Author: Glyn Harper
Publisher: Exisle Publishing
ISBN: 1775592383
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 977
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Book Description
The New Zealand soldiers who left these shores to fight in the First World War represented one of the greatest collective endeavours in the nation’s history. Over 100,000 men and women would embark for overseas service and almost 60,000 of them became casualties. For a small nation like New Zealand this was a tragedy on an unimagined scale. Using their personal testimony, this book reveals what these men experienced – the truth of their lives in battle, at rest, at their best and their worst. Through a comprehensive and sympathetic scrutiny of New Zealand soldiers’ correspondence, diaries and memoirs, a compelling picture of the New Zealand soldier’s war from general to private is revealed. This is not a campaign history of dry facts and detail. Rather, it examines minutely the everyday experience of trench life in all its shapes and forms. Diverse topics such as barbed wire, the use of the bayonet, gas attacks, rats, horses, food, communal singing, infectious diseases and much more feature in this riveting account of the New Zealand soldier in the First World War. It is the story of ordinary men thrust into the most extraordinary circumstances imaginable. Written in an accessible style aimed at the interested general reader, the book is the product of a substantial amount of research. The text is complemented by a range of maps, illustrations, graphs and diagrams.
Author: Donald B. Smith
Publisher: Coteau Books
ISBN: 1550504703
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Born in Toronto to a Methodist family and raised in Wingham, Ontario, William Henry Jackson attended the University of Toronto before moving to Prince Albert, where he began to sympathize with the Métis and their struggle against the Canadian government. Jackson became personal secretary to Louis Riel, was captured by the Canadian militia during the 1885 Resistance, and was convicted of treason and sentenced to an insane asylum near Winnipeg. When he escaped to the United States, joining the labour union movement, he told everyone that he was Métis and modified his name to the Métis-sounding Honoré Jaxon. After a lively career as a politically radical public figure in Chicago - where he befriended, among others, the revolutionary architect Frank Lloyd Wright - Jaxon eventually moved to New York City to attempt life as a real estate developer. His ongoing project was to collect as many books, newspapers and pamphlets relating to the Métis people as possible, in an attempt to establish a library for their use. However, he was evicted from his basement apartment at the age of ninety. His entire collection was dispersed, most of it to the New York City garbage dump, the remainder sold. He died a month later, in early 1952. Honoré Jaxon: Prairie Visionary completes Donald Smith's "Prairie Imposters" popular history trilogy concerning three prominent figures who all pretended a native ancestry they did not, in fact, possess - Honoré Jaxon, Grey Owl, and Long Lance.
Author: Richard S. Faulkner
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700623736
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 778
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Book Description
The Great War caught a generation of American soldiers at a turning point in the nation's history. At the moment of the Republic's emergence as a key player on the world stage, these were the first Americans to endure mass machine warfare, and the first to come into close contact with foreign peoples and cultures in large numbers. What was it like, Richard S. Faulkner asks, to be one of these foot soldiers at the dawn of the American century? How did the doughboy experience the rigors of training and military life, interact with different cultures, and endure the shock and chaos of combat? The answer can be found in Pershing's Crusaders, the most comprehensive, and intimate, account ever given of the day-to-day lives and attitudes of the nearly 4.2 million American soldiers mobilized for service in World War I. Pershing’s Crusaders offers a clear, close-up picture of the doughboys in all of their vibrant diversity, shared purpose, and unmistakably American character. It encompasses an array of subjects from the food they ate, the clothes they wore, their view of the Allied and German soldiers and civilians they encountered, their sexual and spiritual lives, their reasons for serving, and how they lived and fought, to what they thought about their service along every step of the way. Faulkner's vast yet finely detailed portrait draws upon a wealth of sources—thousands of soldiers' letters and diaries, surveys and memoirs, and a host of period documents and reports generated by various staff agencies of the American Expeditionary Forces. Animated by the voices of soldiers and civilians in the midst of unprecedented events, these primary sources afford an immediacy rarely found in historical records. Pershing's Crusaders is, finally, a work that uniquely and vividly captures the reality of the American soldier in WWI for all time.
Author: Edward Howard Marsh
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3387329997
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 158
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Book Description
Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.
Author: Andrew Witmer
Publisher: UMass + ORM
ISBN: 161376944X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
Winner of an Award of Excellence, American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) In 1822, settlers pushed north from Massachusetts and other parts of New England into Monson, Maine. On land taken from the Penobscot people, they established prosperous farms and businesses. Focusing on the microhistory of this village, Andrew Witmer reveals the sometimes surprising ways that this small New England town engaged with the wider world across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Townspeople fought and died in distant wars, transformed the economy and landscape with quarries and mills, and used railroads, highways, print, and new technologies to forge connections with the rest of the nation. Here and Everywhere Else starts with Monson’s incorporation in the early nineteenth century, when central Maine was considered the northern frontier and over 90 percent of Americans still lived in rural areas; it ends with present-day attempts to revive this declining Maine town into an artists’ colony. Engagingly written, with colorful portraits of local characters and landmarks, this study illustrates how the residents of this remote place have remade their town by integrating (and resisting) external influences.
Author: Ervin Eugene Lewis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 186
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Book Description
Author: Lewis Baker
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807125137
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Set in the twilight years of southern aristocracy, The Percys of Mississippi is a biography of a family in whose bloodline ran both a strong commitment to public service and an equally strong but more private dedication to literature. Following four generations of Percy family history, Lewis Baker chronicles the lives and public careers of Colonel William Alexander Percy, a planter and lawyer; his son LeRoy, a lawyer and United States Senator; LeRoy’s son Will, a poet and lawyer; and Will’s nephew and adopted son, the novelist Walker Percy. Known as the “gray eagle of the delta” for his piercing eyes and silver hair, Colonel Percy served as a Confederate officer in both the eastern and western campaigns of the Civil War. He returned home to practice law and manage the family’s property, but he was soon drawn into the arena of state politics, where he fought vigorously to strengthen the Mississippi River levee system and to protect his district from the perils of Reconstruction. With Colonel Percy’s death in 1888, LeRoy Percy inherited his father’s law practice and his mantle of leadership in the community. LeRoy used his power as a United States Senator to continue his father’s long quest for an adequate levee system; struggled to loosen the Ku Klux Klan’s grip of fear on the delta; and campaigned tirelessly to discredit the divisive creed of the state’s rising demagogue politicians. In the election of 1911, LeRoy Percy was defeated in his bid to be returned to the Senate, losing to the flamboyant demagogue James Kimble Vardaman, the “White Chief.” It was a defeat echoed across the South throughout the dawning years of the twentieth century, as poorer whites rejected the moderate counsel of the planter class, their traditional leaders, and embraced the demagogues’ fiery gospel of resentment. It was this troubling, altered South that LeRoy Percy bequeathed to his son William Alexander. Will Percy fought in World War I, taught for a time, and stood at his father’s side throughout many of the battles to safeguard the delta from extremism. But Will’s true calling was as a poet, and his lasting contribution to the delta would be in the form of a memorial to its past—his memoir Lanterns on the Levee. “During my day,” he wrote Will Percy not long before his death, “ I have witnessed the disintegration of that moral cohesion of the South which had given it its strength and its sons their singleness of purpose and simplicity.” It would be left to Walker Percy to fully confont htis modern, disintegrated South; to seek in such works as The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, and The Second Coming the place of the Percy family’s values in a world that has little use for aristocrats.
Author: Susan Nichols Pulsifer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : World War, 1914-1918
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Author: Charles E Peck
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595362230
Category : World War, 1914-1918
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Allen Peck's WW I Letters Home tell of his patriotic volunteer service for the brand-new U.S. Army Air Service to fight for his country. Allen's American group was sent to France to be trained by and to fly with a French escadrille. The airplanes were small, flimsy, and slow, with open cockpits and no heat. No oxygen masks. For young pilots these were exciting, challenging, and for some, fatal months. Allen survived plane crashes, enemy planes shooting bullets through his cockpit, and enemy ground fire. A Croix de Guerre was earned for downing a German. But the trauma was great. After Armistice, he wrote of the tragic toll on his "original gang""Twelve of us reached the front, seven gone, three wounded, one unheard from, and I was untouched." After November 11, his letters tell of experiences at a French university, of adventures at the American Embassy in London, and of helping with Inter-Allied Games. He fell in love with and married a young French girl. When his two-year enlistment was up, Allen chose at first to stay in Paris. But, after five months, he headed back home to America with his new wife, Marguerite. 65 names of individuals with whom he flew or interacted are indexed.
Author: Quincy Sharpe Mills
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : World War, 1914-1918
Languages : en
Pages : 528
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Book Description
