Bristol - 1945 The war has ended; the men are returning home to their loved ones, but for some things have changed. Charlotte Hennessey-White's husband, David is no longer the gentle loving man he once was and Charlotte, so independent during the war, is devastated. Edna Burbage's strong fiancee, Colin has suffered appalling physical injuries. He won't hold her to her promise of marriage, but she insists her feelings are unchanged. But is that true? Is she marrying him out of love or pity? And Polly Chandler's sweetheart, Gavin who'd she'd planned her whole future around, hasn't come home at all. War and suffering have changed their men leaving the women to cope on their own. But they too are changed. They harbour secrets best kept that could do untold damage to these already fragile lives. Praise for Lizzie Lane: 'A gripping saga and a storyline that will keep you hooked' Rosie Goodwin 'The Tobacco Girls is another heartwarming tale of love and friendship and a must-read for all saga fans.' Jean Fullerton 'Lizzie Lane opens the door to a past of factory girls, redolent with life-affirming friendship, drama, and choices that are as relevant today as they were then.' Catrin Collier 'If you want an exciting, authentic historical saga then look no further than Lizzie Lane.' Fenella J Miller

The book describes the armed forces of Peter the Great in its entirety, and covers in depth old Russian troops and irregulars, as well as Peter's new standing army (guards, infantry, dragoons, elite units and artillery) and his brand-new force(the navy, with sailing ships and galleys, and marines). Besides the staffing, organization and development of troops, the book gives detailed account of uniforms, weapons and other materiel (both conventional and unusual). Training is described using drill manuals and tactical instructions of the period, and fighting methods actually performed on the battlefield are described - based on first-hand accounts and period observations from Russian, Swedish and impartial sources. Pitched battles that often predominate in descriptions of early-18th century warfare are given their due in the book; however, linear tactics on the field were not the only - nor even the main - type of actions during the Great Northern War, so the author goes into details of the sieges, small war actions and riverine, lake and naval combats. The author brings up materials that were unavailable to English-speaking readers and scholars so far, and the book not only contains the author's own research, but is also based on the most recent works of other Russian scholars who specialize in various aspects of the Petrine military history; this makes the book a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of Peter the Great's military force during the Great Northern War (1700-1721). The book is supplemented with numerous contemporary prints and paintings, photos of artefacts and recreated uniform kits, as well as specially-commissioned artwork that has been created by an artist who is knowledgeable in details from that period.

Americans have long been asked to support the troops and care for veterans' psychological wounds. Who, though, does this injunction serve? As acclaimed scholar Nadia Abu El-Haj argues here, in the American public's imagination, the traumatized soldier stands in for destructive wars abroad, with decisive ramifications in the post-9/11 era. Across the political spectrum the language of soldier trauma is used to discuss American warfare, producing a narrative in which traumatized soldiers are the only acknowledged casualties of war, while those killed by American firepower are largely sidelined and forgotten. In this wide-ranging and fascinating study of the meshing of medicine, science, and politics, Abu El-Haj explores the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder and the history of its medical diagnosis. While antiwar Vietnam War veterans sought to address their psychological pain even as they maintained full awareness of their guilt and responsibility for perpetrating atrocities on the killing fields of Vietnam, by the 1980s, a peculiar convergence of feminist activism against sexual violence and Reagan's right-wing "war on crime" transformed the idea of PTSD into a condition of victimhood. In so doing, the meaning of Vietnam veterans' trauma would also shift, moving away from a political space of reckoning with guilt and complicity to one that cast them as blameless victims of a hostile public upon their return home. This is how, in the post-9/11 era of the Wars on Terror, the injunction to "support our troops," came to both sustain US militarism and also shields American civilians from the reality of wars fought ostensibly in their name. In this compelling and crucial account, Nadia Abu El-Haj challenges us to think anew about the devastations of the post-9/11 era.

An examination of the Royal Navy's Victualling Board, the body responsible for supplying the fleet. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy increased its manpower from fewer than 20,000 to more than 147,000 men, with a concomitant increase in the quantities of food and drink required to sustain them.The organisation responsible for this, the Victualling Board, performed its tasks using techniques and systems which it had developed over the previous 110 years. In terms of actually delivering supplies to warships, troopships and army garrisons abroad, the Victualling Board performed well given the constraints of long-distance communications and intermittent difficulties in obtaining supplies. However, its other areas of responsibility showed poor performance, as evidenced by the reports of several Parliamentary enquiries. This book examines in detail the processes by which the Victualling Board performed its core and non-core tasks, identifying the areas of competence and incompetence, and establishing the underlying causes of the incompetencies. JANET MACDONALD, author of the highly acclaimed Feeding Nelson's Navy (Chatham, 2004), has recently completed a thesis at King's College London. After a business career, and running an equestrian organisation, she spent ten years as a freelance writer, publishing more than thirty books.

In order to win the Cold War, American presidents embraced the mantra of equality of opportunity to justify racial reform efforts within the US military. The problem was that equality of opportunity never guaranteed acceptance-nor was it designed to. In The Racial Integration of the American Armed Forces, Geoffrey W. Jensen clarifies our understanding of the political processes that fundamentally altered the racial composition of the American military.Jensen examines nearly thirty years of military integration that unfolded during the Cold War. America's racial woes were grist for the propaganda mills in Moscow and their integration effort was intended to curb this assault and protect the nation's image during this largely ideological struggle. But integration of the armed forces needed more than just Cold War justification. It also required the willingness of the president to lead. Military integration occurred as the result of the longstanding tradition of Congress to allow the executive branch to control the staffing and composition of the military. While past accounts of the integration of the armed forces have focused on the critical roles played by the burgeoning leadership of the civil rights movement and the Black population, Jensen is the first to emphasize the importance of presidential leadership and their staffs. Jensen contends that understanding the action-and inaction-of Cold War presidents and their administrations matters just as much as understanding the efforts of those outside of Washington and the West Wing, as it was the presidents who were the ones dictating the pace at which reform was carried out. Jensen has carefully situated this story within the milieu of the Cold War, the civil rights movement, and, looming over it all, the emergence of Southern resistance to desegregation in the United States. Desperately committed to upholding and expanding their vision of white supremacy, the South recoiled in horror at the prospect of racially integrating the armed forces. From this vantage point, Jensen shows how the use of Black military personnel during the Cold War, and throughout all American history, was not born solely out of humanistic beliefs or desires to improve the social status of the Black community, but out of the strategic necessity of winning the war at hand.

This book is a call to action to address the transition many soldiers face when returning to civilian life. It presents an arts-based therapeutic approach to dealing with trauma, exploring the development, performance, and reception of Contact!Unload, a play based on the lives of military veterans overcoming stress injuries encountered during military service. The book, which includes the full script of the play, offers academic, artistic, personal, and theoretical perspectives from people directly involved in the performances as well as those who witnessed the work. The play and book serve as a model for using arts-based approaches to mental health care and as a powerful look into the experiences of military veterans.

"This impressive study, based on a random sample of forty thousand Civil War soldiers both black and white, reaches important conclusions about their motivation and behavior. Its most significant findings emphasize the role of close social networks within companies and regiments in promoting combat performance, preventing desertion, and increasing survival rates in POW camps. Readable and accessible to nonspecialists, this book should find a wide audience among those interested in the Civil War as well as group behavior more generally."--James McPherson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Battle Cry of Freedom"

"This remarkable book is destined to become a classic in social science. It addresses issues of supreme importance and timeliness--loyalty, betrayal, heroism, cowardice, survival, the challenges of diversity, and the benefits of social bonds. It rests on rigorous statistical analysis of an extraordinary historical archive, and yet it is so readable as to be unputdownable. It deals with a single epochal event in one nation's history--the U.S. Civil War--and yet its lessons are highly relevant in many other eras and societies, including our own."--Robert Putnam, author of "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community"

"Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn built a social science laboratory from the enlistment and pension records of men who fought in the Union Army during the American Civil War. In that remarkable laboratory they have discovered how friendship, community ties, and social status alter our choices. Read "Heroes and Cowards" for its reliable science; savor it for how it honors the harrowing circumstances that made the science possible."--Michael Hout, coauthor of "Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years"

"Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn have written a superb book on bravery in the Civil War. Their work informs us not only about courage under fire, but about the many settings where people are called upon to act for a common good. This is a pioneering piece of social science."--Edward L. Glaeser, Harvard University

"In the remarkable "Heroes and Cowards," Costa and Kahn demonstrate how social bonds helped determine which soldiers would fight to the death and which would flee for their lives, which soldiers would survive the deadly prison camps and which would succumb. The authors utilize the tools of social science to serve, rather than obscure, the riveting accounts by Union soldiers--the heroes, the cowards, and those in between."--Claude S. Fischer, University of California, Berkeley

"With its excellent blending of qualitative and quantitative data, this is a significant contribution to Civil War history and, more generally, to military history. It will be of great interest to economists, historians and general readers, especially the large number still fascinated by the Civil War."--Stanley L. Engerman, coauthor of "Time on the Cross"

"Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn are two accomplished scholars whose work offers substantially new insights, on why men desert and how this affects them; on the experience of black soldiers during and after the war; and on the migration patterns of war veterans. The research behind this book is based on data that has not previously been used by scholars, and their use of that data is imaginative and revealing. "Heroes and Cowards" is a significant contribution to ourknowledge of how Civil War veterans coped with the stresses of war and their lives after 1865."--Roger Ransom, author of "The Confederate States of America: What Might Have Been"

""Heroes and Cowards" is a remarkable and impressive piece of economic history, a unique book that will interest a large readership."--Louis P. Cain, Loyola University Chicago

Fate brought them together, now it's up to them to make it work...Having left the army to recover from a traumatic experience, Captain Jane Reed is on her way to Venice to assist Lady Veronica Cooper, a world-famous writer who has lost her mojo. Plagued by grief and sleepless nights, Jane soon finds a kindred spirit in Veronica, coping with her own loss after the death of her husband. When the two relocate to Veronica's villa in the countryside to escape the summer tourists, Jane meets the rest of the Cooper family - including Veronica's brooding son, David. With his own tragic past, David has resigned himself to a life of solitude. Jane finds herself determined to bring joy back into his life, even if it means finally spilling her secrets. Can Jane and David help each other heal, and find love in the process, or are some scars too deep to treat? A tender and uplifting romance for fans of Rosanna Ley and Jennifer Bohnet.

The British soldier of the Great War has been depicted in many books. Invariably, a pen picture paints him as stoic, joining the army in a wave of patriotic fervour, and destined to serve four years on the Western Front in some of the most costly battles in history. Yet often the picture is difficult to resolve for the reader. How did the soldier live, where did he sleep? What was it like to go over the top, and when he did, what did he carry with him? For many, the idea of trench life is hazy, and usually involves 'drowning in mud', in, as one writer put it, 'the pitiless misery' of Passchendaele. Remembering Tommy pays tribute to the real British soldier of the Great War. In stunning images of uniforms, equipment and ephemera, it conjures the atmosphere of the trenches through the belongings of the soldiers themselves - allowing us almost to reach out and touch history.