Assistant Surgeon James A. Black takes the reader on a seldom traveled journey--a fourteen hundred sixty-one day excursion--as he participates in the American Civil War. During his sojourn the Union soldier openly shares his observations, his joys, his concerns, and his frustrations, as he provides the reader with tremendous insight into the daily lives of soldiers in their camps and on their campaigns some one hundred fifty years ago. Black and a contingency of Southern Illinois men enlisted in the Union Army October 6, 1861. The 49th Illinois Infantry Regiment was mustered into service December 31, 1861, briefly trained at Camp Butler, near Springfield, Illinois, and was engaged in combat by February, 1862. The regiment remained active in the Western Theatre of action for the duration of the war. Although the diary does not offer revolutionary revelations about the war or its generals, it does present interesting and revealing perceptions about the conflict, especially concerning the impact on soldiers involved in prolonged military engagement. Black s perspective as a Civil War soldier is unique in many ways. For the first year he wrote with the view of an enlisted infantryman, while the last three years he viewed events from the eyes of a commissioned medical officer. In addition, James Black, a good soldier, was a strong believer in the Union cause, a religious man, and a moralist. In many ways his thoughts reflect the times and yet many thoughts do not necessarily follow conventional Civil War wisdom. The diary is completely unabridged and void of interpretation or comment by scholars. Simply, the diary is James personal story as he lived it.

This Encyclopedia is the first to compile some 500,000 pseudonyms of roughly 270,000 people from all over the world, from all ages and occupations. Besides pseudonyms in the narrower sense, initials, nick names, order names, birth and married names etc. are included. The volumes 1 to 9 list persons by their real names in alphabetical order, in volumes 10 to 16, the pseudonyms are listed alphabetically and the real names provided. To make identification of a person easier, year and place of birth and death are provided where available, as are profession, nationality and more personal data.

Volume 3, Part B, republishes Donna Holt Siemiatkoski's work on the sixth-generation descendants of Gov. Thomas and Alice (Tomes) Welles. It extracts this generation's treatment from her Research Papers previously published for the Welles Family Association in 1995, 1996, and 1997, using the status of the manuscripts in 2001. These extracts are published as a service to genealogical researchers, so that the records held by the Welles Family Association are more readily available. Numbering of individuals has been updated to synchronize with Volume 2. Welles descendants were farmers, governors, senators, bishops, manufacturers, members of the French court, generals, sea captains, and other leaders in eighteenth and nineteenth century America. Family names found here include Wells, Welles, Bidwell, Curtiss, Hale, Hawley, Judson, Robbins, Shelton, Stoddard, Thompson, and Wolcott.

When you see your nation's flag fluttering in the breeze, what do you feel? For thousands of years flags have represented our hopes and dreams. We wave them. Burn them. March under their colours. And still, in the 21st century, we die for them. Flags fly at the UN, on the Arab street, from front porches in Texas. They represent the politics of high power as well as the politics of the mob. From the renewed sense of nationalism in China, to troubled identities in Europe and the USA, to the terrifying rise of Islamic State, the world is a confusing place right now and we need to understand the symbols, old and new, that people are rallying round. In nine chapters (covering the USA, UK, Europe, Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, international flags and flags of terror), Tim Marshall draws on more than twenty-five years of global reporting experience to reveal the histories, the power and the politics of the symbols that unite us - and divide us.