November 1917. The American troops were poorly trained, deficient in military equipment and doctrine, not remotely ready for armed conflict on a large scale-and they'd arrived on the Western front to help the French push back the Germans. The story of what happened next-the American Expeditionary Force's trial by fire on the brutal battlefields of France-is told in full for the first time in Thunder and Flames. Where history has given us some perspective on the individual battles of the period-at Cantigny, Chateau Thierry, Belleau Wood, the Marne River, Soissons, and little-known Fismette-they appear here as part of a larger series of interconnected operations, all conducted by Americans new to the lethal killing fields of World War I and guided by the battle-tested French. Following the AEF from their initial landing to their emergence as an independent army in late September 1918, this book presents a complex picture of how, learning warfare on the fly, sometimes with devastating consequences, the American force played a critical role in blunting and then rolling back the German army's drive toward Paris. The picture that emerges is at once sweeping in scope and rich in detail, with firsthand testimony conjuring the real mud and blood of the combat that Edward Lengel so vividly describes. Official reports and documents provide the strategic and historical context for these ground-level accounts, from the perspective of the Germans as well as the Americans and French. Battle by battle, Thunder and Flames reveals the cost of the inadequacies in U.S. training, equipment, logistics, intelligence, and command, along with the rifts in the Franco-American military marriage. But it also shows how, by trial and error, through luck and ingenuity, the AEF swiftly became the independent fighting force of General John "Blackjack" Pershing's long-held dream-its divisions ultimately among the most combat-effective military forces to see the war through.

French Intellectuals at a Crossroads examines a broad array of interrelated subjects: the effect of World War I on France's intellectual community, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the rise of international communism, calls for pacifism, the creation of an "Intellectuals' International of the Mind," the debate over the myth of the disengaged intellectual, the apolitical group of "intellectuels non-conformistes," and, finally, the challenges of surrealism. Together, these developments reflected the diversity of intellectual commitment in France in the uncertain and troubled 1920s and 1930s. The interwar period also witnessed France's relative decline, as expressed in a move from a mood of immense relief coupled with a feeling of debilitating fatigue to an inward-looking, pessimistic, and defeatist outlook that presaged World War II and national collapse.

During the Civil War, cities, houses, forests, and soldiers' bodies were transformed into ""dead heaps of ruins,"" novel sights in the southern landscape. How did this happen, and why? And what did Americans-northern and southern, black and white, male and female-make of this proliferation of ruins? Ruin Nation is the first book to bring together environmental and cultural histories to consider the evocative power of ruination as an imagined state, an act of destruction, and a process of change. Megan Kate Nelson examines the narratives and images that Americans produced as they confronted the war's destructiveness. Architectural ruins-cities and houses-dominated the stories that soldiers and civilians told about the ""savage"" behaviour of men and the invasions of domestic privacy. The ruins of living things-trees and bodies-also provoked discussion and debate. People who witnessed forests and men being blown apart were plagued by anxieties about the impact of wartime technologies on nature and on individual identities. The obliteration of cities, houses, trees, and men was a shared experience. Nelson shows that this is one of the ironies of the war's ruination-in a time of the most extreme national divisiveness people found common ground as they considered the war's costs. And yet, very few of these ruins still exist, suggesting that the destructive practices that dominated the experiences of Americans during the Civil War have been erased from our national consciousness.

From the late imperial period until 1922, the British and French made private and government loans to Russia, making it the foremost international debtor country in pre-World War I Europe. To finance the modernization of industry, the construction of public works projects, railroad construction, and the development and adventures of the military-industrial complex, Russia's ministers of finance, municipal leaders, and nascent manufacturing class turned, time and time again, to foreign capital. From the forging of the Franco-Russian alliance onwards, Russia's needs were met, first and foremost, its allies and diplomatic partners in the developing Triple Entente. In the case of Russia's relationships with both France and Great Britain, an open pocketbook primed the pump, facilitating the good spirits that fostered agreement. Russia's continued access to those ready lenders ensured that the empire of the Tsars would not be tempted away from its alliance and entente partners. This web of financial and political interdependence affected both foreign policy and domestic society in all three countries. The Russian state was so heavily indebted to its western creditors, rendering those western economies almost prisoners to this debt, that the debtor nation in many ways had the upper hand; the Russian government at times was actually able to dictate policy to its French and British counterparts. Those nations' investing classes-which, in France in particular, spanned not only the upper classes but the middle, rentier class, as well-had such a vast proportion of their savings wrapped up in Russian bonds that any default would have been catastrophic for their own economies. That default came not long after the Bolshevik Revolution brought to power a government who felt no responsibility whatsoever for the debts accrued by the tsars for the purpose of oppressing Russia's workers and peasants. The ensuing effect on allied morale, the French and British economies and, ultimately, on the Anglo-French relationship, was grim and far-reaching. This book will contribute to understandings of the ways that non-governmental and sometimes transnational actors were able to influence both British and French foreign policy and Russian foreign and domestic policy. It will address the role of individual financiers and policy makers-men like Lord Revelstoke, chairman of Baring Brothers, the British and French Rothschild cousins, Edouard Noetzlin of the Banque de Paris et de Pays Bas, and Sergei Witte, Russia's authoritative finance minister during much of this age of expansion; the importance of foreign capital in late imperial Russian policy; and the particular role of British capital and financial investment in the construction and strengthening of the Anglo-Russo-French entente. It will illustrate the interrelationship of political and economic decision-making with the ideas and beliefs that inform security policy. Drawing upon both the traditional archival sources for diplomatic history-the government holdings of Great Britain, France, and Russia-and the non-governmental archival holdings of international finance-this project looks beyond the realm of high politics and state-centered decision making in the formation of foreign policy, offering insights into the forms and functions of diplomatic alliances while elucidating the connections between finance and foreign policy. It is a classic tale of money and power in the modern era-an age of economic interconnectivity and great power interdependency.

The battlefield reputation of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, long recognized as a formidable warrior, has been shaped by one infamous wartime incident. At Fort Pillow in 1864, the attack by Confederate forces under Forrest's command left many of the Tennessee Unionists and black soldiers garrisoned there dead in a confrontation widely labeled as a "massacre." In "The River Was Dyed with Blood," best-selling Forrest biographer Brian Steel Wills argues that although atrocities did occur after the fall of the fort, Forrest did not order or intend a systematic execution of its defenders. Rather, the general's great failing was losing control of his troops.

A prewar slave trader and owner, Forrest was a controversial figure throughout his lifetime. Because the attack on Fort Pillow--which, as Forrest wrote, left the nearby waters "dyed with blood"--occurred in an election year, Republicans used him as a convenient Confederate scapegoat to marshal support for the war. After the war he also became closely associated with the spread of the Ku Klux Klan. Consequently, the man himself, and the truth about Fort Pillow, has remained buried beneath myths, legends, popular depictions, and disputes about the events themselves.

Wills sets what took place at Fort Pillow in the context of other wartime excesses from the American Revolution to World War II and Vietnam, as well as the cultural transformations brought on by the Civil War. Confederates viewed black Union soldiers as the embodiment of slave rebellion and reacted accordingly. Nevertheless, Wills concludes that the engagement was neither a massacre carried out deliberately by Forrest, as charged by a congressional committee, nor solely a northern fabrication meant to discredit him and the Confederate States of America, as pro-Southern apologists have suggested. The battle-scarred fighter with his homespun aphorisms was neither an infallible warrior nor a heartless butcher, but a product of his time and his heritage.

Peace-makers, experts in conflict resolution, researchers and teachers are among the contributors here focused on ethnic and cultural conflict around the world. The volume first addresses elements such as identity and difference, both conceptually and historically. Text that follows describes issues and experiences associated with conflict and war in countries including Africa, China, Iran, Israel, Palestine, and New Zealand. The role of immigration, three major cultures (Islamic, Christian, and Confucian) are examined. Finally, innovative programs and strategies to prevent and manage ethnic conflict and violence are offered by practitioners. This book will interest professors and students of cross-cultural psychology, social psychology, ethnic and cultural relations, international relations, anthropology and political science.