088756
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
While soldiers were off fighting on the fields of war, civilians on the home front fought their own daily struggles, sometimes removed from the violence but often enough from deep within the maelstrom of conflict. Chapters provide readers with an excellent, detailed description of how women, children, slaves, and Native Americans coped with privation and looming threat, and how they often used, or tried to use, periods of turmoil to their own advantage. While it is the soldiers who are often remembered for their strength, honor, and courage, it is the civilians who keep life going during wartime. This volume presents the lives of these brave citizens during the early colonial era, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Civil War. This volume begins with Armstrong Starkey's detailed description of wartime life during the American Colonial era, beginning with the Jamestown, VA settlement of 1607. Among his discussions of civilian lives during the Pequot War, King Philip's War, and the Seven Years' War, Starkey also examines Native American attitudes regarding war, Puritan lives, and Salem witchcraft and its connection to war. Wayne E. Lee continues with his chapter on the American Revolution, investigating how difficult it was for civilians to choose sides, including a telling look at soldier recruitment strategies. He also surveys how inflation and shortages adversely affected civilians, in addition to disease, women's roles, slaves, and Native Americans as civilians. Richard V. Barbuto discusses the War of 1812, taking a close look at life on the ever-expanding frontier, rural homes and families, and jobs and education in city life. Gregory S. Hospodor observes American life during the Mexican War, examining how that conflict amplified domestic tensions caused by sharply divided but closely-held beliefs about national expansion and slavery. Continuing, James Marten looks at southern life in the South during the Civil War, examining the constant burden of supporting Confederate armies or coping with invading northern ones. Paul A. Cimbala concludes this volume with a look at northerner's lives during the Civil War, offering an outstanding essay on a home front mobilized for a titanic struggle, and how the war, no matter how remote, became omnipresent in daily life.

Author: David S. Heidler
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN: 0313335265
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Among his discussions of civilian lives during the Pequot War, King Philip's War, and the Seven Years' War, Starkey also examines Native American attitudes regarding war, Puritan lives, and Salem witchcraft and its connection to war. Wayne E. Lee continues with his chapter on the American Revolution, investigating how difficult it was for civilians to choose sides, including a telling look at soldier recruitment strategies. He also surveys how inflation and shortages adversely affected civilians, in addition to disease, women's roles, slaves, and Native Americans as civilians. Richard V. Barbuto discusses the War of 1812, taking a close look at life on the ever-expanding frontier, rural homes and families, and jobs and education in city life. Gregory S. Hospodor observes American life during the Mexican War, examining how that conflict amplified domestic tensions caused by sharply divided but closely-held beliefs about national expansion and slavery

Author: John Tirman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199831491
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Americans are greatly concerned about the number of our troops killed in battle--33,000 in the Korean War; 58,000 in Vietnam; 4,500 in Iraq--and rightly so. But why are we so indifferent, often oblivious, to the far greater number of casualties suffered by those we fight and those we fight for? This is the compelling, largely unasked question John Tirman answers in The Deaths of Others. Between six and seven million people died in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq alone, the majority of them civilians. And yet Americans devote little attention to these deaths. Other countries, however, do pay attention, and Tirman argues that if we want to understand why there is so much anti-Americanism around the world, the first place to look is how we conduct war. We understandably strive to protect our own troops, but our rules of engagement with the enemy are another matter. From atomic weapons and carpet bombing in World War II to napalm and daisy cutters in Vietnam and beyond, our weapons have killed large numbers of civilians and enemy soldiers. Americans, however, are mostly ignorant of these methods, believing that American wars are essentially just, necessary, and "good." Trenchant and passionate, The Deaths of Others forces readers to consider the tragic consequences of American military action not just for Americans, but especially for those we fight against.

Author: David S. Heidler
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313088721
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
In post-Civil War America, civilians were ordinarily far-removed from the actual fighting. War brought about tremendous and far-reaching changes to America's society, politics, and economy nonetheless. Readers are offered detailed glimpses into the lives of ordinary folk struggling with the privations, shortages, and anxieties brought on by U.S. entry into war. They are also shown how they strove to turn changing times to their advantage, especially civically and economically, as minorities pressed for political inclusion and traders profited from government contracts and women took on well-paying skilled jobs in large numbers for the first time. Susan Badger Doyle's chapter on the Indian Wars in the American West shows how for whites the migration westward was the path to a land of opportunity, for Native Americans migration it was a disastrous epoch that led to their near-extermination. Michael Neiberg's piece on World War I highlights how America's entry into the war on the Allied side was far from universally popular or supported because of large German and Irish immigrant communities, and how this tepid support led to the creation of some of the harshest censorship and curtailment of civil rights in U.S. history. Judy Litoff's chapter on the home front during World War II focuses on the exceptional changes brought on by total mobilization for the war effort, African-Americans' push for expanded civil rights, to women entering the workforce in large numbers, to the public's acceptance, even expectation, of centralized planning and government intervention in economic and social matters. Jon Timothy Kelly's essay on the Cold War provides a look at how the country quickly returned to a state of readiness when the end of World War II ushered in the Cold War and the immanent threat of nuclear annihilation, even as a booming economy brought undreamt of material prosperity to huge numbers of Americans. Finally, James Landers describes how American involvement in Vietnam, the first televised war, profoundly changed American attitudes about war even as this particular conflict touched few Americans, but divided them like few previous events have.

Author: Scott Reynolds Nelson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199725977
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Claiming more than 600,000 lives, the American Civil War had a devastating impact on countless numbers of common soldiers and civilians, even as it brought freedom to millions. This book shows how average Americans coped with despair as well as hope during this vast upheaval. A People at War brings to life the full humanity of the war's participants, from women behind their plows to their husbands in army camps; from refugees from slavery to their former masters; from Mayflower descendants to freshly recruited Irish sailors. We discover how people confronted their own feelings about the war itself, and how they coped with emotional challenges (uncertainty, exhaustion, fear, guilt, betrayal, grief) as well as physical ones (displacement, poverty, illness, disfigurement). The book explores the violence beyond the battlefield, illuminating the sharp-edged conflicts of neighbor against neighbor, whether in guerilla warfare or urban riots. The authors travel as far west as China and as far east as Europe, taking us inside soldiers' tents, prisoner-of-war camps, plantations, tenements, churches, Indian reservations, and even the cargo holds of ships. They stress the war years, but also cast an eye at the tumultuous decades that preceded and followed the battlefield confrontations. An engrossing account of ordinary people caught up in life-shattering circumstances, A People at War captures how the Civil War rocked the lives of rich and poor, black and white, parents and children--and how all these Americans pushed generals and presidents to make the conflict a people's war.

Author: John A. Ruddiman
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813936187
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Young Continental soldiers carried a heavy burden in the American Revolution. Their experiences of coming of age during the upheavals of war provide a novel perspective on the Revolutionary era, eliciting questions of gender, family life, economic goals, and politics. "Going for a soldier" forced young men to confront profound uncertainty, and even coercion, but also offered them novel opportunities. Although the war imposed obligations on youths, military service promised young men in their teens and early twenties alternate paths forward in life. Continental soldiers’ own youthful expectations about respectable manhood and their goals of economic competence and marriage not only ordered their experience of military service; they also shaped the fighting capacities of George Washington’s army and the course of the war. Becoming Men of Some Consequence examines how young soldiers and officers joined the army, their experiences in the ranks, their relationships with civilians, their choices about quitting long-term military service, and their attempts to rejoin the flow of civilian life after the war. The book recovers young soldiers’ perspectives and stories from military records, wartime letters and journals, and postwar memoirs and pension applications, revealing how revolutionary political ideology intertwined with rational calculations and youthful ambitions. Its focus on soldiers as young men offers a new understanding of the Revolutionary War, showing how these soldiers’ generational struggle for their own independence was a profound force within America’s struggle for its independence.

Author: Chris Hedges
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416583149
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Acclaimed New York Times journalist and author Chris Hedges offers a critical -- and fascinating -- lesson in the dangerous realities of our age: a stark look at the effects of war on combatants. Utterly lacking in rhetoric or dogma, this manual relies instead on bare fact, frank description, and a spare question-and-answer format. Hedges allows U.S. military documentation of the brutalizing physical and psychological consequences of combat to speak for itself. Hedges poses dozens of questions that young soldiers might ask about combat, and then answers them by quoting from medical and psychological studies. • What are my chances of being wounded or killed if we go to war? • What does it feel like to get shot? • What do artillery shells do to you? • What is the most painful way to get wounded? • Will I be afraid? • What could happen to me in a nuclear attack? • What does it feel like to kill someone? • Can I withstand torture? • What are the long-term consequences of combat stress? • What will happen to my body after I die? This profound and devastating portrayal of the horrors to which we subject our armed forces stands as a ringing indictment of the glorification of war and the concealment of its barbarity.

Author: Daniel K. Blewett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1598844989
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
In this companion volume to his 1995 bibliography of the same title, Daniel Blewett continues his foray into the vast literature of military studies. As did its predecessor, it covers land, air, and naval forces, primarily but not exclusively from a U.S. perspective, with the welcome emergence of small wars from publishing obscurity. In addition to identifying relevant organizations and associations, Blewett has gathered together the very best in chronologies, bibliographies, biographical dictionaries, indexes, journals abstracts, glossaries, and encyclopedias, each accompanied by a brief descriptive annotation. This work remains a pertinent addition to the general reference collections of public and academic libraries as well as special libraries, government documents collections, military and intelligence agency libraries, and historical societies and museums.

Author: Randall M. Miller
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313065365
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 2658

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Book Description
The course of daily life in the United States has been a product of tradition, environment, and circumstance. How did the Civil War alter the lives of women, both white and black, left alone on southern farms? How did the Great Depression change the lives of working class families in eastern cities? How did the discovery of gold in California transform the lives of native American, Hispanic, and white communities in western territories? Organized by time period as spelled out in the National Standards for U.S. History, these four volumes effectively analyze the diverse whole of American experience, examining the domestic, economic, intellectual, material, political, recreational, and religious life of the American people between 1763 and 2005. Working under the editorial direction of general editor Randall M. Miller, professor of history at St. Joseph's University, a group of expert volume editors carefully integrate material drawn from volumes in Greenwood's highly successful Daily Life Through History series with new material researched and written by themselves and other scholars. The four volumes cover the following periods: The War of Independence and Antebellum Expansion and Reform, 1763-1861, The Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Industrialization of America, 1861-1900, The Emergence of Modern America, World War I, and the Great Depression, 1900-1940 and Wartime, Postwar, and Contemporary America, 1940-Present. Each volume includes a selection of primary documents, a timeline of important events during the period, images illustrating the text, and extensive bibliography of further information resources—both print and electronic—and a detailed subject index.

Author: Stephen Huggins
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 070062855X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
From the first, America has considered itself a “shining city on a hill”—uniquely lighting the right way for the world. But it is hard to reconcile this picture, the very image of American exceptionalism, with what America’s Use of Terror shows us: that the United States has frequently resorted to acts of terror to solve its most challenging problems. Any “war on terror,” Stephen Huggins suggests, will fail unless we take a long, hard look at ourselves—and it is this discerning, informed perspective that his book provides. Terrorism, as Huggins defines it, is an act of violence against noncombatants intended to change their political will or support. The United States government adds a qualifier to this definition: only if the instigator is a “subnational group.” On the contrary, Huggins tells us, terrorism is indeed used by the state—a politically organized body of people occupying a definite territory—in this case, the government of the United States, as well as by such predecessors as the Continental Congress and early European colonists in America. In this light, America’s Use of Terror re-examines key historical moments and processes, many of them events praised in American history but actually acts of terror directed at noncombatants. The targeting of women and children in Native American villages, for instance, was a use of terror, as were the means used to sustain slavery and then to further subjugate freed slaves under Jim Crow laws and practices. The placing of Philippine peasants in concentration camps during the Philippine-American War; the firebombing of families in Dresden and Tokyo; the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—all are last resort measures to conclude wars, and these too are among the instances of American terrorism that Huggins explores. Terrorism, in short, is not only terrorism when they do it to us, as many Americans like to think. And only when we recognize this, and thus the dissonance between the ideal and the real America, will we be able to truly understand and confront modern terrorism.