The Shelf2Life WWI Memoirs Collection is an engaging set of pre-1923 materials that describe life during the Great War through memoirs, letters and diaries. Poignant personal narratives from soldiers, doctors and nurses on the front lines to munitions workers and land girls on the home front, offer invaluable insight into the sacrifices men and women made for their country. Photographs and illustrations intensify stories of struggle and survival from the trenches, hospitals, prison camps and battlefields. The WWI Memoirs Collection captures the pride and fear of the war as experienced by combatants and non-combatants alike and provides historians, researchers and students extensive perspective on individual emotional responses to the war.

"Lean men, brown men, men from overseas,
Men from all the outer world; shy and ill at ease
" There were Canadian Mounties, American cowboys, Arctic explorers, adventurers, rogues, big game hunters and sportsmen. There were famous men like Cherry Kearton, the naturalist and explorer and the grand old man of Africa-Frederick Selous himself. All these men had come together under the Union Flag to do battle against colonial Imperial Germany in East Africa. They came under the command of Driscoll of Driscoll's Scouts who performed with renown during the Boer War. These were the men of the 25th Royal Fusiliers-The Legion of Frontiersmen-and their battlegrounds were to be the great plains of Africa rich in wildlife and elemental danger. This is their story through the years of the Great War told by one of their own officers in vivid detail. It is a story of campaigns and hardship which would be equal to the best of them and lay many a 'lean, brown man' in a shallow grave in the red earth before it was concluded.

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"Laboras Home Front is an outstanding contribution. Balanced and fair-minded, Kerstenas richly documented account puts the AFL at the center of wartime labor relations and domestic history generally. . . . Kersten also sheds new light on the key role of the AFL in the emergence of social democratic liberalism during the era of World War II."
--Robert H. Zieger, University of Florida

"Labor's Home Front is the work of a careful and thorough historian. Kersten establishes the centrality of the often neglected American Federation of Labor to the story of labor's uphill efforts during World War II to breathe life into the lofty ideals embodied in the Four Freedoms. He skillfully weaves his case studies--on gender, race, union rivalries, safety, the open shop, and postwar planning--into a narrative fully attentive to the evolution of the Federation's ideology and politics, poignantly conveying the spirit of sacrifice and suffering without romanticizing his subjects. This is a genuinely important book."
--Eric Arnesen, author of "Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality"

One of the oldest, strongest, and largest labor organizations in the U.S., the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had 4 million members in over 20,000 union locals during World War II. The AFL played a key role in wartime production and was a major actor in the contentious relationship between the state, organized labor, and the working class in the 1940s. The war years are pivotal in the history of American labor, but books on the AFL's experiences are scant, with far more on the radical Congress of Industrial Unions(CIO).

Andrew E. Kersten closes this gap with Labor's Home Front, challenging us to reconsider the AFL and its influence on twentieth-century history. Kersten details the union's contributions to wartime labor relations, its opposition to the open shop movement, divided support for fair employment and equity for women and African American workers, its constant battles with the CIO, and its significant efforts to reshape American society, economics, and politics after the war. Throughout, Kersten frames his narrative with an original, central theme: that despite its conservative nature, the AFL was dramatically transformed during World War II, becoming a more powerful progressive force that pushed for liberal change.

Written in a clear and engaging narrative style, this book analyzes the pivotal campaign in which Robert E. Lee drove the Union Army of the Potomac under George B. McClellan away from the Confederate capital of Richmond, VA, in the summer of 1862. The Seven Days' Battles: The War Begins Anew examines how Lee's Confederate forces squared off against McClellan's Union Army during this week-long struggle, revealing how both sides committed many errors that could have affected the outcome. Indeed, while Lee is often credited with having brilliant battle plans, the author shows how the Confederate commander mismanaged battles, employed too many complicated maneuvers, and overestimated what was possible with the resources he had available. For his part, McClellan of the Union Army failed to commit his troops at key moments, accepted erroneous intelligence, and hindered his campaign by refusing to respect the authority of his civilian superiors. This book presents a synthetic treatment that closely analyzes the military decisions that were made and why they were made, analyzes the successes and failures of the major commanders on both sides, and clearly explains the outcomes of the battles. The work contains sufficient depth of information to serve as a resource for undergraduate American history students while providing enjoyable reading for Civil War enthusiasts as well as general audiences.

For six decades, John Knoepfle has been writing poems, and he's still going strong. Knoepfle writes love poems, among the best we have, of the joys, loneliness, danger and the infinite transformations of marriage. He writes narrative poems, surreal, sardonic and magical about astronauts on the moon or an angry farmer and a prophetic owl. He recovers the stories of folks who never made it into the history books. Always he has a respect for the spoken word and lays his lines out on the page so that you too can hear it. And a spiritual force runs through his books like the slow and powerful rivers of the Midwest he inhabits. Both moving and humorous, Knoepfle's autobiography shows us how by hard work and lucky accident he came to be the poet he is.

Largely overshadowed by World War II's "greatest generation" and the more vocal veterans of the Vietnam era, Korean War veterans remain relatively invisible in the narratives of both war and its aftermath. Yet, just as the beaches of Normandy and the jungles of Vietnam worked profound changes on conflict participants, the Korean Peninsula chipped away at the beliefs, physical and mental well-being, and fortitude of Americans completing wartime tours of duty there. Upon returning home, Korean War veterans struggled with home front attitudes toward the war, faced employment and family dilemmas, and wrestled with readjustment. Not unlike other wars, Korea proved a formative and defining influence on the men and women stationed in theater, on their loved ones, and in some measure on American culture. In the Shadow of the Greatest Generation not only gives voice to those Americans who served in the "forgotten war" but chronicles the larger personal and collective consequences of waging war the American way.

The War for Legitimacy in Politics and Culture 1936-1946 presents the first investigation of how the phenomenon of political legitimacy operated within Europe's political cultures during the period of the Second World War. Amidst the upheavals of that turbulent period in Europe's twentieth-century history, a wide variety of contenders for power emerged, each of which claimed to possess the right to rule.Exploring political discourse, state propaganda, and high and low culture, the book argues that legitimacy lay not with rulers, and still less in the barrel of a gun, but in the values behind differing approaches to "good" government. An important contribution to the study of the political culture of wartime Europe, this volume will be essential reading for both political scientists and twentieth-century historians.

In the bleak and bitter cold of a copper mine in northern Japan, U.S. Marine Sergeant Major Charles Jackson was allowed to send a postcard his wife. He was allowed ten words-he used three: "I AM ALIVE!" This message, classic in its poignancy of suffering and despair captures only too well what it meant to be a Japanese prisoner-of-war in World War II. In this riveting book, acclaimed military historian Major Bruce H. Norton USMC (ret.) brings to life a long-forgotten memoir by a Marine captured at Corregidor in May 1942 and held in Japanese captivity for three devastating years. In unflinching prose, Sergeant Major Jackson described the fierce yet impossible battle for Corregidor, the surrender of thousands of his comrades, the long forced marches to prison camps, and the lethal reality of captivity. One of the most important eyewitness accounts of World War II, this book is a testament to the men who sacrificed for their country. Jackson's unvarnished account of what his fellow soldiers endured in the face of enemy inhumanity pays tribute to the men who served America during the war-and why it ultimately prevailed.

During the First World War it was the task of the U.S. Department of Justice, using the newly passed Espionage Act and its later Sedition Act amendment, to prosecute and convict those who opposed America's entry into the conflict. In "Unsafe for Democracy," historian William H. Thomas Jr. shows that the Justice Department did not stop at this official charge but went much further--paying cautionary visits to suspected dissenters, pressuring them to express support of the war effort, or intimidating them into silence. At times going undercover, investigators tried to elicit the unguarded comments of individuals believed to be a threat to the prevailing social order. In this massive yet largely secret campaign, agents cast their net wide, targeting isolationists, pacifists, immigrants, socialists, labor organizers, African Americans, and clergymen. The unemployed, the mentally ill, college students, schoolteachers, even schoolchildren, all might come under scrutiny, often in the context of the most trivial and benign activities of daily life. Delving into numerous reports by Justice Department detectives, Thomas documents how, in case after case, they used threats and warnings to frighten war critics and silence dissent. This early government crusade for wartime ideological conformity, Thomas argues, marks one of the more dubious achievements of the Progressive Era--and a development that resonates in the present day.
Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians
"Recommended for all libraries."--Frederic Krome, "Library Journal"

The 'Normans' during the Great War in Europe
It would misleading and unfair to the entertainment value and writing ability of the author of this book to describe it as a regimental history. Nothing justifiably so classified began with the expletive, 'Fed up ' Nevertheless, this excellent account takes the reader to the heart of the light infantry regiment raised in Guernsey and from its nearby islands, a regiment of local men who were proud of their independence and their heritage as decedents of the Norman warriors who accompanied Duke William on the conquest of England-the country they all acknowledged as nothing less than their own. Blicq, the author, was one of their number-an ordinary soldier and proud to be one of the worst in the battalion So he predictably brings an element of humour into his graphic portrayal of his comrades and indeed, the text is full of wry period dialogue. Intimate portrait of life on the march, in camp and in the trenches is vividly painted giving the reader a picture of the Guernsey men's experience of life and death on the Western Front. The reader joins Blicq-half of the infamous 'Duo' into battle at Hendecourt, Cambrai, Marcoing, Masnieres through the near catastrophic German onslaught of 1918 to the Passchendaele sector and Doulieu-Estaires. This is a remarkable story of the men of a small island state who loyally and with humour and determination rallied to its call and, in many cases, sacrificed to the last full measure, leaving an appalling legacy of death and injury for the Channel Islands in the post war period. This is an unusual view of a unit at war on the Western Front from original sources and recommended. Available in softcover and hardcover with dust jacket.

When the Germans invaded her small Belgian village in 1914, Marthe Cnockaert's home was burned and her family separated. After getting a job at a German hospital, and winning the Iron Cross for her service to the Reich, she was approached by a neighbor and invited to become an intelligence agent for the British. Not without trepidation, Cnockaert embarked on a career as a spy, providing information and engaging in sabotage before her capture and imprisonment in 1916. After the war, she was paid and decorated by a grateful British government for her service. Cnockaert's is only one of the surprising and gripping stories that comprise Female Intelligence. This is the first history of the female spies who served Britain during World War I, focusing on both the powerful cultural images of these women and the realities, challenges, and contradictions of intelligence service. Between the founding of modern British intelligence organizations in 1909 and the demobilization of 1919, more than 6,000 women served the British government in either civil or military occupations as members of the intelligence community. These women performed a variety of services, and they represented an astonishing diversity of nationality, age, and class. From Aphra Behn, who spied for the British government in the seventeenth century, to the most well known example, Mata Hari, female spies have a long history, existing in juxtaposition to the folkloric notion of women as chatty, gossipy, and indiscreet. Using personal accounts, letters, official documents and newspaper reports, Female Intelligence interrogates different, and apparently contradictory, constructions of gender in the competing spheres of espionage activity.