War Studies

With an executive order from President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, the United States Marine Corps - the last all-white branch of the U.S. military - was forced to begin recruiting and enlisting African Americans. The first black recruits received basic training at the segregated Camp Montford Point, adjacent to Camp Lejeune, near Jacksonville, North Carolina.

Drawing on a wide range of long-neglected documents, Eric Foner places a new emphasis on the centrality of the Black experience to an understanding of the era. We see African Americans as active agents in overthrowing slavery, in helping win the Civil War, and - even more actively - in shaping Reconstruction and creating a legacy long obscured and misunderstood. Foner makes clear how, by war's end, freed slaves in the South built on networks of church and family in order to exercise their right of suffrage as well as gain access to education, land, and employment.

After World War II ended in 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States began a decades-long confrontation that would become known as the Cold War. American foreign policy focused on "containment" - preventing the communist USSR from gaining more ground - and many people looked at the geographical and political implications of this policy. Others, meanwhile, explored American domestic life in that same period. But historian Elaine Tyler May became the first person to bring these seemingly unrelated areas together.

Jesus warned us about wars and rumors of wars, that these would be the beginnings of birth pains; a world-wide struggle that will result in a new, transformed world. Many of the signs he cited correspond to the seven seals opened by the Lamb in the book of Revelation and the destruction of a country called, Babylon the Great.

For more than 15 years, award-winning journalist Sophie McNeill has reported on some of the most war-ravaged and oppressive places on earth, including Syria, Gaza, Yemen, West Bank and Iraq. In We Can't Say We Didn't Know, Sophie tells the human stories of devastation and hope behind the headlines—of children, families and refugees, of valiant doctors, steadfast dissidents and Saudi women seeking asylum. These innocent civilians bear the brunt of the lawlessness of the current age of impunity, where war crimes go unpunished and human rights are abused.

The story in this book offers a look inside the antinuclear movement and its recent successful campaign to ban the bomb. Ray Acheson narrates the journey of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons - from scrappy organizing to winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 and achieving a landmark UN treaty banning nuclear weapons - and developments in feminist disarmament activism.

After World War I, black Americans fervently hoped for a new epoch of peace, prosperity, and equality. Black soldiers believed their participation in the fight to make the world safe for democracy finally earned them rights they had been promised since the close of the Civil War. Instead, an unprecedented wave of anti-black riots and lynchings swept the country. From April to November of 1919, the racial unrest rolled across the South into the North and the Midwest, even to the nation's capital. Red Summer is the first narrative history about this epic encounter.

Combining compelling data with anecdotal evidence, author Leena Al Olaimy sheds light on unorthodox and counterintuitive strategies to address social woes that groups like ISIS exploit. Using religion, neuroscience, farming, and even love, this book offers many inspiring examples and - for once - an optimistic outlook on how we can not just fight but prevent terrorism.

In Inventing a Christian America, Green, a leading historian of religion and politics, explores the historical record that is purported to support the popular belief in America's religious founding and status as a Christian nation.

James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern Black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing Black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into Black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters.

“A book that both taught me so much and also kept me on the edge of my seat. It is an invaluable text from a supremely talented writer.” —Clint Smith, author of How the Word is Passed The definitive history of the pervasiveness of racial inequality in American higher education America’s...

Shannon Watts was a stay-at-home mom folding laundry when news broke of the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. In one moment, she went from outraged to engaged and decided to do something about it. What started as a simple Facebook group to connect with other frustrated parents grew into...

Mythology is not about the past. The past is what’s behind us and that’s not where mythology really exists. The big daddy of mythology hails from ancient Greece - and whether we realize it or not, Greek mythology influences the western world of today. The Greeks were not a boring bunch, and their mythology was no different! Greek Mythology: Timeless Tales from the Ancients is a smart, fun, compulsively listenable overview of the Greek's favorite characters and tales. These myths are filled with sex, violence, drama, lies, monsters, hubris, journeys, and just about anything else you can think of!

Acclaimed historian Colin G. Calloway, Dartmouth professor of history and American Indian studies, is the series editor for The Penguin Library of American Indian History. Rich in detail and highly readable, this compelling narrative portrays the Shawnees' valiant struggle to maintain their way of life.

Few events have sparked more legends and stories of the supernatural than America's Civil War. The accounts of gallantry and heroism have spread far and wide. Nancy Roberts grew up listening to her father's stories of the War Between the States, and she trekked over many battle sites with him during her childhood. After reading about General Joshua Chamberlain's supernatural experience at the Battle of Gettysburg, Roberts began to collect tales of the blue and gray and write them down.

A two-time Newbery Honor Book author, Jim Murphy is among the world’s finest writers of nonfiction for children. In A Savage Thunder he takes listeners back to the American Civil War to tell the terrible yet extraordinary story of the Battle of Antietam. With the entire world watching, two armies met in Maryland in 1862. The Union needed a victory. The Confederacy hoped to continue its success. When the smoke cleared, 23,000 men were dead or wounded—and the momentum had shifted to the Union.

The original, full accounting of a rebellion in the Heart of Dixie.

A maverick, unionist district in the heart of the Old South? A notorious county that seceded from the Confederacy? This is how Jones County, Mississippi, is known in myth and legend. Since 1864 the legend has persisted. Differing versions give the name of this new nation as Republic of Jones, Jones County Confederacy, and Free State of Jones. Over the years this story has captured the imaginations of many.

Soldier Girls follows the lives of three women on their paths to the military. These women, who are quite different in every way, become friends, and we watch their interaction and also what happens when they are separated. We see their families, their lovers, their spouses, their children. We see them work extremely hard, deal with the attentions of men on base and in war zones, and struggle to stay connected to their families back home.

A powerful history of the Great Migration and its sweeping impact on Black and American culture, from Reconstruction to the rise of hip hop. Over the course of six decades, an unprecedented wave of Black Americans left the South and spread across the nation in search of a better life--a...

In this powerful and wide-ranging collection of essays, Rebecca Solnit turns her attention to the war at home. This is a war, she says, "[W]ith so many casualties that we should call it by its true name, this war with so many dead by police, by violent ex-husbands and partners and lovers, by people pursuing power and profit at the point of a gun or just shooting first and figuring out who they hit later."