Throughout the Civil War, irregular warfare, including the use of hit-and-run assaults, ambushes, and raiding tactics, thrived in localized guerrilla fights within the Border States and the Confederate South. The Guerrilla Hunters offers a comprehensive overview of the tactics, motives, and actors in these conflicts, from the Confederate-authorised Partisan Rangers, a military force directed to spy on, harass, and steal from Union forces, to men like John Gatewood, who deserted the Confederate army in favour of targeting Tennessee civilians believed to be in sympathy with the Union. With a foreword by Kenneth W. Noe and an afterword by Daniel E. Sutherland, this collection represents an impressive array of the foremost experts on guerrilla fighting in the Civil War. Providing new interpretations of this long-misconstrued aspect of warfare, these scholars go beyond the conventional battlefield to examine the stories of irregular combatants across all theaters of the Civil War, bringing geographic breadth to what is often treated as local and regional history. The Guerrilla Hunters shows that instances of unorthodox combat, once thought isolated and infrequent, were numerous, and many clashes defy easy categorisation. Novel methodological approaches and a staggering diversity of research and topics allow this volume to support multiple areas for debate and discovery within this growing field of Civil War scholarship.

Elden Duane Rogers died on March 19, 1945, one of the eight hundred who perished on the aircraft carrier USS Franklin that day. It was his nineteenth birthday. Write home often, the navy told sailors like Elden, thinking it would keep up morale among sailors and those waiting for them stateside. But they were told not to write anything about where they were, where they had been, where they were going, what they were doing, or even what the weather was like. Spies were presumed everywhere, and loose lips could sink ships. Before a sailor's letter could be sealed and sent, a censor read it and with a razor blade cut out words that told too much. So Long for Now reconstructs the lost world of a sailor's daily life in World War II, piecing together letters from Elden's family in Vega, Texas, and from his girlfriend, the untold stories behind Elden's own letters, and the context of the war itself. Historian Jerry L. Rogers delves past censored letters limited to small talk and local gossip to conjure the danger, excitement, boredom, and sacrifices that sailors in the Pacific theater endured. He follows Elden from enlistment in the navy through every battle the USS Franklin saw. Flight deck crashes, kamikaze hits, and tensions and alliances aboard ship all built to the unprecedented chaos and casualties of the Japanese air attack on March 19. ""So long for now,"" Elden signed off - never ""Goodbye."" This moving work poignantly confronts the horrors of war, giving voice to a young sailor, the country he served, the family and friends he left behind, and the hope that has sustained them.

THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER THE EPIC TRUE STORY OF DUNKIRK - NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY CHRISTOPHER NOLAN AND STARRING KENNETH BRANAGH, TOM HARDY AND MARK RYLANCE. In 1940, at the French port of Dunkirk, more than 300,000 trapped Allied troops were dramatically rescued from destruction at the hands of Nazi Germany by an extraordinary seaborne evacuation. The true history of the soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians involved in the nine-day skirmish has passed into legend. Now, the story Winston Churchill described as a 'miracle' is narrated by bestselling author Joshua Levine in its full, sweeping context, including new interviews with veterans and survivors. Told from the viewpoints of land, sea and air, Joshua Levine's Dunkirk is a dramatic account of a defeat that paved the way to ultimate victory and preserved liberty for generations to come.

Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with Cummings's Cambridge, Massachusetts upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism and other "modern" movements in the arts. As the United States prepared to enter the First World War, Cummings volunteered as an ambulance driver, was shipped out to Paris and met his first love, Marie Louise Lallemand, who was working in Paris as a prostitute. Soon after reaching the front, however, he was unjustly imprisoned in a brutal French detention centre at La Ferte-Mace. Through this confrontation with arbitrary and sadistic authority, he found the courage to listen to his own voice. Probing an underexamined yet formative time in the poet's life, this deeply researched account illuminates his ideas about love, justice, humanity and brutality. J. Alison Rosenblitt weaves together letters, journal entries and sketches with astute analyses of poems that span Cummings' career, revealing the origins of one of the twentieth century's most famous poets.

The civil rights revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s transformed the literature on Reconstruction in America by emphasizing the social history of emancipation and the hopefulness that reunification would bring equality. Much of this revisionist work served to counter and correct the racist and pro-Confederate accounts of Reconstruction written in the early twentieth century. While there have been modern scholarly revisions of individual states, most are decades old, and Michael W. Fitzgerald's Reconstruction in Alabama is the first comprehensive reinterpretation of that state's history in over a century. Fitzgerald's work not only revises the existing troubling histories of the era, it also offers a compelling and innovative new look at the process of rebuilding Alabama following the war. Attending to an array of issues largely ignored until now, Fitzgerald's history begins by analyzing the differences over slavery, secession, and war that divided Alabama's whites, mostly along the lines of region and class. He examines the economic and political implications of defeat, focusing particularly on how freed slaves and their former masters mediated the postwar landscape. For a time, he suggests, whites and freedpeople coexisted mostly peaceably in some parts of the state under the Reconstruction government, as a recovering cotton economy bathed the plantation belt in profit. Later, when charting the rise and fall of the Republican Party, Fitzgerald shows that Alabama's new Republican government implemented an ambitious program of railroad subsidy, characterized by substantial corruption that eventually bankrupted the state and helped end Republican rule. He shows, however, that the state's freedpeople and their preferred leaders were not the major players in this arena: they had other issues that mattered to them far more, like public education, civil rights, voting rights, and resisting the Klan's terrorist violence. After Reconstruction ended, Fitzgerald suggests that white collective memory of the era fixated on black voting, big government, high taxes, and corruption, all of which buttressed the Jim Crow order in the state. This misguided understanding of the past encouraged Alabama's intransigence during the later civil rights era. Despite the power of faulty interpretations that united segregationists, Fitzgerald demonstrates that it was class and regional divisions over economic policy, as much as racial tension, that shaped the complex reality of Reconstruction in Alabama.

How does political change take hold? In the 1850s, politicians and abolitionists despaired, complaining that the "North, the poor timid, mercenary, driveling North" offered no forceful opposition to the power of the slaveholding South. And yet, as John L. Brooke proves, the North did change. Inspired by brave fugitives who escaped slavery and the cultural craze that was Uncle Tom's Cabin, the North rose up to battle slavery, ultimately waging the bloody Civil War.While Lincoln's alleged quip about the little woman who started the big war has been oft-repeated, scholars have not fully explained the dynamics between politics and culture in the decades leading up to 1861. Rather than simply viewing the events of the 1850s through the lens of party politics, "There Is a North" is the first book to explore how cultural action -- including minstrelsy, theater, and popular literature -- transformed public opinion and political structures. Taking the North's rallying cry as his Title, Brooke shows how the course of history was forever changed.

In December 1860, South Carolinians voted to abandon the Union, sparking the deadliest war in American history. Led by a proslavery movement that viewed Abraham Lincoln's place at the helm of the federal government as a real and present danger to the security of the South, southerners, both slaveholders and nonslaveholders, willingly risked civil war by seceding from the United States. Radical proslavery activists contended that without defending slavery's westward expansion American planters would, like their former counterparts in the West Indies, become greatly outnumbered by those they enslaved. The result would transform the South into a mere colony within the federal government and make white southerners reliant on antislavery outsiders for protection of their personal safety and wealth. Faith in American exceptionalism played an important role in the reasoning of the antebellum American public, shaping how those in both the free and slave states viewed the world. Questions about who might share the bounty of the exceptional nature of the country became the battleground over which Americans fought, first with words, then with guns. Carl Lawrence Paulus's The Slaveholding Crisis examines how, due to the fear of insurrection by the enslaved, southerners created their own version of American exceptionalism, one that placed the perpetuation of slavery at its forefront. Feeling a loss of power in the years before the Civil War, the planter elite no longer saw the Union, as a whole, fulfilling that vision of exceptionalism. As a result, Paulus contends, slaveholders and nonslaveholding southerners believed that the white South could anticipate racial conflict and brutal warfare. This narrative postulated that limiting slavery's expansion within the Union was a riskier proposition than fighting a war of secession. In the end, Paulus argues, by insisting that the new party in control of the federal government promoted this very insurrection, the planter elite gained enough popular support to create the Confederate States of America. In doing so, they established a thoroughly proslavery, modern state with the military capability to quell massive resistance by the enslaved, expand its territorial borders, and war against the forces of the Atlantic antislavery movement.

In 1891 the hill state and principality of Manipur erupted in violence, the worst bloodshed in India since the Great Mutiny thirty-four years earlier. The Manipuris even chopped off the head of the Chief Commissioner of Assam and those of his entourage including the British Resident, handsome Frank Grimwood, leaving his beautiful young wife Ethel alone and the only woman in a world gone mad. The rising resulted in the largest colonial expedition ever mounted on the North-East Frontier of India and the worst fighting there until the Second World War. William Wright unlocks the secret government files, long buried and hushed-up, to reveal a story out of the pages of Somerset Maugham or Conrad; one of colossal military ineptitude alongside VC-winning heroism, involving pornography and paedophilia. On this evidence, it is impossible to think of the Empire-builders in quite the same way again! There were no Maxim guns, so no mowing down of helpless natives, just hard slog and the edge of the Gurkha's Kukri, with Ethel playing a courageous part in the retreat from Manipur, not knowing her husband had already been beheaded, his feet also lopped off and thrown to the pariah dogs. Behind the bravery, the scandal was complex. The subsequent trial of the Manipuri princes was not legal and even Queen Victoria asked for them to be found not guilty, but the Viceroy was determined to aid a cover-up. Ethel preferred the company of her handsome stepbrother to that of Frank, her husband. Frank's hobby was photographing nude young girls ... did that lead directly to his gruesome death? 13 August is now celebrated yearly as 'Patriot's Day' by the Manipuris. They may not know exactly what they are celebrating.

The Civil War experiences of Albert C. Ellithorpe, a Caucasian Union Army officer commanding the tri-racial First Indian Home Guards, illuminate remarkable and understudied facets of campaigning west of the Mississippi River. Major Ellithorpe's unit- comprised primarily of refugee Muscogee Creek and Seminole Indians and African Americans who served as interpreters- fought principally in Arkansas and Indian Territory, isolated from the larger currents of the Civil War. Using Ellithorpe's journal and his series of Chicago Evening Journal articles as her main sources, M. Jane Johansson unravels this exceptional account, providing one of the fullest examinations available on a mixed-race Union regiment serving in the border region of the West. Ellithorpe's insightful observations on Indians and civilians as well as the war in the trans-Mississippi theater provide a rare glimpse into a largely forgotten aspect of the conflict. He wrote extensively about the role of Indian troops, who served primarily as scouts and skirmishers, and on the nature of guerrilla warfare in the West. Ellithorpe also exposed internal problems in his regiment; some of his most dramatic entries concern his own charges against Caucasian officers, one of whom allegedly stole money from the unit's African American interpreters. Compiled here for the first time, Ellithorpe's commentary on the war adds a new chapter to our understanding of America's most complicated and tragic conflict.

When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, everybody in Britain knew that the civilian population would be affected far more than they had been in the First World War. As aircraft got more advanced, Britain's cities came within range and were vulnerable to attack from the air, possibly using poison gas. Before the war had started, plans were made to train civilians in first aid or to act as air raid wardens, to distribute air raid shelters that could be set up in back gardens and to evacuate children from the cities. Soon after the start of the war, Britain's women were called up to work in the expanding factories that would feed the war effort, and on the farms in the Women's Land Army. Food and clothing were rationed to make sure that there was enough to go around. After the Germans swept through Western Europe in the summer of 1940, the Home Guard was formed to help defend against invasion. In this book, Neil R. Storey and Fiona Kay paint an evocative picture of life in Britain during the war years, from Austerity to the friendly invasion of Americans. This book is part of the Britain's Heritage series, which provides definitive introductions to the riches of Britain's past, and is the perfect way to get acquainted with the home front in the Second World War in all its variety.

During the Civil War, Vicksburg, Mississippi, assumed almost mythic importance in the minds of Americans: northerners and southerners, soldier and civilian. The city occupied a strategic and commanding position atop rocky cliffs above the Mississippi River, from which it controlled the great waterway. As a result, Federal forces expended enormous effort, expense, and troops in many attempts to capture Vicksburg. The immense struggle for this southern bastion ultimately heightened its importance beyond its physical and strategic value. Its psychological significance elevated the town's status to one of the war's most important locations. Vicksburg's defiance dismayed northerners and delighted Confederates, who saw command of the river as a badge of honor. Finally, after a six-week siege that involved intense military and civilian suffering amid heavy artillery bombardment, Union forces captured the ""Gibraltar of the Confederacy,"" ending the bloody campaign. While many historians have told the story of the fall of Vicksburg, Bradley R. Clampitt is the first to offer a comprehensive examination of life there after its capture by the United States military. In the war-ravaged town, indiscriminate hardships befell soldiers and civilians alike during the last two years of the conflict and immediately after its end. In Occupied Vicksburg, Clampitt shows that following the Confederate withdrawal, Federal forces confronted myriad challenges in the city including filth, disease, and a never-ending stream of black and white refugees. Union leaders also responded to the pressures of newly free people and persistent guerrilla violence in the surrounding countryside. Detailing the trials of blacks, whites, northerners, and southerners, Occupied Vicksburg stands as a significant contribution to Civil War studies, adding to our understanding of military events and the home front. Clampitt's astute research provides insight into the very nature of the war and enhances existing scholarship on the experiences of common people during America's most cataclysmic event.

In the spring of 1944, Ernest Hemingway travelled to London and then to France to cover the Second World War for Colliers Magazine. He had resisted this kind of journalism for the early period of the war but now threw himself into the thick of events. He flew missions with the RAF, went on a landing craft on Omaha Beach on D-Day, involved himself in the French Resistance forces and famously rode into the still dangerous streets of liberated Paris. He was at the Siegfried Line in the Huertgen Forest when the 22nd Regiment lost nearly every man sent into the fight. This invigorating narrative is, in parallel, an investigation into Hemingway's subsequent work-much of it stemming from his wartime experience-which shaped the latter stages of his career.

D-Day before dawn. Minute by minute, hour by hour the danger grows... In the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, a small detachment of British airborne troops stormed the German defence forces and paved the way for the Allied invasion of Europe. Pegasus Bridge was the first engagement of D-Day, the turning point of World War II. This gripping account by acclaimed author Stephen E. Ambrose brings to life a daring mission so crucial that, had it been unsuccessful, the entire Normandy invasion might have failed. Ambrose traces each step of the preparations over many months to the minute-by-minute excitement of the hand-to-hand confrontations on the bridge. This is a story of heroism and cowardice, kindness and brutality - the stuff of all great adventures.

'I felt physically sick from the pit of my stomach and to be honest was now feeling vulnerable and completely outside my depth of knowledge. The world had seemingly gone mad and I was having visions of the base now being ransacked; I was confused and unsure what to do. My solution was to do the only thing that I could do. I climbed the nearest sangar and started to draw.' Jules George. Jules George, war artist, travelled to Helmand, Afghanistan, in 2010, in the wake of its bloodiest year for British troops. War Artists in Afghanistan: Beyond the Wire reproduces the remarkable sketches, watercolours and oil paintings born of his experiences with the 2nd Yorkshires (Green Howards). His work captures the vast scale and stunning, fertile beauty of the Afghan landscape, and in its midst, the British soldier, out on patrol, boarding a Chinook or caught in a firefight.The book also features the work of four other war artists in Afghanistan: Douglas Farthing, a former sergeant in the British paratroopers; and Michael Fay, soldier-turned-combat artist for the United States Marine Corps; Arabella Dorman, internationally recognised portrait painter and war artist; and Matthew Cook, trained illustrator, former Times war artist and Territorial Army solider. Each artist's work is accompanied by their own, first-hand account of war in Afghanistan.

"This comprehensively researched, well-written book represents the definitive account of Robert E. Lee's triumph over Union leader John Pope in the summer of 1862. . . . Lee's strategic skills, and the capabilities of his principal subordinates James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson, brought the Confederates onto the field of Second Manassas at the right places and times against a Union army that knew how to fight, but not yet how to win."-"Publishers Weekly"

"The deepest, most comprehensive, and most definitive work on this Civil War campaign, by the unchallenged authority."-James I. Robertson Jr., author of "Stonewall Jackson"

In 1942, the United States War Department distributed a handbook to American servicemen that advised them on the peculiarities of the "British, their country, and their ways."

Over sixty years later, this newly published reproduction from the rich archives of the Bodleian Library offers a fascinating glimpse into American military preparations for World War II. The guide was intended to alleviate the culture shock for soldiers taking their first trip to Great Britain, or, for that matter, abroad. The handbook is punctuated with endearingly nostalgic advice and refreshingly candid quips such as: "The British don't know how to make a good cup of coffee. You don't know how to make a good cup of tea. It's an even swap."

By turns hilarious and poignant, many observations featured in the handbook remain relevant even today. Reproduced in a style reminiscent of the era, "Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain" is a powerfully evocative war-time memento that offers a unique perspective on the longstanding American-British relationship and reveals amusingly incisive American perceptions of the British character and country.

A tale of survival, love, hardship, family, heartbreak and triumph. This is the incredible story of 89-year-old Chelsea Pensioner Sergeant Major Colin Thackery who, in 2019, made history by becoming the oldest person to win Britain's Got Talent. The show gave a glimpse into Colin's history, but the truth of his unique and eventful life is far more gripping and surprising than viewers could have imagined. Enthralling, poignant and inspiring, this book tells Colin's story, from being a child helping Air Raid Wardens during The Blitz, through fighting in the Korean War, touring the world with the army, becoming a widower after 66 years of marriage, life as a Chelsea Pensioner and touching the nation's hearts with his show-winning singing in honour of his late wife, Joan. Ultimately, Colin's story is a tale of triumph: of resilience in the hardest of times; of hope in the face of despair; and of everlasting love.

In the past, an excavated musket ball might simply have been catalogued as either a ""spherical lead bullet"" or an ""impacted bullet."" But each recovered ball, far from being a mere lump of lead, is a part of history and has a story to tell. With the help of new equipment and research techniques, and an increase in the number of discoveries, these narratives can finally contribute exacting detail to the historical record. Battlefield archaeologist Daniel M. Sivilich provides readers with the tools and techniques to unlock the stories of small shot in this book, the first definitive guide to identifying musket balls, from the oldest formed to those fired in the early nineteenth century. Musket Ball and Small Shot Identification: A Guide traces the history of musket balls and small shot, and explores their uses as lethal projectiles and in nonlethal alterations. Sivilich asks - and answers - a variety of questions to demonstrate how a musket ball found in a military context can help to interpret the site: Was it fired? What did it hit? What type of gun is it associated with? Has it been chewed, and if so, by whom or what? Was it hammered into gaming pieces? By equipping historians and archaeologists with the information necessary for answering these questions, Sivilich's accessible work opens new views into firing lines, casualty areas, and military camps. It dispels long-held misperceptions about lead shot having been bitten by humans, offers examples of shot altered to improve lethality, and discusses balls made of materials other than lead, such as pewter. Coupling detailed analysis with more than 300 color and black-and-white illustrations for comparison and identification, this guide will prove indispensable to historians, battlefield archeologists, and collectors. It is a critical resource for understanding the full story of firepower.

You've probably heard of Winston Churchill... He's the one who raised his fingers in a V sign and smoked a massive cigar. But do you want to know more? INSIDE: Get to know the man behind the cigar in Winston's secret diary! Re-live events of the century in The Winston Weekly! Read how Winston led Britain to victory in the Second World War!