Why did Abraham Lincoln sneak into Washington for his inauguration? was the Gettysburg Address written on the back of an envelope? Where did the Underground Railroad run? Did General Sherman really say, "War is Hell"?

If you can't answer these questions, you're not alone. Millions of Americans, bored by dull textbooks, are in the dark about the most significant event in our history. Now New York Times bestselling author Kenneth C. Davis comes to the rescue, deftly sorting out the players, the politics, and the key events - Emancipation and Reconstruction, Shiloh and Gettysburg, Generals Grant and Lee, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and much more. Drawing on moving eyewitness accounts, Davis includes a wealth of "hidden history" about the roles played by women and African Americans before and during the war, along with lesser-known facts that will enthrall even learned Civil War buffs. Vivid, informative, and hugely entertaining, Don't Know Much About the Civil War is the only book you'll ever need on "the war that never ended."

The fall of 2016 saw the release of the widely popular First World War video game Battlefield 1. Upon the game's initial announcement and following its subsequent release, Battlefield 1 became the target of an online racist backlash that targeted the game's inclusion of soldiers of color. Across social media and online communities, players loudly proclaimed the historical inaccuracy of black soldiers in the game and called for changes to be made that correct what they considered to be a mistake that was influenced by a supposed political agenda. Through the introduction of the theoretical framework of the 'White Mythic Space', this book seeks to investigate the reasons behind the racist rejection of soldiers of color by Battlefield 1 players in order to answer the question: Why do individuals reject the presence of people of African descent in popular representations of history?

The Women of the Great War
It has been a salient feature of twentieth century warfare that the industrial nature of conflict, combined with the huge number of men required and the numerous machines and armaments involved, has meant that industry has-of necessity-had to increase its capacity to keep the fighting forces constantly and consistently supplied. Yet each conflict has inevitably drained the places of industry of the very workforce it required to function effectively. The solution in both World Wars has been for women to step forward to fill the roles formally undertaken by men who were by then enlisted into the armed services. Of course, women invariably proved themselves to be equal to the tasks assigned to them and indeed without them wartime industrial production would inevitably have been compromised to the point of peril for the military outcome. The work was invariably hard and often dangerous, but women on the home front have long been regarded as the essential, if largely unsung, heroines of the war effort. The principal benefit of this book is that it not only describes the activities of women in the workplace, but that it includes many photographs of women at work, demonstrating the multitude of weapons, armaments, equipment and vehicles they manufactured during the First World War. This concise Leonaur edition includes two books-that were originally so short as to not have seen re-publication in modern times-for good value.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

Victory at Home is at once an institutional history of the federal War Manpower Commission and a social history of the southern labor force within the commission's province. Charles D. Chamberlain explores how southern working families used America's rapid wartime industrialization and an expanded federal presence to gain unprecedented economic, social, and geographic mobility in the chronically poor region. Chamberlain looks at how war workers, black leaders, white southern elites, liberal New Dealers, nonsouthern industrialists, and others used and shaped the federal war mobilization effort to fill their own needs. He shows, for instance, how African American, Latino, and white laborers worked variously through churches, labor unions, federal agencies, the NAACP, and the Urban League, using a wide variety of strategies from union organizing and direct action protest to job shopping and migration. Throughout, Chamberlain is careful not to portray the southern wartime labor scene in monolithic terms. He discusses, for instance, conflicts between racial groups within labor unions and shortfalls between the War Manpower Commission's national directives and their local implementation. An important new work in southern economic and industrial history, Victory at Home also has implications for the prehistory of both the civil rights revolution and the massive resistance movement of the 1960s. As Chamberlain makes clear, African American workers used the coalition of unions, churches, and civil rights organizations built up during the war to challenge segregation and disenfranchisement in the postwar South.

War was no stranger to the town of Sudbury, Massachusetts. A small farming community at the outbreak of the Civil War, Sudbury stood ready to support the cause of the Union. Uriah and Mary Moore, a local farmer and his wife, parents of ten children, sent four sons off to fight for the Union. George Frederick Moore was twenty years old when he joined the Thirty-fifth Massachusetts Regiment in 1862, along with brother, Albert. Their brother, John, had enlisted in the Thirteenth Massachusetts Regiment and had been serving since 1861. In 1864, a fourth brother, Alfred, joined the Fifty-ninth Massachusetts Regiment. The eighty-four letters in this collection span the years from August 1862 to the end of the War and include correspondence to and from Pvt. George Moore and five family members. George's personal diaries from 1863 and 1864 are also included, as well as the 1867 diary of Sarah Jones, the girl he married. Through research the family is traced long after the war, revealing their travels and accomplishments. Explanatory passages that accompany these letters highlight the campaigns of the Thirty-fifth Massachusetts through the war years. George Moore took part in battles from South Mountain and Antietam to Fredericksburg, Vicksburg, Campbell's Station, and the Siege of Knoxville. He participated in the Battles of the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and the assault on Petersburg. The letters to and from George Moore and his loved ones provide an intimate glimpse of the trials, not only of the soldiers, but of the family who sent their boys off to war.

In the search for the deeper causes of the 'War to end all wars' the reading public has been presented with countless titles by military, diplomatic and intellectual historians. Some of these have, however, been motivated by a desire to show how their authors would have preferred the past events to have been, so as to promote some present-day agenda. This is the fallacy of 'presentism'. John Moses was trained at the Universities of Munich and Erlangen by professors committed to the Rankean tradition of showing 'how it actually was', as far as humanly possible, based on diligent archival research and with the strictest objectivity and emotional detachment. Consequently, both Moses and Overlack have been at pains to identify the essential peculiarity of the Kaiser's Germany and have focused sharply on the question of how its war planning impinged on Australasia.

A great war correspondent reports from the Great War
Richard Harding Davis is well regarded as a writer of fiction, but it is for his work and writings as a journalist-particularly when covering the battle front-that posterity has awarded him the accolade 'the first famous American war correspondent.' Davis' first experience as a war correspondent was during the Spanish-American War and he later covered the Boer War in South Africa. The outbreak of the Great War saw him travelling to Europe and once there his pursuit of the story and vital information propelled him through many theatres of the conflict. The passage of time filters away those who have experienced momentous events until the few who are remembered are those who have left a written record. Each account is beyond value when their number is finite, but occasionally we are blessed not only with an invaluable account but also a fine author to convey it. By this time Davis had perfected his craft and these two books brought together by Leonaur for good value demonstrate that perfectly. They are augmented here with some of Davis' letters sent during the Great War. This was to be Davis' last campaign on returning home to New York he fell ill and died suddenly in 1916 aged just 52 years old. Available in softcover and hardback with dust jacket for collectors.

War in the East African bush
The First World War was inevitably a global conflict because the rush by the principal powers of Europe to establish trading bases and colonies, principally during the 19th century, guaranteed it would be so. In Africa, German and British settlers were close neighbours and at the outbreak of hostilities were ready for immediate confrontation. National and imperial forces were dispatched to augment local military operations. This book concerns the struggle for East Africa. It was written, drawing on memory and diary entries, by a British senior staff officer, a brigadier-general, who was central to the organisation of the British campaign and who has left posterity a concise, thorough and detailed historical overview of it from the British perspective. This book qualifies as a campaign history rather than a first hand account and is recommended to readers seeking that perspective on this interesting 'sideshow' theatre of the war.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

This study uses a comparative analysis of the Malayan Emergency, the American experience in Vietnam, and Operation IRAQI FREEDOM to examine the role and effectiveness of artillery units in complex counterinsurgency environments. Through this analysis, four factors emerge which impact the employment of artillery units: the counterinsurgency effort's requirement for indirect fires; constraints and limitations on indirect fires; the counterinsurgency effort's force organization; and the conversion cost of nonstandard roles for artillery units. In conclusion, the study offers five broadly descriptive fundamentals for employing artillery units in a counterinsurgency environment: invest in tactical leadership, exploit lessons learned, support the operational approach and strategic framework, maintain pragmatic fire support capability, and minimize collateral damage. Finally, the study examines the role of education for leaders in a counterinsurgency, and its influence on these imperative fundamentals.

A unique Leonaur edition-never before available in this form
John Buchan was a popular author of historical and adventure fiction whose works remain in print to the present day. He also wrote important works of non-fiction that are less well remembered. Among these was a commissioned, multi-volume history of the First World War that was so well regarded that it became a source-work for other historians. This Leonaur Original, drawn from Buchan's history, and including many maps, battle plans, photographs and illustrations, has been published to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War on the Western Front as overwhelming German forces swept through Belgium and France. This was a mobile war-much like the wars fought in Europe for hundreds of years-of marching infantry and cavalry armed with lances and swords. The battle at Mons, the dogged retreat of the 'Contemptible Little Army' of the B. E. F., the incredible resistance of the out-dated Belgian Forces, the battles of the Marne and Aisne as the tide turned, and the carnage of the First Battle of Ypres as the war became a stalemate of wire, mud and trenches at the close of the year, are all covered in Buchan's brilliant take on just six months of war in 1914.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

On April 25th 1915, during the First World War, the famous Anzacs landed ashore at Gallipoli. At the exact same moment, leading figures of Armenian life in the Ottoman Empire were being arrested in vast numbers. That dark day marks the simultaneous birth of a national story - and the beginning of a genocide. When We Dead Awaken - the first narrative history of the Armenian Genocide in decades - draws these two landmark historical events together. James Robins explores the accounts of Anzac Prisoners of War who witnessed the genocide, the experiences of soldiers who risked their lives to defend refugees, and Australia and New Zealand's participation in the enormous post-war Armenian relief movement. By exploring the vital political implications of this unexplored history, When We Dead Awaken questions the national folklore of Australia, New Zealand, and Turkey - and the mythology of Anzac Day itself.