“We frequently see one idea appear in one discipline as if it were new, when it migrated from another discipline, like a mole that had dug under a fence and popped up on the other side.” 

Taking note of this phenomenon, John Goldsmith and Bernard Laks embark on a uniquely interdisciplinary history of the genesis of linguistics, from nineteenth-century currents of thought in the mind sciences through to the origins of structuralism and the ruptures, both political and intellectual, in the years leading up to World War II. Seeking to explain where contemporary ideas in linguistics come from and how they have been justified, Battle in the Mind Fields investigates the porous interplay of concepts between psychology, philosophy, mathematical logic, and linguistics. Goldsmith and Laks trace theories of thought, self-consciousness, and language from the machine age obsession with mind and matter to the development of analytic philosophy, behaviorism, Gestalt psychology, positivism, and structural linguistics, emphasizing throughout the synthesis and continuity that has brought about progress in our understanding of the human mind. Arguing that it is impossible to understand the history of any of these fields in isolation, Goldsmith and Laks suggest that the ruptures between them arose chiefly from social and institutional circumstances rather than a fundamental disparity of ideas. 
 

During the morning hours of September 17, 1868, on a sandbar in the middle of the Republican River in eastern Colorado, a large group of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, Araphaho, and Sioux attacked about fifty civilian scouts under the command of Major George A. Forsyth. For two days the scouts held off repeated charges before the Indian warriors departed. For nine days, the scouts lived off the meat of their horses until additional forces arrived to relieve them. Five scouts were killed and eighteen wounded during the encounter that later came to be known as the Battle of Beecher Island.

Monnett's compelling study is the first to examine the Beecher Island Battle and its relationship to the overall conflict between American Indians and Euroamericans on the central plains of Colorado and Kansas during the late 1860s. Focusing on the struggle of the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers warrior society to defend the lands between the Republican River valley and the Smoky Hill River valley from Euroamerican encroachment, Monnett presents original reminiscences of American Indian and Euroamerican participants. Unlike many military studies of the Indian Wars, The Battle of Beecher Island also includes in-depth examinations of the viewpoints of homesteaders and the views of western railroad interests of the late nineteenth century.

The Battle of Kosovo cycle of heroic ballads is generally considered the finest work of Serbian folk poetry. Commemorating the Serbian Empire’s defeat at the hands of the Turks in the late fourteenth century, these poems and fragments have been known for centuries in Eastern Europe. With the appearance of the collections of Serbian folk poems by Vuk Stefanovic Karasdzic, the brilliance of the poetry in the Kosovo and related cycles of ballads was affirmed by poets and critics as deeply influential as Goethe, Jacob Brimm, Adam Mickiewicz, and Alexander Pushkin. Although translations into English have been attempted before, few of them, as Charles Simic notes in his preface, have been persuasive until now. Simic compares the movement of the verse in these translations to the “variable foot” effect of William Carlos Williams’s later poetry, and argues that John Matthias “grasps the poetic strategies of the anonymous Serbian poet as well as Pound did those of Chinese poetry.”

First published in 1987, the translation of the Battle of Kosovo is now reprinted both because of its intrinsic merits and because the recent crisis in Kosovo itself compels the entire world to understand the nature of the ancient conflicts and passions that fuel it. Although Matthias and Simic have elected to retain their original preface and introduction, Christopher Merrill, a scholar of the region and author of Only the Nails Remain, has contributed a brief afterword explaining the importance of this poetry in the context of NATO’s first military action ever against a sovereign nation.

Originally published in 1902 by the Government Printing Office (and revised and reprinted in 1909 and 1913), The Battle of Shiloh and the Organizations Engaged was the official park commission history of this important battle and remains a seminal work on the subject. Although the book is the cornerstone of Shiloh historiography and is extensively cited by serious historians, the original edition is not widely available today.  Timothy B. Smith redresses this problem with this new reprint of the 1913 edition for which he has written an introduction that places the important work in historical context.
 
Written by D. W. Reed, a veteran of the battle and the first official historian of the Shiloh National Military Park, The Battle of Shiloh and the Organizations Engaged provides a succinct and authoritative overview of the battle.  In addition to a narrative of the campaign, Reed describes the units engaged and the movements of every brigade.  In addition, he includes numerous tables of strengths and losses for the armies as well as remarkably detailed maps and diagrams showing the action as it unfolded.  These spectacular color maps are accessible in an enclosed CD in a PDF format. The net result is a compact yet detailed view of Shiloh unmatched anywhere else.
 
Even a century after its first publication, this book stands as one of the most dependable, concise, and important works on the Battle of Shiloh. This new edition makes this work accessible once again.
 
D. W. Reed was a veteran of the Battle of Shiloh and the first historian of the Shiloh National Military Park.

Timothy B. Smith is the author of This Great Battlefield of Shiloh: History, Memory, and the Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park and The Untold Story of Shiloh: The Battle and the Battlefield. He was a park ranger at the Shiloh National Military Park before accepting a teaching position at the University of Tennessee at Martin.

In The Battle of the Sexes in French Cinema, 1930–1956, Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier adopt a sociocultural approach to films made in France before, during, and after World War II, paying particular attention to the Occupation years (1940–44). The authors contend that the films produced from the 1930s until 1956—when the state began to subsidize the movie industry, facilitating the emergence of an "auteur cinema"—are important, both as historical texts and as sources of entertainment.

Citing more than 300 films and providing many in-depth interpretations, Burch and Sellier argue that films made in France between 1930 and 1956 created a national imaginary that equated masculinity with French identity. They track the changing representations of masculinity, explaining how the strong patriarch who saved fallen or troubled women from themselves in prewar films gave way to the impotent, unworthy, or incapable father figure of the Occupation. After the Liberation, the patriarch reemerged as protector and provider alongside assertive women who figured as threats not only to themselves but to society as a whole.

     History, we are often taught, is driven by vast social, political, and economic forces. But each political event, each war, each clash in the streets or at the picket lines, is experienced by individuals. It is this profound bond between public history and personal struggle, Alessandro Portelli contends, that gives oral history its significance and its power.
     In The Battle of Valle Giulia—the title comes from an Italian student protest of the 1960s—Portelli reflects on how to connect personal memories with history, how to fittingly collect and represent the complexity of memory. Crossing cultures, classes, and generations, he records the private and singular experiences of Italian steelworkers and Kentucky coal miners, veterans and refugees of World War II, soldiers who fought in Vietnam, Italian resistance fighters and Nazis, and members of student movements from Berkeley to Rome. By listening to those whom others presume are "without historical memory"—such as youthful protesters, or the rural Tuscan women who saw every father, son, and brother killed by Nazi soldiers—Portelli clarifies the process by which narratives come into being as oral history, and he illustrates the differences and distances between story-telling and history-telling.
     Portelli's articulate discussion of dialogue, representation, narrative and genre link historical analysis with literary and linguistic theory and with the concerns of contemporary anthropology.

From December 31, 1862, to January 2, 1863, the Army of the Cumberland and Army of Tennessee fought a bloody battle along Stones River. Led by Major General William S. Rosecrans, Union forces would eventually emerge victorious. Coming at the end of a series of Union defeats, this victory would give Lincoln and the Northern population a bright ray of hope during a fall and winter of reversals.

Decisions at Stones River introduces readers to critical decisions made by Confederate and Union commanders. Matt Spruill and Lee Spruill examine the decisions that shaped the way the campaign and battle unfolded. Rather than offering a history of the Battle of Stones River, the Spruills focus on the critical decisions, those decisions that had a major impact on both Federal and Confederate forces in shaping the progression of the battle as we know it today. This account is designed to present the reader with a coherent and manageable blueprint of the battle’s development. Exploring and studying the critical decisions allows the reader to progress from an understanding of “what happened” to “why events happened” as they did.

Complete with maps and a guided tour, Decisions at Stones River is an indispensable primer, and readers looking for a digestible introduction to the Battle of Stones River can tour this sacred ground—or read about it at their leisure—with key insights into why events unfolded as they did and a deeper understanding of the Civil War itself.

Decisions at Stones River is the first in a series of books that will explore the critical decisions of major campaigns and battles of the Civil War

Matt Spruill is a retired U. S. Army colonel and Civil War historian and lecturer. A former Gettysburg licensed battlefield guide he is the author of seven previously Civil War books including most recently Decisions at Gettysburg: The Nineteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Campaign and Winter Lightning: A Guide to the Battle of Stones River, second edition.

Lee Spruill is a retired U. S. Army lieutenant colonel and a combat veteran of the campaign in Afghanistan. He is the author of two previous book, including most recently Winter Lightning: A Guide to the Battle of Stones River, second edition.

Few thinkers better encapsulate the two polarities of economic and social thought in the twenty-first century than Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Wrestling with the horrors of world wars, the atrocities of fascist regimes, the hungers of the Great Depression, and the turbulence of political ideologies as they grew evermore pitted against one another, both sought a cure for modernity’s terrible problems and a safeguard against future catastrophes—a task that would leave them with completely different conclusions. In this book, Thomas Hörber offers a clear historical account of the work of these two great figures of modern economic thought.
           
Hoerber looks at the two central works that would alter the course of economic thought: Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Placing them within the context of the devastation that followed World War I, he explains how the historical conditions in which these books were written help us better understand how their lessons can illuminate the economic and political phenomena of our own era, such as the recent financial crisis, globalization, and European integration. He shows how Keynes’s emphasis on government regulation through monetary and fiscal policy and Hayek’s great cautions against the tyrannies that can so easily arise from central planning have led to competing schools of economic thought. Making accessible classic economic theory and employing a qualitative method of economics, he offers an articulated account of how history has led to our current economic environment.
           
With a broad perspective and incisive but clear examinations of important economic theories, this book places the two great economists of the twentieth-century within their historical context, illuminating how much we have learned—and can still learn—from them both.
 

A Vietnam War combat memoir from the perspective of an artilleryman.

Impact Zone documents Marine First Lieutenant James S. Brown's intense battle experiences, including those at Khe Sanh and Con Thien, throughout his thirteen months of service on the DMZ during 1967-68. This high-action account also reflects Brown's growing belief that the Vietnam War was mis-fought due to the unproductive political leadership of President Johnson and his administration. Brown's naiveté developed into hardening skepticism and cynicism as he faced the harsh realities of war, though he still managed to retain a sense of honor, pride, and patriotism for his country.

Impact Zone is a distinctive book on the Vietnam War because it is told from the perspective of an artilleryman, and the increasingly dangerous events gain momentum as they progress from one adventure to the next. Impact Zone is not only an important historical document of the Vietnam conflict, but also a moving record of the personal and emotional costs of war.

Loss and Redemption at St Vith closes a gap in the record of the Battle of the Bulge by recounting the exploits of the 7th Armored Division in a way that no other study has. Most accounts of the Battle of the Bulge give short-shrift to the interval during which the German forward progress stopped and the American counterattack began. This narrative centers on the 7th Armored Division for the entire length of the campaign, in so doing reconsidering the story of the whole battle through the lens of a single division and accounting for the reconstitution of the Division while in combat.

Mashairi Ya Vita Vya Kuduhu is a presentation and discussion of both manuscript and published versions of poems written by Lamu poets around the time of the Battle of Kuduhu. The poetic dialogue studied in this volume has played a significant role in the history of Swahili poetry, and its primary concern is to inform continued work in this area. The poems contained in this work were transmitted and preserved by speakers of Kiswahili and later collected and preserved by scholars. Chapter One contains the edited poems; Chapter Two consists of the translations. Subsequent chapters include accounts of the Battle of Kuduhu, editing and translating practices, and annotated poems and source versions. This work is presented as an example of the importance of research, fieldwork, and the consideration of available versions and alternative styles of presentation in the study of Swahili poetry.

These events are now seen as a foundational moment in Chicago’s storied past. With Rising up from Indian Country, noted historian Ann Durkin Keating richly recounts the Battle of Fort Dearborn while situating it within the context of several wider histories that span the nearly four decades between the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, in which Native Americans gave up a square mile at the mouth of the Chicago River, and the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, in which the American government and the Potawatomi exchanged five million acres of land west of the Mississippi River for a tract of the same size in northeast Illinois and southeast Wisconsin.

 

In the first book devoted entirely to this crucial period, Keating tells a story not only of military conquest but of the lives of people on all sides of the conflict. She highlights such figures as Jean Baptiste Point de Sable and John Kinzie and demonstrates that early Chicago was a place of cross-cultural reliance among the French, the Americans, and the Native Americans. Published to commemorate the bicentennial of the Battle of Fort Dearborn, this gripping account of the birth of Chicago will become required reading for anyone seeking to understand the city and its complex origins.       

“An outstanding guide…meets the needs of the serious students as well as the casual visitor.”
- Edwin Bearss, former chief historian of the National Park Service

In this guide, matt Spruill recounts the story of the November 1863 battle of Chattanooga using official reports and observations by commanding officers in their own words. The book is organized in the format still used by the military on staff rides, allowing the reader to understand how the battle was fought and why leaders made the decisions they did.

Unlike other books on the battle of Chattanooga, this work guides the reader through the battlefield, allowing both visitor and armchair traveler to see the battle through the eyes of its participants. Numerous tour “stops” take the reader through the battles for Chattanooga: Wauhatchie, Lookout mountain, Orchard Knob, Missionary Ridge, and Ringgold Gap. With easy-to-follow instructions, extensive tactical maps, eyewitness accounts, and editorial analyses, the reader is transported to the center of the action. Storming the heights offers new insights and covers key ground rarely seen by visitors to Chattanooga.

Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815 by Tom Kanon tells the often forgotten story of the central role citizens and soldiers from Tennessee played in the Creek War in Alabama and War of 1812.

Although frequently discussed as separate military conflicts, the War of 1812 against Great Britain and the Creek War against Native Americans in the territory that would become Alabama were part of the same forceful projection of growing American power. Success in both wars won for America security against attack from abroad and vast tracks of new land in “the Old Southwest.” In Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815, Tom Kanon explains the role Tennesseans played in these changes and how they remade the south.

Because it was a landlocked frontier state, Tennessee’s economy and security depended heavily upon the river systems that traversed the region; some, like the Tennessee River, flowed south out of the state and into Native American lands. Tennesseans of the period perceived that gaining mastery of these waterways formed an urgent part of their economic survival and stability.

The culmination of fifteen years’ research, Kanon’s work draws on state archives, primary sources, and eyewitness accounts, bringing the information in these materials together for first time. Not only does he narrate the military campaigns at the heart of the young nation’s expansion, but he also deftly recalls the economic and social pressures and opportunities that encouraged large numbers of Tennesseans to leave home and fight. He expertly weaves these themes into a cohesive narrative that culminates in the vivid military victories of the War of 1812, the Creek War, and the legendary Battle of New Orleans—the victory that catapulted Tennessee’s citizen-soldier Andrew Jackson to the presidency.

Expounding on the social roles and conditions of women, slaves, minorities, and Native Americans in Tennessee, Kanon also brings into focus the key idea of the “home front” in the minds of Tennesseans doing battle in Alabama and beyond. Kanon shows how the goal of creating, strengthening, and maintaining an ordered society permeated the choices and actions of the American elites on the frontiers of the young nation.

Much more than a history of Tennesseans or the battles they fought in Alabama, Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815, is the gripping story of a pivotal turning point in the history of the young American republic.

Around the turn of the last century, feelings of patriotism, nationalism, and sectional reconciliation swept the United States and led to a nationwide memorialization of American military history in general and the Civil War in particular. The 1894 establishment of the Shiloh National Military Park, for example, grew out of an effort by veterans themselves to preserve and protect the site of one of the Civil War’s most important engagements.

Returning to the Pittsburg Landing battlefield, Shiloh veterans organized themselves to push the Federal government into establishing a park to honor both the living participants in the battle and those who died there. In a larger sense, these veterans also contributed to the contemporaneous reconciliation of the North and the South by focusing on the honor, courage, and bravery of Civil War soldiers instead of continuing divisive debates on slavery and race.

This Great Battlefield of Shiloh tells the story of their efforts from the end of the battle to the park’s incorporation within the National Park Service in 1933. The War Department appointed a park commission made up of veterans of the battle. This commission surveyed and mapped the field, purchased land, opened roads, marked troop positions, and established the historical interpretation of the early April 1862 battle. Many aged veterans literally gave the remainder of their lives in the effort to plan, build, and maintain Shiloh National Military Park for all veterans. By studying the establishment and administration of parks such as the one at Shiloh, the modern scholar can learn much about the mindsets of both veterans and their civilian contemporaries regarding the Civil War. This book represents an important addition to the growing body of work on the history of national remembrance.


Timothy B. Smith is on staff at the Shiloh National Military Park. He is author of Champion Hill:  Decisive Battle for Vicksburg and This Great Battlefield of Shiloh:  History, Memory, and the Establishment of a Civil War National Military Park.

A masterpiece of prose and research, the definitive history of the struggle for Atlanta during the Civil War, an episode immortalized by the novel Gone with the Wind
Called “the greatest event of the Civil War” by New York diarist George Templeton Strong, the epic struggle for the city of Atlanta in the bloody summer of 1864 was a pivotal moment in American history. Union commander William Tecumseh Sherman’s relentless fight for the city secured the reelection of Abraham Lincoln, sealed the fate of the Southern Confederacy, and set a precedent for military campaigns that endures today. Its depiction in the novel and motion picture Gone with the Wind established the fight for Atlanta as an iconic episode in our nation’s most terrible war. In War Like the Thunderbolt: The Battle and Burning of Atlanta, award-winning author Russell S. Bonds takes the reader behind the lines and across the smoky battlefields of Peachtree Creek, Atlanta, Ezra Church, and Jonesboro, and into the lives of fascinating characters, both the famous and the forgotten, including the fiery and brilliant Sherman; General John Bell Hood, the Confederacy’s last hope to defend Atlanta; Benjamin Harrison, the diminutive young Indiana colonel who would rise to become President of the United States; Patrick Cleburne, the Irishmanturned- Southern officer; and ten-year-old diarist Carrie Berry, who bravely withstood and bore witness to the fall of the city. Here also is the dramatic story of the ordeal of Atlanta itself—the five-week artillery bombardment, the expulsion of its civilian population, and the infamous fire that followed. Based on new research in diaries, newspapers, previously unpublished letters, and other archival sources, War Like the Thunderbolt is a combination of captivating narrative and insightful military analysis—a stirring account of the battle and burning of the “Gate City of the South.”

The final book by Marquette University historian Frank L. Klement (1905-1994), this is a vivid chronological narrative of Wisconsin's role in the pivotal event in American history. In this volume, Klement greatly expanded his 1962 booklet on this topic, adding new material on each of Wisconsin's fifty-three infantry regiments, political and constitutional issues, soldiers voting, women and the war, and Wisconsin's black soldiers.

A Cuban woman who moved to New Orleans in the 1850s and eloped with her American lover, Loreta Janeta Velazquez fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy as the cross-dressing Harry T. Buford. As Buford, she single-handedly organized an Arkansas regiment; participated in the historic battles of Bull Run, Balls Bluff, Fort Donelson, and Shiloh; romanced men and women; and eventually decided that spying as a woman better suited her Confederate cause than fighting as a man. In the North, she posed as a double agent and worked to traffic information, drugs, and counterfeit bills to support the Confederate cause. She was even hired by the Yankee secret service to find "the woman . . . traveling and figuring as a Confederate agent"—Velazquez herself.

Originally published in 1876 as The Woman in Battle, this Civil War narrative offers Velazquez’s seemingly impossible autobiographical account, as well as a new critical introduction and glossary by Jesse Alemán. Scholars are divided between those who read the book as a generally honest autobiography and those who read it as mostly fiction. According to Alemán’s critical introduction, the book also reads as pulp fiction, spy memoir, seduction narrative, travel literature, and historical account, while it mirrors the literary conventions of other first-person female accounts of cross-dressing published in the United States during wartime, dating back to the Revolutionary War. Whatever the facts are, this is an authentic Civil War narrative, Alemán concludes, that recounts how war disrupts normal gender roles, redefines national borders, and challenges the definition of identity.