This landmark study of the most traumatic era in American history won a Pulitzer Prize in 1918 for its concise, clear-minded survey of the Civil War from political and economic perspectives. From "the great factor in the destruction of slavery"-the election of Abraham Lincoln as President in 1860-to the "twenty thousand men in Wall Street" who sang to celebrate the war's end four years later, Rhodes, a self-taught historian, lends a distinctive voice to his retelling of the war. All students of the upheaval and disorder of the period will appreciate this enduring and unusual perspective on it.

Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I dialogues with the variety of texts recently published to commemorate the Great War. It explores Italian socialist pacifism, the role of women during the conflict and a dominant cultural movement, Futurism, whose leader, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, glorified war and enlisted in the fight. Other soldiers created documents about the war that differ from the heroic and virile endeavor that Marinetti placed at the center of his works on war. Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I pays attention to the representations of the soldiers through an analysis of their letters, dominated by descriptions of the terrible hunger they suffered. In contrast, popular film absorbed the cultural lessons in Marinetti's writings and represented soldiers as modernist heroes in comedies and dramas. However, film did not shy away from representing cowards who could only be baffoons and fools in propaganda films. In another medium, the concern was to publish texts that would serve the fighting soldier and inform readers about ideological and historical motivations for the conflict. The publishing industry supported national propaganda efforts. Only socialism could endanger anti-war publication, but after its initial opposition to the conflict, socialists occupied a neutral position. Italian socialism still remained the only European socialist party that did not renege its pacifism in order to embrace nationalism and the war, but it was also not in favor of actions that would sabotage in the Italian war industry. ltalian socialism is only one feature of Italian culture that was dramatically changed during the war. WWI impacted every aspect of Italian and of European cultures. For instance, as an essay in Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I explores, the war industry needed workers. The solution was to bring Chinese men France to contribute in the war effort. After the war, they moved to other countries and in Milan, Italy, they founded one of the oldest Chinatowns in Europe, dramatically changing the human landscape of Italy as they later moved to other Italian cities. Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I supplies essential research articles to the construction of an inclusive portrayal of WWI and Italian culture by deepening our understanding of the transformative role it played in 20th century Italy and Europe.

This important translation looks at World War I from the perspective of German working-class women. The author demonstrates the intimate connection between 'general' social history and women's history while analyzing the dynamics between these different levels of interpretation. She asks:
- How did women view the war and whom did they hold responsible for it?
- How did military leaders and politicians perceive women at work, in the home, and
on the streets?
This book explores the ways in which the people themselves interpreted their world and their lives -- a perspective often neglected by historians but one becoming increasingly relevant in Germany today. Essential reading for all those interested in War Studies, German Studies, History and Women's Studies and an excellent text for course use.

The international bestselling author returns with an exploration of one of the grandest obsessions of the twentieth century

'The Bomber Mafia is a case study in how dreams go awry. When some shiny new idea drops from the heavens, it does not land softly in our laps. It lands hard, on the ground, and shatters.'

In the years before the Second World War, in a sleepy air force base in central Alabama, a small group of renegade pilots put forth a radical idea. What if we made bombing so accurate that wars could be fought entirely from the air? What if we could make the brutal clashes between armies on the ground a thing of the past?

This book tells the story of what happened when that dream was put to the test. The Bomber Mafia follows the stories of a reclusive Dutch genius and his homemade computer, Winston Churchill's forbidding best friend, a team of pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard, a brilliant pilot who sang vaudeville tunes to his crew, and the bomber commander, Curtis Emerson LeMay, who would order the bloodiest attack of the Second World War.

In this tale of innovation and obsession, Gladwell asks: what happens when technology and best intentions collide in the heat of war? And what is the price of progress?

The book explores how Churchill was portrayed in the UK press during the Second World War, comparing his depictions in Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, and provincial English newspapers. By using a variety of newspapers from these areas, it examines local opinions about Churchill at the time he was the wartime prime minister. It analyses how Churchill was received and depicted by newspapers in the UK and why differences in these depictions emerged in each area. It contributes to the study of public opinion in the war and of Churchill's reputation, of the British media, as well as to the study of the notion of Britishness, focusing on local perspectives.

One survivor tells of the fire-bombing of Dresden. Another recounts the pervasive fear of marauding Russian and Czech bandits raping and killing. Children recall fathers who were only photographs and mothers who were saviors and heroes.

These are typical in the stories collected in "The War of Our Childhood: Memories of World War II." For this book Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, a childhood refugee himself after the fall of Nazi Germany, interviewed twenty-seven men and women who as children--by chance and sheer resilience--survived Allied bombs, invading armies, hunger, and chaos.

"Our eyes carried no hate, only recognition of what was," Samuel writes of his childhood. "Peace was an abstraction. The world we Kinder knew nearly always had the word 'war' appended to it."

Samuel's heartfelt narratives from these innocent survivors are invariably riveting and often terrifying. Each engrossing story has perilous and tragic moments--school children in Leuna who are sent home during an air raid but are strafed as moving targets; fathers who exist only as distant figures, returning to their families long after the war--or not at all; mothers who are raped and tortured; families who are forced into a seemingly endless relocation that replicates the terrors of war itself. In capturing such experiences from nearly every region of Germany and involving people of every socio-economic class, this is a collection of unique memories, but each account contributes to a cumulative understanding of the war that is more personal than strategic surveys and histories.

For Samuel and the survivors he interviewed, agony and fright were part of everyday life, just as were play, wondrous experience, and above all perseverance.

"My focus," Samuel writes, "is on the astounding ability of a generation of German children to emerge from debilitating circumstances as sane and productive human beings."

This year is the eightieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. In that year, Lizzy Schwarz was a teenage Jew enjoying life in Boskovice, Czechoslovakia. Far to the east in Poland, teenage Jerzy Dyszkiewicz had recently qualified as an Officer Cadet in the Polish Army. During the war, Lizzy and her family were interned in Nazi concentration camps. Lizzy's mother died from ill health brought on by cruel treatment, her sister and father later died at the Auschwitz death camp. Lizzy however miraculously survived three of those horrendous camps. In September 1939, Jerzy's unit was moving west to meet the invading Germans when they were captured by the Soviet Army advancing east. They were handed over to the Germans and sent to a series of POW camps to work. In 1942, Jerzy and three close comrades escaped from a camp near the Belgian border and, surviving many close shaves, finally made it to England. After the war Lizzy and Jerzy coincidentally met and later married in London on 17th September 1955. This is their incredible story of a double escape from Nazis with an ultimate happy ending.

This study is among the first works in English to comprehensively address the Scandinavian First World War experience in the larger international context of the war. It surveys the complex relationship between the belligerent great powers and Northern Europe's neutral small states in times of crisis and war. The book's overreaching rationale draws upon three underlying conceptual fields: neutrality and international law, hegemony and great power politics as well as diplomacy and policy-making of small states in the international arena. From a variety of angles, it examines the question of how neutrality was understood and perceived, negotiated and dealt with both among the Scandinavian states and the belligerent major powers, especially Britain, Germany and Russia. For a long time, the experience of neutral countries during the First World War was seen as marginal, and was overshadowed by the experiences of occupation and collaboration brought about by the Second World War. In this book, Jonas demonstrates how this perception has changed, with neutrality becoming an integral part of the multiple narratives of the First World War. It is an important contribution to the international history of the First World War, cultural-historically influenced approaches to diplomatic history and the growing area of neutrality studies.

This book explores the important role that the Korean War played in Turkish culture and society in the 1950s. Despite the fact that fewer than 15,000 Turkish soldiers served in Korea, this study shows that the Turkish public was exposed to the war in an unprecedented manner, considering the relatively small size of the country's military contribution. It examines how the Turkish people understood the war and its causes, how propaganda was used to 'sell' the war to the public, and the impact of these messages on the Turkish public. Drawing on literary and visual sources, including archival documents, newspapers, protocols of parliamentary sessions, books, poems, plays, memoirs, cartoons and films, the book shows how the propaganda employed by the state and other influential civic groups in Turkey aimed to shape public opinion regarding the Korean War. It explores why this mattered to Turkish politicians, viewing this as instrumental in achieving the country's admission to NATO, and why it mattered to Turkish people more widely, seeing instead a war in the name of universal ideas of freedom, humanity and justice, and comparing the Turkish case to other states that participated in the war.

The Battle of Marathon changed the course of history in ancient Greece. To many, the impossible seemed to have been achieved - the mighty Persian Empire halted in its advance. What happened that day, why was the battle fought, and how did people make sense of it? This bold new history of the battle examines how the conflict unfolded and the ideas attached to it in antiquity and beyond. Many thought the battle offered lessons in how people should behave, with heroism to be emulated and faults to be avoided. While the battle itself was fought in one day, the battle for the idea of Marathon has lasted ever since. After immersing you in the battle, Sonya Nevin will help you explore how the ancient Athenians used the battle to (re)define relations between themselves and others, and how the battle continued to be used to express ideas about gods, empire and morality in the age of Alexander and his successors - at Rome as well as in Greece under the Roman Empire - and in the ages after antiquity. Even today, Marathon plays a remarkable role in sport, film and children's literature. Each retelling is a re-imagining of the battle and its meaning. A clash of weapons, gods and principles, this is Marathon as you've never seen it before!

This is one volume in a library of Confederate States history, in twelve volumes, written by distinguished men of the South, and edited by Gen. Clement A. Evans of Georgia. A generation after the Civil War, the Southern protagonists wanted to tell their story, and in 1899 these twelve volumes appeared under the imprint of the Confederate Publishing Company. The first and last volumes comprise such subjects as the justification of the Southern States in seceding from the Union and the honorable conduct of the war by the Confederate States government; the history of the actions and concessions of the South in the formation of the Union and its policy in securing the territorial dominion of the United States; the civil history of the Confederate States; Confederate naval history; the morale of the armies; the South since the war, and a connected outline of events from the beginning of the struggle to its close. The other ten volumes each treat a separate State with details concerning its peculiar story, its own devotion, its heroes, and its battlefields. Volume 7 is Alabama and Mississippi.

The Japanese military was responsible for the sexual enslavement of thousands of women and girls in Asia and the Pacific during the China and Pacific wars under the guise of providing 'comfort' for battle-weary troops. Campaigns for justice and reparations for 'comfort women' since the early 1990s have highlighted the magnitude of the human rights crimes committed against Korean, Chinese and other Asian women by Japanese soldiers after they invaded the Chinese mainland in 1937. These campaigns, however, say little about the origins of the system or its initial victims. The Japanese Comfort Women and Sexual Slavery during the China and Pacific Wars explores the origins of the Japanese military's system of sexual slavery and illustrates how Japanese women were its initial victims.

The lens of apartheid-era Jewish commemorations of the Holocaust in South Africa reveals the fascinating transformation of a diasporic community. Through the prism of Holocaust memory, this book examines South African Jewry and its ambivalent position as a minority within the privileged white minority. Grounded in research in over a dozen archives, the book provides a rich empirical account of the centrality of Holocaust memorialization to the community's ongoing struggle against global and local antisemitism. Most of the chapters focus on white perceptions of the Holocaust and reveals the tensions between the white communities in the country regarding the place of collective memories of suffering in the public arena. However, the book also moves beyond an insular focus on the South African Jewish community and in very different modality investigates prominent figures in the anti-apartheid struggle and the role of Holocaust memory in their fascinating journeys towards freedom.

Recent scholarship has broadened definitions of war and shifted from the narrow focus on battles and power struggles to include narratives of the homefront and private sphere. To expand scholarship on textual representations of war means to shed light on the multiple theaters of war, and on the many voices who contributed to, were affected by, and/or critiqued German war efforts. Engaged women writers and artists commented on their nations' imperial and colonial ambitions and the events of the tumultuous beginning of the twentieth century. In an interdisciplinary investigation, this volume explores select female-authored, German-language texts focusing on German colonial wars and World War I and the discourses that promoted or critiqued their premises. They examine how colonial conflicts contributed to a persistent atmosphere of Kriegsbegeisterung (war enthusiasm) that eventually culminated in the outbreak of World War I, or a Kriegskritik (criticism of war) that resisted it. The span from German colonialism to World War I brings these explosive periods into relief and challenges readers to think about the intersection of nationalism, violence and gender and about the historical continuities and disruptions that shape such events.