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.

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.

The Bavarian mountain village of Oberammergau is famous for its decennial passion play. The play began as an articulation of the villagers' strong Catholic piety, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries developed into a considerable commercial enterprise. The growth of the passion play from a curiosity of village piety into a major tourist attraction encouraged all manner of entrepreneurial behavior and brought the inhabitants of this isolated rural area into close contract with a larger world. Hundreds of thousands of tourists came to see the play, and thousands of temporary workers descended on the village during the play season, some settling permanently in Oberammergau. Adolf Hitler would attend a performance of the play in 1934, later saying that the drama "revealed the muck and mire of Jewry." But, Helena Waddy argues, it is a mistake to brand Oberammergau as a Nazi stronghold, as has commonly been done. In this book she uses Oberammergau's unique history to explain why and how genuinely some villagers chose to become Nazis, while others rejected Party membership and defended their Catholic lifestyle. She explores the reasons why both local Nazis and their opponents fought to protect the village's cherished identity against the Third Reich's many intrusive demands. On the other hand, she also shows that the play mirrored the Gospel-based anti-Semitism endemic to Western culture. As a local study of the rise of Nazism and the Nazi era, Waddy's work is an important contribution to a growing genre. As a collective biography, it is a fascinating and moving portrait of life at a time when, as Thomas Mann wrote, "every day hurled the wildest demands at the heart and brain."

Lord Derby, Lancashire's highest-ranked nobleman and its principal royalist, once offered the opinion that the English civil wars had been a 'general plague of madness'. Complex and bedevilling, the earl defied anyone to tell the complete story of 'so foolish, so wicked, so lasting a war'. Yet attempting to chronicle and to explain the events is both fascinating and hugely important. Nationally and at the county level the impact and significance of the wars can hardly be over-stated: the conflict involved our ancestors fighting one another, on and off, for a period of nine years; almost every part of Lancashire witnessed warfare of some kind at one time or another, and several towns in particular saw bloody sieges and at least one episode characterised as a massacre. Nationally the wars resulted in the execution of the king; in 1651 the Earl of Derby himself was executed in Bolton in large measure because he had taken a leading part in the so-called massacre in that town in 1644.In the early months of the civil wars many could barely distinguish what it was that divided people in 'this war without an enemy', as the royalist William Waller famously wrote; yet by the end of it parliament had abolished monarchy itself and created the only republic in over a millennium of England's history. Over the ensuing centuries this period has been described variously as a rebellion, as a series of civil wars, even as a revolution. Lancashire's role in these momentous events was quite distinctive, and relative to the size of its population particularly important. Lancashire lay right at the centre of the wars, for the conflict did not just encompass England but Ireland and Scotland too, and Lancashire's position on the coast facing Catholic, Royalist Ireland was seen as critical from the very first months.And being on the main route south from Scotland meant that the county witnessed a good deal of marching and marauding armies from the north. In this, the first full history of the Lancashire civil wars for almost a century, Stephen Bull makes extensive use of new discoveries to narrate and explain the exciting, terrible events which our ancestors witnessed in the cause either of king or parliament. From Furness to Liverpool, and from the Wyre estuary to Manchester and Warrington...civil war actions, battles, sieges and skirmishes took place in virtually every corner of Lancashire.

In 1864, six hundred Confederate prisoners of war, all officers, were taken out of a prison camp in Delaware and transported to South Carolina, where most were confined in a Union stockade prison on Morris Island. They were placed in front of two Union forts as "human shields" during the siege of Charleston and exposed to a fearful barrage of artillery fire from Confederate forts. Many of these men would suffer an even worse ordeal at Union-held Fort Pulaski near Savannah, Georgia, where they were subjected to severe food rationing as retaliatory policy. Author and historian Karen Stokes uses the prisoners' writings to relive the courage, fraternity and struggle of the "Immortal 600."

In late November 1864, the last Southern army east of the Mississippi that was still free to maneuver started out from northern Alabama on the Confederacy's last offensive. John Bell Hood and his Army of Tennessee had dreams of capturing Nashville and marching on to the Ohio River, but a small Union force under Hood's old West Point roommate stood between him and the state capital. In a desperate attempt to smash John Schofield's line at Franklin, Hood threw most of his men against the Union works, centered on the house of a family named Carter, and lost 30 percent of his attacking force in one afternoon, crippling his army and setting it up for a knockout blow at Nashville two weeks later. With firsthand accounts, letters and diary entries from the Carter House Archives, local historian James R. Knight paints a vivid picture of this gruesome conflict.

From Cabinda in Angola to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, 4 Reconnaissance Regiment conducted numerous clandestine seaborne raids during the Border War. They attacked strategic targets such as oil facilities, transport infrastructure and even Russian ships. All the while 4 Recce’s existence and capability was largely kept secret, even within the South African Defence Force.

With unparalleled access to previously top secret documents, 50 operations undertaken by 4 Recce, other Special Forces units and the South African Navy are described here in Iron Fist From The Sea. The daunting Operation Kerslig (1981), in which an operator died in a raid on a Luanda oil refinery and others were injured, is retold in spine-tingling detail. The book reveals the versatility and effectiveness of this elite unit and also tells of both the successes and failures of its actions. Sometimes missions go wrong, as in Operation Argon (1985) when Captain Wynand Du Toit was captured. This fascinating work will enthrall anyone with an interest in Special Forces operations.

Iron Fist From The Sea takes you right to the raging surf, to the adrenalin and fear that is seaborne raiding.

This authentic account is a tribute to the courage and resolve with which soldiers and their loved ones confront uncertainty, fear, hardship and the loss of their comrades. Subjected to continual changes of affiliation as the Falklands campaign unfolds, 2 Troop has to create its own identity and sense of belonging drawing on its professional belief, strength of leadership, and intrinsic camaraderie. This is the story of how they did it, and the contribution they made, in one of the toughest campaigns since World War 2. A 'must read' for aspiring junior commanders and students of the realities of war. -- General Sir Peter Wall GCB, CBE, DL, FREng

‘Brave, compassionate and inspiring – it left me in floods of tears’ Adam Kay, author of This Is Going to Hurt

For more than twenty-five years, David Nott has taken unpaid leave from his job as a general and vascular surgeon with the NHS to volunteer in some of the world’s most dangerous war zones. From Sarajevo under siege in 1993, to clandestine hospitals in rebel-held eastern Aleppo, he has carried out life-saving operations and field surgery in the most challenging conditions, and with none of the resources of a major London teaching hospital.

The conflicts he has worked in form a chronology of twenty-first-century combat: Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Darfur, Congo, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Gaza and Syria. But he has also volunteered in areas blighted by natural disasters, such as the earthquakes in Haiti and Nepal.

Driven both by compassion and passion, the desire to help others and the thrill of extreme personal danger, he is now widely acknowledged to be the most experienced trauma surgeon in the world. But as time went on, David Nott began to realize that flying into a catastrophe – whether war or natural disaster – was not enough. Doctors on the ground needed to learn how to treat the appalling injuries that war inflicts upon its victims. Since 2015, the foundation he set up with his wife, Elly, has disseminated the knowledge he has gained, training other doctors in the art of saving lives threatened by bombs and bullets.

War Doctor is his extraordinary story

Born out of a desire to commemorate those men from King's Road, St Albans, who lost their lives in the Great War, the road's current residents suggested the idea of a lasting memorial. Then came the task of researching the lives and the families of those men. It involved many hours of leafing through old newspapers and archives, obtaining advice from local and national bodies and seeking help from relatives of the deceased. A further memorial - this book, which includes a brief history of this street - is the result. The book was compiled by Compiled by Judy Sutton & Helen Little with help and support from many others.

This authentic account is a tribute to the courage and resolve with which soldiers and their loved ones confront uncertainty, fear, hardship and the loss of their comrades. Subjected to continual changes of affiliation as the Falklands campaign unfolds, 2 Troop has to create its own identity and sense of belonging drawing on its professional belief, strength of leadership, and intrinsic camaraderie. This is the story of how they did it, and the contribution they made, in one of the toughest campaigns since World War 2. A 'must read' for aspiring junior commanders and students of the realities of war. -- General Sir Peter Wall GCB, CBE, DL, FREng

Jamie and Todd are horrified to learn that the grand plan, which they thought had been defeated, might be about to be implemented in 1775, America. Hector and Catherine have to go back in time and thwart Travis - an agent of the grand plan - who is hell bent on world domination. Jamie and Todd go with Hector and Catherine on a mission to 1775, to prevent a super gun from being used in the battle of bunker hill, during the American war of independence, but they have only days to stop history from being altered.

Making sense of the wars for Vietnam has had a long history. The question why Vietnam? dominated American and Vietnamese political life for much of length of the Vietnam wars and has continued to be asked in the three decades since they ended. The essays in this inaugural volume of the National History Centres book series Reinterpreting History examine the conceptual and methodological shifts that mark the contested terrain of Vietnam war scholarship. They range from top-down reconsiderations of critical decision-making moments in Washington, Hanoi, and Saigon to microhistories of the war that explore its meanings from the bottom up. Some draw on recently available Vietnamese-language archival materials. Others mine new primary sources in the United States or from France, Great Britain, the former Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. Collectively, these essays map the interpretative histories of the Vietnam wars: past, present, and future. They also raise questions about larger meanings and the ongoing relevance of the wars for Vietnam in American, Vietnamese, and international histories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

On 2 September 1944, a German Wehrmacht Liaison Officer was captured by the Russians in Bucharest. His name was Lieutenant-Colonel Heinz-Helmut von Hinckeldey and he was to remain a "war convict" of the Soviets until 1955. For 11 years, Heinz-Helmut von Hinckeldey had to endure the deprivation - both physical and psychological - of imprisonment; the filth and squalor of the cells, in which he was kept; the agony of isolation and repeated self-examination; and the pain of ignorance, of not knowing if his motherland (Germany) still existed or whether those he loved, ever realized that he was alive. The personal Story that, like countless others, would never have been told, had it not been for the admiration and fascination built up over time by the Author, Charles Wood