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Books > History > History of specific subjects > Military history
"An author's quest to discover what really happened to his uncle
in World War II"
To all appearances, Anthony "Tony" Korkuc was just another
casualty of World War II. A gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress,
Korkuc was lost on a bombing mission over Germany, and his family
believed that his body had never been recovered. But when they
learned in 1995 that Tony was actually buried at Arlington National
Cemetery, his nephew Bob Korkuc set out on a seven-year quest to
learn the true fate of an uncle he never knew.
"Finding a Fallen Hero" is a compelling story that blends a
wartime drama with a primer on specialized research. Author Bob
Korkuc initially set out to learn how his Uncle Tony came to rest
at Arlington. In the process, he also unraveled the mystery of what
occurred over the skies of Germany half a century ago.
Korkuc dug up military documents and private letters and
interviewed people in both the United States and Germany. He
tracked down surviving crewmembers and even found the brother of
the Luftwaffe pilot who downed the B-17. Dozens of photographs help
readers envision both Tony Korkuc's fateful flight and his nephew's
dogged search for the truth.
A gripping chronicle of exhaustive research, "Finding a Fallen
Hero" will strike a chord with any reader who has lost a family
member to war. And it will inspire others to satisfy their own
unanswered questions.
On August 8, 1942, 302 people arrived by train at Vocation,
Wyoming, to become the first Japanese American residents of what
the U.S. government called the Relocation Center at Heart Mountain.
In the following weeks and months, they would be joined by some
10,000 of the more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent,
two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, incarcerated as "domestic enemy
aliens" during World War II. Heart Mountain became a town with
workplaces, social groups, and political alliances-in short,
networks. These networks are the focus of Saara Kekki's Japanese
Americans at Heart Mountain. Interconnections between people are
the foundation of human societies. Exploring the creation of
networks at Heart Mountain, as well as movement to and from the
camp between 1942 and 1945, this book offers an unusually detailed
look at the formation of a society within the incarcerated
community, specifically the manifestation of power, agency, and
resistance. Kekki constructs a dynamic network model of all of
Heart Mountain's residents and their interconnections-family,
political, employment, social, and geospatial networks-using
historical "big data" drawn from the War Relocation Authority and
narrative sources, including the camp newspaper Heart Mountain
Sentinel. For all the inmates, life inevitably went on: people
married, had children, worked, and engaged in politics. Because of
the duration of the incarceration, many became institutionalized
and unwilling to leave the camps when the time came. Yet most
individuals, Kekki finds, took charge of their own destinies
despite the injustice and looked forward to the day when Heart
Mountain was behind them. Especially timely in its implications for
debates over immigration and assimilation, Japanese Americans at
Heart Mountain presents a remarkable opportunity to reconstruct a
community created under duress within the larger American society,
and to gain new insight into an American experience largely lost to
official history.
The definitive history of Rome's golden age - antiquity's ultimate superpower at the pinnacle of its greatness.
The Pax Romana has long been revered as a golden age. At its peak, the Roman Empire stretched from Scotland to Arabia, and contained perhaps a quarter of humanity. It was the wealthiest and most formidable state the world had yet seen.
Beginning in 69AD, a year that saw four Caesars in succession rule the empire, and ending some seven decades later with the death of Hadrian, Pax presents a dazzling history of Rome at the height of its power. From the gilded capital to realms beyond the frontier, historian Tom Holland portrays the Roman Empire in all its predatory glory. Vivid scene follows vivid scene: the destruction of Jerusalem and Pompeii, the building of the Colosseum and Hadrian's Wall, the conquests of Trajan. Vividly sketching the lives of Romans both ordinary and spectacular, from slaves to emperors, Holland demonstrates how Roman peace was the fruit of unprecedented military violence.
A stunning portrait of Rome's glory days, this is the epic history of the pax Romana.
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