American Patriots

American Patriots
Author: Gail Lumet Buckley
Publisher: Crown Books For Young Readers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2003
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780375822438

They fought on Lexington Green the first morning of the Revolution and survived the bitter cold winter at Valley Forge. They stormed San Juan Hill with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and manned an anti-aircraft gun at Pearl Harbor. They are the black Americans who fought, often in foreign lands, for freedoms that they did not enjoy at home. Adapted for young readers, this dramatic story brings to life the heroism of people such as Crispus Attucks, Benjamin O. Davis, Charity Adams, and Colin Powell, and captures the spirit that drove these Americans to better their lives and demand of themselves the highest form of sacrifice.

From Coveralls to Zoot Suits

From Coveralls to Zoot Suits
Author: Elizabeth R. Escobedo
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2013-03-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469602067

During World War II, unprecedented employment avenues opened up for women and minorities in U.S. defense industries at the same time that massive population shifts and the war challenged Americans to rethink notions of race. At this extraordinary historical moment, Mexican American women found new means to exercise control over their lives in the home, workplace, and nation. In From Coveralls to Zoot Suits, Elizabeth R. Escobedo explores how, as war workers and volunteers, dance hostesses and zoot suiters, respectable young ladies and rebellious daughters, these young women used wartime conditions to serve the United States in its time of need and to pursue their own desires. But even after the war, as Escobedo shows, Mexican American women had to continue challenging workplace inequities and confronting family and communal resistance to their broadening public presence. Highlighting seldom heard voices of the "Greatest Generation," Escobedo examines these contradictions within Mexican families and their communities, exploring the impact of youth culture, outside employment, and family relations on the lives of women whose home-front experiences and everyday life choices would fundamentally alter the history of a generation.

Home Front

Home Front
Author: Julian M. Pleasants
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-09-28
Genre: North Carolina
ISBN: 9780813064093

Julian Pleasants offers a grassroots view of World War II's extraordinary impact on the homefront by focusing on the myriad ways, large and small, that the war changed the lives of average citizens. Using oral histories, interviews, and newspaper accounts, Pleasants connects family-level decisions to fundamental social, economic, industrial, and military growth that helped move the Tar hell state toward a more progressive future.

Taps For A Jim Crow Army

Taps For A Jim Crow Army
Author: Christy McGuire
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2014-07-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813148995

Many black soldiers serving in the U.S. Army during World War II hoped that they might make permanent gains as a result of their military service and their willingness to defend their country. They were soon disabused of such illusions. Taps for a Jim Crow Army is a powerful collection of letters written by black soldiers in the 1940s to various government and nongovernment officials. The soldiers expressed their disillusionment, rage, and anguish over the discrimination and segregation they experienced in the Army. Most black troops were denied entry into army specialist schools; black officers were not allowed to command white officers; black soldiers were served poorer food and were forced to ride Jim Crow military buses into town and to sit in Jim Crow base movie theaters. In the South, German POWs could use the same latrines as white American soldiers, but blacks could not. The original foreword by Benjamin Quarles, professor emeritus of history at Morgan State University, and a new foreword by Bernard C. Nalty, the chief historian in the Office of Air Force History, offer rich insights into the world of these soldiers.

Coming Out Under Fire

Coming Out Under Fire
Author: Allan Bérubé
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2010-09-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 080789964X

During World War II, as the United States called on its citizens to serve in unprecedented numbers, the presence of gay Americans in the armed forces increasingly conflicted with the expanding antihomosexual policies and procedures of the military. In Coming Out Under Fire, Allan Berube examines in depth and detail these social and political confrontation--not as a story of how the military victimized homosexuals, but as a story of how a dynamic power relationship developed between gay citizens and their government, transforming them both. Drawing on GIs' wartime letters, extensive interviews with gay veterans, and declassified military documents, Berube thoughtfully constructs a startling history of the two wars gay military men and women fough--one for America and another as homosexuals within the military. Berube's book, the inspiration for the 1995 Peabody Award-winning documentary film of the same name, has become a classic since it was published in 1990, just three years prior to the controversial "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which has continued to serve as an uneasy compromise between gays and the military. With a new foreword by historians John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, this book remains a valuable contribution to the history of World War II, as well as to the ongoing debate regarding the role of gays in the U.S. military.

Bataan Survivor

Bataan Survivor
Author: David L. Hardee
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2017-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0826273599

A forgotten account, written in the immediate aftermath of World War II, which vividly portrays the valor, sacrifice, suffering, and liberation of the defenders of Bataan and Corregidor through the eyes of one survivor. The personal memoir of Colonel David L. Hardee, first drafted at sea from April-May 1945 following his liberation from Japanese captivity, is a thorough treatment of his time in the Philippines. A career infantry officer, Hardee fought during the Battle of Bataan as executive officer of the Provisional Air Corps Regiment. Captured in April 1942 after the American surrender on Bataan, Hardee survived the Bataan Death March and proceeded to endure a series of squalid prison camps. A debilitating hernia left Hardee too ill to travel to Japan in 1944, making him one of the few lieutenant colonels to remain in the Philippines and subsequently survive the war. As a primary account written almost immediately after his liberation, Hardee’s memoir is fresh, vivid, and devoid of decades of faded memories or contemporary influences associated with memoirs written years after an experience. This once-forgotten memoir has been carefully edited, illustrated and annotated to unlock the true depths of Hardee’s experience as a soldier, prisoner, and liberated survivor of the Pacific War.

The Cloudbuster Nine

The Cloudbuster Nine
Author: Anne R. Keene
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2018-04-06
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 168358208X

In 1943, while the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals were winning pennants and meeting in that year's World Series, Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky, and Johnny Sain practiced on a skinned-out college field in the heart of North Carolina. They and other past and future stars formed one of the greatest baseball teams of all time. They were among a cadre of fighter-pilot cadets who wore the Cloudbuster Nine baseball jersey at an elite Navy training school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a child, Anne Keene's father, Jim Raugh, suited up as the team batboy and mascot. He got to know his baseball heroes personally, watching players hit the road on cramped, tin-can buses, dazzling factory workers, kids, and service members at dozens of games, including a war-bond exhibition with Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium. Jimmy followed his baseball dreams as a college All-American but was crushed later in life by a failed major-league bid with the Detroit Tigers. He would have carried this story to his grave had Anne not discovered his scrapbook from a Navy school that shaped America's greatest heroes including George H. W. Bush, Gerald Ford, John Glenn, and Paul "Bear" Bryant. With the help of rare images and insights from World War II baseball veterans such as Dr. Bobby Brown and Eddie Robinson, the story of this remarkable team is brought to life for the first time in The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team That Helped Win World War II.

China's Muslims and Japan's Empire

China's Muslims and Japan's Empire
Author: Kelly A. Hammond
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2020-09-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1469659662

In this transnational history of World War II, Kelly A. Hammond places Sino-Muslims at the center of imperial Japan's challenges to Chinese nation-building efforts. Revealing the little-known story of Japan's interest in Islam during its occupation of North China, Hammond shows how imperial Japanese aimed to defeat the Chinese Nationalists in winning the hearts and minds of Sino-Muslims, a vital minority population. Offering programs that presented themselves as protectors of Islam, the Japanese aimed to provide Muslims with a viable alternative—and, at the same time, to create new Muslim consumer markets that would, the Japanese hoped, act to subvert the existing global capitalist world order and destabilize the Soviets. This history can be told only by reinstating agency to Muslims in China who became active participants in the brokering and political jockeying between the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese Empire. Hammond argues that the competition for their loyalty was central to the creation of the ethnoreligious identity of Muslims living on the Chinese mainland. Their wartime experience ultimately helped shape the formation of Sino-Muslims' religious identities within global Islamic networks, as well as their incorporation into the Chinese state, where the conditions of that incorporation remain unstable and contested to this day.

Taffy of Torpedo Junction

Taffy of Torpedo Junction
Author: Nell Wise Wechter
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2012-05-15
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1469601362

Back in print A longtime favorite of several generations of Tar Heels, Taffy of Torpedo Junction is the thrilling adventure story of thirteen-year-old Taffy Willis, who, with the help of her pony and dog, exposes a ring of Nazi spies operating from a secluded house on Hatteras Island, North Carolina, during World War II. For readers of all ages, the book brings to life the dramatic wartime events on the Outer Banks, where German U-boats turned an area around Cape Hatteras into 'Torpedo Junction' by sinking more than sixty American vessels in just a six-month period in 1942. Taffy has been enjoyed by young and old alike since it was first published in 1957.

The Boys in the Boat (Movie Tie-In)

The Boys in the Boat (Movie Tie-In)
Author: Daniel James Brown
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2023-12-05
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0593512308

The inspiration for the Major Motion Picture Directed by George Clooney—exclusively in theaters December 25, 2023! The #1 New York Times bestselling true story about the American rowing triumph of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin—from the author of Facing the Mountain For readers of Unbroken, out of the depths of the Depression comes an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times—the improbable, intimate account of how nine working-class boys from the American West showed the world at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin what true grit really meant. It was an unlikely quest from the start. With a team composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the University of Washington’s eight-oar crew team was never expected to defeat the elite teams of the East Coast and Great Britain, yet they did, going on to shock the world by defeating the German team rowing for Adolf Hitler. The emotional heart of the tale lies with Joe Rantz, a teenager without family or prospects, who rows not only to regain his shattered self-regard but also to find a real place for himself in the world. Drawing on the boys’ own journals and vivid memories of a once-in-a-lifetime shared dream, Brown has created an unforgettable portrait of an era, a celebration of a remarkable achievement, and a chronicle of one extraordinary young man’s personal quest.