War Studies

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."

"A novel of bewitching ingenuity, one whose darkling, melodic mind conceives a world of ruin and awe..." --New York Times Book Review A vivid, brutal, razor-sharp debut about a woman who carves out her share of the American Dream by living as a man 1946: At the apogee of the American Century...

By Cecile depicts post-World War II France as it reels from war and recovery. In Paris, an orphan girl, Cecile, finds refuge with an older man. He introduces her to nightclubs, intellectuals, artists (Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Eartha Kitt!), and non-monogamy. When she falls for his mistress, she begins to live a life she deems worthy of writing about...but only under the pseudonym of her husband.

The timely, powerful memoir of a man unjustly charged with a crime for helping his relatives, I Just Wanted to Save My Family offers a heartrending window into the lives of those displaced by the Syrian civil war and a scathing critique of the often absurd, unfeeling bureaucracies that determine their fates.

Our DANTES study guides are different! The Civil War and Reconstruction DANTES/DSST Study Guide teaches you everything that you need to know to pass the DSST test. This study guide has more than sample test questions. Our easy-to-understand study guide will teach you the information. We’ve condensed what you need to know into a manageable book—one that will leave you completely prepared to tackle the test. This study guide includes sample test questions that will test your knowledge and teach you new material.

Don't miss this FastReads book bundle, Money & Motivation. This bundle includes five summaries of best-selling books on money, motivation, and success to help you stay focused, achieve more, and make your money work harder for you. Each summary includes key takeaways and analysis of the original book to help you quickly absorb the author's wisdom in a distilled and easy-to-digest format. FastReads' summaries mean you save time and money listening to only what you need.

For years we’ve been inundated with bleak forecasts about the future. But in this electrifying new book, author Byron Reese debunks the pessimistic outlook as dangerous, and shows instead how technology will soon create a dramatically better world for every person on earth, beyond anything we have dared to imagine. With the art of a storyteller, Reese synthesizes history, technology, and sociology into an exciting, fast-moving narrative that shows how technological change has had dramatic effects on humanity in the past.

Serving for seventeen months during the period between the British surrender at Yorktown and the signing of the final treaty, a time when peace was far from secure, Deborah Sampson accomplished her deception by becoming an outstanding soldier. Alfred Young shows us why she did it and exactly how she carried it off. He meticulously reconstructs her early life as an indentured servant; her young adulthood as a weaver, teacher, and religious rebel; and her military career in the light infantry—followed by service as an orderly to a general at West Point.

More than a decade ago, counterterrorism expert Rita Katz began browsing white supremacist and neo-Nazi forums. The hateful rhetoric and constant threats of violence immediately reminded her of jihadist militants. Now, years of attacks committed by extremists radicalized online—including at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and mosques in New Zealand, as well as the Capitol siege—have brought home the danger. From ISIS to QAnon, Saints and Soldiers pinpoints the approaches needed for a new era in which arrests and military campaigns alone cannot stop never-before-seen threats.

Late on the evening of October 16, 1859, John Brown and his band of 18 raiders descended on Harpers Ferry at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. In an ill-fated attempt to incite a slave insurrection, they seized the federal arsenal, took hostages, and retreated to a fire engine house. The raiders were routed, and several were captured. Soon after, they were tried, convicted, and hanged. Among Brown's raiders were five African Americans whose lives and deaths have long been overshadowed by their martyred leader and, even today, are little remembered.

Timothy W. Crawford's The Power to Divide examines the use of wedge strategies, a form of divisive statecraft designed to isolate adversaries from allies and potential supporters to gain key advantages. With a multidimensional argument about the power of accommodation in competition, and a survey of alliance diplomacy around both World Wars, The Power to Divide artfully analyzes the past and future performance of wedge strategy in great power politics.

Executive Order 9981, issued by President Harry Truman on July 26, 1948, desegregated all branches of the United States military by decree. EO 9981 is often portrayed as a heroic and unexpected move by Truman. But in reality, Truman's history-making order was the culmination of more than 150 years of legal, political, and moral struggle.

When Norman Pearlstine - as editor in chief of Time Inc. - agreed to give prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald a reporter's notes of a conversation with a "confidential source", he was vilified for betraying the freedom of the press. But in this hard-hitting inside story, Pearlstine shows that "Plamegate" was not the clear case it seemed to be, and that confidentiality has become a weapon in the White House's war on the press - a war fought with the unwitting complicity of the press itself.

An urgent, prescient, and expert look at how future technology will change virtually every aspect of war as we know it and how we can respond to the serious national security challenges ahead. Future war is almost here: battles fought in cyberspace; biologically enhanced soldiers; autonomous...

Sun Tzu's iconic treatise, The Art of War, has been studied by military historians and strategists for centuries. The concepts he recommends remain as effective and his advice as perceptive today as it has ever been. However, The Art of War is certainly not only of use to individuals in the military. The principles he lays out are remarkably applicable to a wide variety of professions and situations, from business to politics to everyday interpersonal relationships.

Ersula J. Ore scrutinizes the civic roots of lynching, the relationship between lynching and white constitutionalism, and contemporary manifestations of lynching discourse and logic today. From the 1880s onward, lynchings, she finds, manifested a violent form of symbolic action that called a national public into existence, denoted citizenship, and upheld political community.

Farhana Qazi draws on her background as a pioneering counterterrorism professional and a devout Muslim to offer an insider’s view of what drives girls and women to join radical Islamic movements and how we can keep them from making this terrible choice.