In the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front, Elton E. Mackin's memoirs are a haunting portrayal of war as seen through the eyes of a highly decorated Marine Corps private who fought in every major World War I campaign in which the Marine Brigade participated - from Belleau Wood to the crossing of the Meuse on the eve of the Armistice. At age nineteen, Private Mackin joined the Marine Brigade's 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment on beleaguered Hill 142, where the Marines were fighting as part of the U.S. Army's 2d Infantry Division. The call soon went out for volunteers to serve as runners, carrying messages from headquarters to the front lines or guiding attacking units to the jumpoff point. Mackin accepted the challenge and became a member of what frontline marines called the "suicide squad". He miraculously survived some of the most vicious fighting of the war without serious injury - other than to his psyche. His narrative, written in a style evocative of the heyday of American literature, the 1920s and 1930s, is certain to become a classic in its own right. Mackin shares with the reader not just the horrors of war, but the subtle little everyday experiences that make the life of the combat soldier both tolerable and soul-shattering. Suddenly We Didn't Want to Die is a book that will leave you wondering how anyone can emerge from battle with sanity intact.

Not Even My Name is a rare eyewitness account of the horrors of a little-known, often denied genocide, in which hundreds of thousands of Armenian and Pontic Greek minorities in Turkey were killed during and after World War I. As told by Sano Halo to her daughter, Thea, this is the story of her survival of the death march at age ten that annihilated her family, and the mother-daughter pilgrimage to Turkey in search of Sano's home seventy years after her exile. Sano, a Pontic Greek from a small village near the Black Sea, also recounts the end of her ancient, pastoral way of life in the Pontic Mountains.

In the spring of 1920, Turkish soldiers arrived in the village and shouted the proclamation issued by General Kemal Attatürk: "You are to leave this place. You are to take with you only what you can carry . . . " After surviving the march, Sano was sold into marriage at age fifteen to a man three times her age who brought her to America. Not Even My Name follows Sano's marriage, the raising of her ten children, and her transformation from an innocent girl who lived an ancient way of life in a remote place to a woman in twentieth-century New York City.

Although Turkey actively suppresses the truth about the murder of almost three million of its Christian minorities--Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian--during and after World War I, and the exile of millions of others, here is a first-hand account of the horrors of that genocide.

How did Russia develop a modern national identity, and what role did the military play? Joshua Sanborn examines tsarist and Soviet armies of the early twentieth century to show how military conscription helped to bind citizens and soldiers into a modern political community. The experience of total war, he shows, provided the means by which this multiethnic and multiclass community was constructed and tested. Drafting the Russian Nation is the first archivally based study of the relationship between military conscription and nation-building in a European country. Stressing the importance of violence to national political consciousness, it shows how national identity was formed and maintained through the organized practice of violence. The cultural dimensions of the "military body" are explored as well, especially in relation to the nationalization of masculinity. The process of nation-building set in motion by military reformers culminated in World War I, when ethnically diverse conscripts fought together in total war to preserve their national territory. In the ensuing Civil War, the army's effort was directed mainly toward killing the political opposition within the "nation." While these complex conflicts enabled the Bolsheviks to rise to power, the massive violence of war even more fundamentally constituted national political life. Not all minorities were easily assimilated. The attempt to conscript natives of Central Asia for military service in 1916 proved disastrous, for example. Jews; also identified as non-nationals, were conscripted but suffered intense discrimination within the armed forces because they were deemed to be inherently unreliable and potentially disloyal. Drafting the Russian Nation is rich with insights into the relation of war to national life. Students of war and society in the twentieth century will find much of interest in this provocative study.

The author, N.P. Comnene, was an important Romanian diplomat of the interwar period, serving his country as ambassador to Switzerland, Germany, the Vatican, as well as a delegate to the League of Nations. He wrote this book during the First World War, to describe Romania's role in World War I during the critical years of 1916 and 1917. This book discusses the situation of the Romanians living within the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at that time. He also analyzes the causes for Romania's entry into the war and the threat posed by Germany. Finally he discusses Romania's contribution to the war effort during 1916 and the first half of 1917.

This book is important for historians interested in the First World War on the Eastern Front. It includes a number of important historical documents that help to illustrate the author's account of the events of the time. The book includes a preface by Albert Thomas, the French minister of Armaments and War Production at that time, and Maurice Muret.

Why do totalitarian propagandas such as those created in Nazi Germany and the former German Democratic Republic initially succeed, and why do they ultimately fail? Outside observers often make two serious mistakes when they interpret the propaganda spawned by these authoritarian regimes. First, they assume their rhetoric worked largely because they were supported by a police state, that people cheered Hitler and Honecker because they feared the consequences of not doing so. Second, they assume that propaganda really succeeded in persuading most of the citizenry that the Nuremberg rallies were a reflection of how most Germans thought, or that most East Germans were convinced Marxist-Leninists. World War II Allies feared that rooting out Nazism would be a very difficult task. No leading scholar or politician in the West expected East Germany to collapse nearly as rapidly as it did. Effective propaganda depends on a full range of persuasive methods, from the gentlest suggestion to overt violence, which the dictatorships of the twentieth century understood well. In many ways, modern totalitarian movements rest upon worldviews that are religious in nature, Nazism and Marxism-Leninism presented themselves as explanations for all of life-culture, morality, science, history, recreation. They provided people with reasons for accepting the status quo. Bending Spines examines the full range of persuasive techniques used by Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic, and concludes that both systems failed in part because they expected more of their propaganda than it was able to deliver.

In this fascinating examination of German texts written about the First World War, Wolfgang Natter offers a new understanding of the relationship between culture and warfare. He focuses not only on the literary voices of German authors whose works are found in a library today but also on the wartime agencies, institutions, and individuals that produced and distributed an enormous body of books and printed materials during the First World War, the Weimar period, and the years preceding World War II. The book argues that the militarization of literature that occurred between 1914 and 1918 and the ways war events reconfigured literary institutions, aesthetics, and cultural politics, help to explain how a military ethos could remain vibrant in a defeated Germany and lay the groundwork for another world war.

Natter draws on previously unexamined archival sources, literature published between 1914 and 1940, and recent cultural, historical, and literary debates. He considers how the German war "experience" was mobilized by military, state, and private institutions; how reading and the publishing industry influenced history-making activities; and how post-war reassessments of the lost war's meaning uncovered a powerful storehouse of cultural ammunition that propelled and sustained National Socialism's rise to power. In examining these issues within the context of German nationalism, it also contributes to a general discussion regarding the theories and cultural practices of twentieth-century modernity.