Marching Masters

Marching Masters
Author: Colin Edward Woodward
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2014-03-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813935423

The Confederate army went to war to defend a nation of slaveholding states, and although men rushed to recruiting stations for many reasons, they understood that the fundamental political issue at stake in the conflict was the future of slavery. Most Confederate soldiers were not slaveholders themselves, but they were products of the largest and most prosperous slaveholding civilization the world had ever seen, and they sought to maintain clear divisions between black and white, master and servant, free and slave. In Marching Masters Colin Woodward explores not only the importance of slavery in the minds of Confederate soldiers but also its effects on military policy and decision making. Beyond showing how essential the defense of slavery was in motivating Confederate troops to fight, Woodward examines the Rebels’ persistent belief in the need to defend slavery and deploy it militarily as the war raged on. Slavery proved essential to the Confederate war machine, and Rebels strove to protect it just as they did Southern cities, towns, and railroads. Slaves served by the tens of thousands in the Southern armies—never as soldiers, but as menial laborers who cooked meals, washed horses, and dug ditches. By following Rebel troops' continued adherence to notions of white supremacy into the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, the book carries the story beyond the Confederacy’s surrender. Drawing upon hundreds of soldiers’ letters, diaries, and memoirs, Marching Masters combines the latest social and military history in its compelling examination of the last bloody years of slavery in the United States.

Marching into Darkness

Marching into Darkness
Author: Waitman Wade Beorn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2014-01-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 067472660X

On October 10, 1941, the Jewish population of the Belarusian village of Krucha was rounded up and shot. This atrocity was not the routine work of the SS but was committed by a regular German army unit acting on its own initiative. Marching into Darkness is a bone-chilling exposé of the ordinary footsoldiers who participated in the Final Solution on a daily basis. Although scholars have exploded the myth that the Wehrmacht played no significant part in the Holocaust, a concrete picture of its involvement has been lacking. Marching into Darkness reveals in detail how the army willingly fulfilled its role as an agent of murder on a massive scale. Waitman Wade Beorn unearths forced labor, sexual violence, and grave robbing, though a few soldiers refused to participate and even helped Jews. Improvised extermination progressively became methodical, with some army units going so far as to organize "Jew hunts." The Wehrmacht also used the pretense of Jewish anti-partisan warfare as a subterfuge by reporting murdered Jews as partisans. Through military and legal records, survivor testimonies, and eyewitness interviews, Beorn paints a searing portrait of an army's descent into ever more intimate participation in genocide.

Marching Through Georgia

Marching Through Georgia
Author: S. M. Stirling
Publisher: Baen Books
Total Pages: 416
Release: 1991-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780671720698

Explores the possibilities of alternative history by changing the participants and the stakes in World War II

The Visible Confederacy

The Visible Confederacy
Author: Ross A. Brooks
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 503
Release: 2019-11-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807173703

Featuring 92 images and line drawings The Visible Confederacy is a comprehensive analysis of the commercially and government-generated visual and material culture of the Confederate States of America. While historians have mainly studied Confederate identity through printed texts, this book shows that Confederates also built and shared a sense of who they were through other media: theatrical performances, military clothing, manufactured goods, and an assortment of other material. Examining previously understudied and often unpublished visual and documentary sources, Ross A. Brooks provides new perspectives on Confederates’ sense of identity and ideas about race, gender, and independence, as well as how those conceptions united and divided them. Brooks’s work complements the historiography surrounding the Confederate nation by revealing how imagery and objects offer new windows on southern society and a richer understanding of Confederate citizens. Brooks builds substantially upon previous studies of the iconology and iconography of Confederate imagery and material culture by adding a broader range of government and commercially generated images and objects. He examines not only popular or high art and government-produced imagery, but also lowbrow art, transitory theatrical productions, and ephemeral artifacts generated by southerners. Collectively, these materials provide a variety of lenses through which to explore and assay the various priorities, ideological fault lines, and worldviews of Confederate citizens. Brooks’s study is one of the first extensive academic works to use imagery and objects as the basis for studying the Confederate South. His work provides fresh avenues for examining Confederate ideas about race, slavery, gender, independence, and the war, and it offers insight into the intentions and factors that contributed to the creation of Confederate nationalism. The Visible Confederacy furthers our understanding of what the Confederacy was, what Confederates fought for, and why their vision has persisted in memory and imagination for so long beyond the Confederacy’s existence. Visual and material culture captured not only the tensions, but also the illusions and delusions that Confederates shared.

Masters of Command

Masters of Command
Author: Barry Strauss
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2013-05-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1439164495

Analyzes the leadership and strategies of three forefront military leaders from the ancient world, offers insight into the purposes behind their conflicts, and shows what today's leaders can glean from their successes and failures.

Private Citizens

Private Citizens
Author: Tony Tulathimutte
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2016-02-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 006239911X

“Scathing, upsetting and generous all at once, this novel, about millennial friends in pre-2008-crash San Francisco, thrums with Tulathimutte’s sly intelligence and unerring comic timing. . . . The warm flashes make the satire cut deeper.” —The New York Times, “The Funniest Novels Since Catch-22” "One of the really phenomenal novels I've read in the last decade." —Jonathan Franzen From a brilliant new literary talent comes a sweeping comic portrait of privilege, ambition, and friendship in millennial San Francisco. With the social acuity of Adelle Waldman and the murderous wit of Martin Amis, Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens is a brainy, irreverent debut—This Side of Paradise for a new era. Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the aughts, Private Citizens embraces the contradictions of our new century: call it a loving satire. A gleefully rude comedy of manners. Middlemarch for Millennials. The novel's four whip-smart narrators—idealistic Cory, Internet-lurking Will, awkward Henrik, and vicious Linda—are torn between fixing the world and cannibalizing it. In boisterous prose that ricochets between humor and pain, the four estranged friends stagger through the Bay Area’s maze of tech startups, protestors, gentrifiers, karaoke bars, house parties, and cultish self-help seminars, washing up in each other’s lives once again. A wise and searching depiction of a generation grappling with privilege and finding grace in failure, Private Citizens is as expansively intelligent as it is full of heart.

Robert E. Lee

Robert E. Lee
Author: Allen C. Guelzo
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 625
Release: 2022-08-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1101912227

A WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the award-winning historian and best-selling author of Gettysburg comes the definitive biography of Robert E. Lee. An intimate look at the Confederate general in all his complexity—his hypocrisy and courage, his inner turmoil and outward calm, his disloyalty and his honor. "An important contribution to reconciling the myths with the facts." —New York Times Book Review Robert E. Lee is one of the most confounding figures in American history. Lee betrayed his nation in order to defend his home state and uphold the slave system he claimed to oppose. He was a traitor to the country he swore to serve as an Army officer, and yet he was admired even by his enemies for his composure and leadership. He considered slavery immoral, but benefited from inherited slaves and fought to defend the institution. And behind his genteel demeanor and perfectionism lurked the insecurities of a man haunted by the legacy of a father who stained the family name by declaring bankruptcy and who disappeared when Robert was just six years old. In Robert E. Lee, the award-winning historian Allen Guelzo has written the definitive biography of the general, following him from his refined upbringing in Virginia high society, to his long career in the U.S. Army, his agonized decision to side with Virginia when it seceded from the Union, and his leadership during the Civil War. Above all, Guelzo captures Robert E. Lee in all his complexity--his hypocrisy and courage, his outward calm and inner turmoil, his honor and his disloyalty.

Freedom Soldiers

Freedom Soldiers
Author: Assistant Professor of History Jonathan Lande
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2024-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 019753175X

Freedom Soldiers examines the lives of formerly enslaved men who deserted the US Army during the Civil War and their experiences in army camps, courts, and prisons. It explores their reasons for leaving, often through their own voices from courts-martial testimony.

African-Americans in Defense of the Nation

African-Americans in Defense of the Nation
Author: James T. Controvich
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2011-03-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0810874806

While the role of the African American in American history has been written about extensively, it is often difficult to locate the wealth of material that has been published. African-Americans in Defense of the Nation builds on a long list of early bibliographies concerning the subject, bringing together a broad spectrum of titles related to the African-American participation in America's wars. It covers both military exploits—as African Americans have been involved in every American conflict since the Revolution—and their participation in the homefront support.

Citizen-Officers

Citizen-Officers
Author: Andrew S. Bledsoe
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2015-11-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807160725

From the time of the American Revolution, most junior officers in the American military attained their positions through election by the volunteer soldiers in their company, a tradition that reflected commitment to democracy even in times of war. By the outset of the Civil War, citizen-officers had fallen under sharp criticism from career military leaders who decried their lack of discipline and efficiency in battle. Andrew S. Bledsoe’s Citizen-Officers explores the role of the volunteer officer corps during the Civil War and the unique leadership challenges they faced when military necessity clashed with the antebellum democratic values of volunteer soldiers. Bledsoe’s innovative evaluation of the lives and experiences of nearly 2,600 Union and Confederate company-grade junior officers from every theater of operations across four years of war reveals the intense pressures placed on these young leaders. Despite their inexperience and sometimes haphazard training in formal military maneuvers and leadership, citizen-officers frequently faced their first battles already in command of a company. These intense and costly encounters forced the independent, civic-minded volunteer soldiers to recognize the need for military hierarchy and to accept their place within it. Thus concepts of American citizenship, republican traditions in American life, and the brutality of combat shaped, and were in turn shaped by, the attitudes and actions of citizen-officers. Through an analysis of wartime writings, post-war reminiscences, company and regimental papers, census records, and demographic data, Citizen-Officers illuminates the centrality of the volunteer officer to the Civil War and to evolving narratives of American identity and military service.