This compelling reference focuses on the events, individuals, organizations, and ideas that shaped Japanese warfare from early times to the present day. Japan's military prowess is legendary. From the early samurai code of morals to the 20th-century battles in the Pacific theater, this island nation has a long history of duty, honor, and valor in warfare. This fascinating reference explores the relationship between military values and Japanese society, and traces the evolution of war in this country from 700 CE to modern times. In Japan at War: An Encyclopedia, author Louis G. Perez examines the people and ideas that led Japan into or out of war, analyzes the outcomes of battles, and presents theoretical alternatives to the strategic choices made during the conflicts. The book contains contributions from scholars in a wide range of disciplines, including history, political science, anthropology, sociology, language, literature, poetry, and psychology; and the content features internal rebellions and revolutions as well as wars with other countries and kingdoms. Entries are listed alphabetically and extensively cross-referenced to help readers quickly locate topics of interest. Topic finder lists A comprehensive timeline 10 maps of key military theaters Essential primary source documents related to the military history of Japan

Over the past century, South Africa’s military has established itself in several defining battles and operations. Preferring manoeuvre over attrition, and often punching above their weight, they have become known for their tenacity, dash, and ability to defy the odds. Their unique command style also sets them apart from other armies and has helped them excel in challenging circumstances.

In 20 Battles, military historians Evert Kleynhans and David Brock Katz investigate how South Africa’s way of war evolved over a 100-year period. They track the evolution of the doctrine and structure of the South African defence forces, rediscovering historical continuity, if any, and the lessons learned in past battles and operations such as Otavifontein, Delville Wood, Southern Ethiopia, Tobruk, Chiusi, Savannah, Cassinga, Cuito Cuanavale and Boleas.

The book also identifies a number of firsts for the defence force, such as the first ever deployment during the 1914 Industrial Strike; the varied deployments across different theatres during both world wars; the first large scale crossborder deployments during the Border War; the first deployment of the new South African National Defence Force after 1994; and, culminating with the recent, and now infamous, Battle of Bangui.

The civil wars that brought down the Roman Republic were fought on more than battlefields. Armed gangs infested the Italian countryside, in the city of Rome mansions were besieged, and bounty-hunters searched the streets for "public enemies." Among the astonishing stories to survive from these years is that of a young woman whose parents were killed, on the eve of her wedding, in the violence engulfing Italy. While her future husband fought overseas, she staved off a run on her father's estate. Despite an acute currency shortage, she raised money to help her fiance in exile. And when several years later, her husband, back in Rome, was declared an outlaw, she successfully hid him, worked for his pardon, and joined other Roman women in staging a public protest. The wife's tale is known only because her husband had inscribed on large slabs of marble the elaborate eulogy he gave at her funeral. Though no name is given on the inscriptions, starting as early as the seventeenth century, scholars saw saw similarities between the contents of the inscription and the story, preserved in literary sources, of one Turia, the wife of Quintus Lucretius. Although the identification remains uncertain, and in spite of the other substantial gaps in the text of the speech, the "Funeral Speech for Turia" (Laudatio Turiae), as it is still conventionally called, offers an extraordinary window into the life of a high-ranking woman at a critical moment of Roman history. In this book Josiah Osgood reconstructs the wife's life more fully than it has been before by bringing in alongside the eulogy stories of other Roman women who also contributed to their families' survival while working to end civil war. He shows too how Turia's story sheds rare light on the more hidden problems of everyday life for Romans, including a high number of childless marriages. Written with a general audience in mind, Turia: A Roman Woman's Civil War will appeal to those interested in Roman history as well as war, and the ways that war upsets society's power structures. Not only does the study come to terms with the distinctive experience of a larger group of Roman women, including the prudence they had to show to succeed , but also introduces readers to an extraordinary tribute to married love which, though from another world, speaks to us today.

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Leonidas Polk is one of the most fascinating figures of the Civil War. Consecrated as a bishop of the Episcopal Church and commissioned as a general into the Confederate army, Polk's life in both spheres blended into a unique historical composite. Polk was a man with deep religious convictions but equally committed to the Confederate cause. He baptized soldiers on the eve of bloody battles, administered last rites and even presided over officers' weddings, all while leading his soldiers into battle. Historian Cheryl White examines the life of this soldier-saint and the legacy of a man who unquestionably brought the first viable and lively Protestant presence to Louisiana and yet represents the politics of one of the darkest periods in American history.

On September 10, 1813, the hot, still air that hung over Lake Erie was broken by the sounds of sharp conflict. Led by Oliver Hazard Perry, the American fleet met the British, and though they sustained heavy losses, Perry and his men achieved one of the most stunning victories in the War of 1812. Author Walter Rybka traces the Lake Erie Campaign from the struggle to build the fleet in Erie, Pennsylvania, during the dead of winter and the conflict between rival egos of Perry and his second in command, Jesse Duncan Elliott, through the exceptionally bloody battle that was the first U.S. victory in a fleet action. With the singular perspective of having sailed the reconstructed U.S. brig Niagara for over twenty years, Rybka brings the knowledge of a shipmaster to the story of the Lake Erie Campaign and the culminating Battle of Lake Erie.

On July 11, 1864, some residents cheered and others watched in horror as Confederate troops spread across the fields and orchards of Silver Spring, Maryland. Many fled to the capital while General Jubal Early's troops ransacked their property. The estate of Lincoln's postmaster general, Montgomery Blair, was burned, and his father's home was used by Early as headquarters from which to launch an attack on Washington's defenses. Yet the first Civil War casualty in Silver Spring came well before Early's raid, when Union soldiers killed a prominent local farmer in 1862. This was life in the shadow of the Federal City. Drawing on contemporary accounts and memoirs, Dr. Robert E. Oshel tells the story of Silver Spring over the tumultuous course of the Civil War.

A military operation unlike any other on American soil, Morgan's Raid was characterized by incredible speed, superhuman endurance and innovative tactics. One of the nation's most colorful leaders, Confederate general John Hunt Morgan, took his cavalry through enemy-occupied territory in three states in one of the longest offensives of the Civil War. The effort produced the only battles fought north of the Ohio River and reached farther north than any other regular Confederate force. With twenty-five maps and more than forty illustrations, Morgan's Raid historian David L. Mowery takes a new look at this unprecedented event in American history, one historians rank among the world's greatest land-based raids since Elizabethan times.

Too far north, the great state of Maine did not witness any Civil War battles. However, Mainers contributed to the war in many important ways. From the mainland to the islands, soldiers bravely fought to preserve the United States in all major battles. Men like General Joshua Chamberlain, a hero of Little Round Top, proudly returned home to serve as governor. Maine native Hannibal Hamlin served as Abraham Lincoln's first vice president. And Maine's strong women sacrificed and struggled to maintain their communities and support the men who had left to fight. Author Harry Gratwick diligently documents the stories of these Mainers, who preserved "The Way Life Should Be" for Maine and the entire United States.

Virginia's Shenandoah Valley was known as the "Breadbasket of the Confederacy" due to its ample harvests and transportation centers, its role as an avenue of invasion into the North and its capacity to serve as a diversionary theater of war. The region became a magnet for both Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War, and nearly half of the thirteen major battles fought in the valley occurred as part of General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's 1862 Valley Campaign. Civil War historian Jonathan A. Noyalas examines Jackson's Valley Campaign and how those victories brought hope to an infant Confederate nation, transformed the lives of the Shenandoah Valley's civilians and emerged as Stonewall Jackson's defining moment.

Told here for the first time is the compelling story of the Bluff City during the Civil War. Historian and preservationist Mike Bunn takes you from the pivotal role Eufaula played in Alabama's secession and early enthusiasm for the Confederate cause to its aborted attempt to become the state's capital and its ultimate capture by Union forces, chronicling the effects of the conflict on Eufaulans along the way. "Civil War Eufaula "draws on a wide range of firsthand individual perspectives, including those of husbands and wives, political leaders, businessmen, journalists, soldiers, students and slaves, to produce a mosaic of observations on shared experiences. Together, they communicate what it was like to live in this riverside trading town during a prolonged and cataclysmic war. It is the story of ordinary people in extraordinary times.

Coral and Concrete, Greg Dvorak's cross-cultural history of Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands, explores intersections of environment, identity, empire, and memory in the largest inhabited coral atoll on earth. Approaching the multiple "atollscapes" of Kwajalein's past and present as Marshallese ancestral land, Japanese colonial outpost, Pacific War battlefield, American weapons-testing base, and an enduring home for many, Dvorak delves into personal narratives and collective mythologies from contradictory vantage points. He navigates the tensions between "little stories" of ordinary human actors and "big stories" of global politics-drawing upon the "little" metaphor of the coral organisms that colonize and build atolls, and the "big" metaphor of the all-encompassing concrete that buries and co-opts the past. Building upon the growing body of literature about militarism and decolonization in Oceania, this book advocates a layered, nuanced approach that emphasizes the multiplicity and contradictions of Pacific Islands histories as an antidote to American hegemony and globalization within and beyond the region. It also brings Japanese, Korean, Okinawan, and American perspectives into conversation with Micronesians' recollections of colonialism and war. This transnational history-built upon a combination of reflective personal narrative, ethnography, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies-thus resituates Kwajalein Atoll as a pivotal site where Islanders have not only thrived for thousands of years, but also mediated between East and West, shaping crucial world events. Based on multi-sited ethnographic and archival research, as well as Dvorak's own experiences growing up between Kwajalein, the United States, and Japan, Coral and Concrete integrates narrative and imagery with semiotic analysis of photographs, maps, films, and music, traversing colonial tropical fantasies, tales of victory and defeat, missile testing, fisheries, war-bereavement rituals, and landowner resistance movements, from the twentieth century through the present day. Representing history as a perennial struggle between coral and concrete, the book offers an Oceanian paradigm for decolonization, resistance, solidarity, and optimism that should appeal to all readers far beyond the Marshall Islands.

During the Great War, voluntary medical assistance to British Forces was organised by the British Red Cross and the Order of St John. As the conflict escalated there was a shortage of medical assistance and ancillary services. The solution came with the creation of the General Service Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) which enabled those with little or no medical training to undertake more routine jobs - cooks, laundry maids, wardmaids, dispensers, drivers etc. This book is a reprint of the final, and largest, British Red Cross list giving information of over 18,000 women and men who were involved. It provides individual detail (name, rank, unit, destination) together with lists of Headquarters Staff, Commissioners and Representatives, and also a Roll of Honour

In the decade following the first Gulf War, most observers regarded it as an exemplary effort by the international community to lawfully and forcefully hold a regional aggressor in check. Interpretations have changed with the times. The Gulf War led to the stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia, an important contributing cause of the 9/11 attacks. The war also led to a long obsession with Saddam Hussein that culminated in a second, far longer, American-led war with Iraq. In Into the Desert, Jeffrey Engel has gathered an all-star cast of contributors to reevaluate the first Gulf War: Michael Gordon of the New York Times; Sir Lawrence Freedman, former foreign policy advisor to Tony Blair; Ambassador Ryan Crocker; Middle East specialist Shibley Telhami; and Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations. Engel and his contributors examine the war's origins, the war itself, and its long-term impact on international relations. All told, Into the Desert offers an astute reassessment of one of the most momentous events in the last quarter century.

In the summer of 1781, during the seventh year of the Revolutionary War, the allied American and French armies of Generals Washington and Rochambeau were encamped at Dobbs Ferry, Ardsley, Hartsdale, Edgemont and White Plains. Washington chose lower Westchester for encampment because of its proximity to the British forces which controlled Manhattan, and which Washington intended to attack.On August 14 Washington and Rochambeau received a communication from French Admiral de Grasse, who suggested a joint sea and land campaign against General Cornwallis's British troops in Virginia. Washington risked all on this march. Its success depended on precise timing and coordination of multiple naval and land movements including those of Generals Washington, Rochambeau and Lafayette, and of French Admirals de Grasse and Barras. Success also required the utmost secrecy, and an elaborate deception was prepared by Washington in order to convince the British that Manhattan remained the target of the allied armies. Two months later, at Yorktown, Virginia, Cornwallis surrendered his entire army to the American and French forces.

The Isle os are not nearly as well-known as the Cajuns or the Creoles or the French, but they have had an undeniable and lasting impact on this state and the south. Adaptable, resourceful, and undeniably proud, they have shaped their destinies against the odds. As their settlements failed, they rebuilt. As the governments changed from Spanish to French to American, they endured. Many campaigned in the American Revolution; they secured victory in the famous Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812; and as they began to understand the surrounding marshes, they learned to make their livings from trapping and fishing and pass on their wisdom and culture through oral tradition. They shaped the development of the state but are too often ignored, even in local history.

Tennessee's Thirteenth Union Cavalry was a unit composed mostly of amateur soldiers that eventually turned undisciplined boys into seasoned fighters. At the outbreak of the Civil War, East Tennessee was torn between its Unionist tendencies and the surrounding Confederacy. The result was the persecution of the "home Yankees" by Confederate sympathizers. Rather than quelling Unionist fervor, this oppression helped East Tennessee contribute an estimated thirty thousand troops to the North. Some of those troops joined the "Loyal Thirteenth" in Stoneman's raid and in pursuit of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Join author Melanie Storie as she recounts the harrowing narrative of an often-overlooked piece of Civil War history.