front cover of A Bag of Marbles
A Bag of Marbles
Joseph Joffo
University of Chicago Press, 2000
When Joseph Joffo was ten years old, his father gave him and his brother fifty francs and instructions to flee Nazi-occupied Paris and, somehow, get to the south where France was free. Previously out of print, this book is a captivating and memorable story; readers will instinctively find themselves rooting for these children caught in the whirlwind of World War II.

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front cover of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Volume 5
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Volume 5
Edited by Peter Cozzens
University of Illinois Press, 2001

Indispensable must-reads for all Civil War buffs and historians, bringing together little-known and never before gathered first-hand accounts, articles, maps, and illustrations 

The first four volumes of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, published in the late nineteenth century, became the best-selling and most frequently cited works ever published on the Civil War. Volume 5, assembled by the acclaimed military historian Peter Cozzens, carries on the tradition of its namesake, offering a dazzling new collection of fresh material written by military and civilian leaders, North and South, on a broad array of war-related topics. Featured articles include General Grant on the second battle of Bull Run, General Beauregard on the Shiloh campaign, General Sherman on the conference at City Point, Joshua Chamberlain on the Fredericksburg campaign, and many more. Also presented are dozens of maps and more than one hundred illustrations.

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front cover of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Volume 6
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Volume 6
Edited by Peter Cozzens
University of Illinois Press, 2001

Sifting carefully through reports from newspapers, magazines, personal memoirs, and letters, Peter Cozzens' Volume 6 brings readers more of the best first-person accounts of marches, encampments, skirmishes, and full-blown battles, as seen by participants on both sides of the conflict. Alongside the experiences of lower-ranking officers and enlisted men are accounts from key personalities including General John Gibbon, General John C. Lee, and seven prominent generals from both sides offering views on "why the Confederacy failed." This volume includes one hundred and twenty illustrations, including sixteen previously uncollected maps of battlefields, troop movements, and fortifications.

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front cover of Biography of a Runaway Slave
Biography of a Runaway Slave
Miguel Barnet
Northwestern University Press, 2002

In this remarkable testimony, Cuban novelist and anthropologist Miguel Barnet presents the narrative of 105-year-old Esteban Montejo, who lived as a slave, as fugitive in the wilderness, and as a soldier in the Cuban War of Independence. Honest, blunt, compassionate, shrewd, and engaging, his voice provides an extraordinary insight into the African culture that took root in the Caribbean.

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front cover of Birkenau, The Camp Of Death
Birkenau, The Camp Of Death
Marco Nahon
University of Alabama Press, 1989

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The Black Seasons
Glowinski
Northwestern University Press, 2005
A mosaic of memories from a childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto and a life in hiding on the other side of the wall

When six-year-old Michal Glowinski first heard the adults around him speak of the ghetto, he understood only that the word was connected with moving-and conjured up a fantastical image of a many-storied carriage pulled through the streets by some umpteen horses. He was soon to learn that the ghetto was something else entirely. A half-century later, Glowinski, now an eminent Polish literary scholar, leads us haltingly into Nazi-occupied Poland. Scrupulously attentive to the distance between a child's experience and an adult's reflection, Glowinski revisits the images and episodes of his childhood: the emaciated violinist playing a Mendelssohn concerto on the ghetto streets; his game of chess with a Polish blackmailer threatening to deliver him to the Gestapo; and his eventual rescue by Catholic nuns in an impoverished, distant convent. In language at once spare and eloquent, Glowinski explores the horror of those years, the fragility of existence, and the fragmented nature of memory itself.

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A Blockaded Family
Life in Southern Alabama During the Civil War
Parthenia Hague
University of Alabama Press, 2005
Recounts how a frightened and war-weary household dealt with privations during the blockade imposed on the South by the federal navy

Parthenia Hague experienced the Civil War while employed as a schoolteacher on a plantation near Eufaula, Alabama. This book recounts how a frightened and war-weary household dealt with privations during the blockade imposed on the South by the federal navy. The memoir of Parthenia Hague is a detailed look at the ingenious industry and self-sufficiency employed by anxious citizens as the northern army closed in.
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front cover of Borders and Boundaries
Borders and Boundaries
How Women Experienced the Partition of India
Ritu Menon
Rutgers University Press, 1998
As an event of shattering consequence, the Partition of India remains significant today. While Partition sounds smooth on paper, the reality was horrific. More than eight million people migrated and one million died in the process. The forced migration, violence between Hindus and Muslims, and mass widowhood were unprecedented and well-documented. What was less obvious but equally real was that millions of people had to realign their identities, uncertain about who they thought they were. The rending of the social and emotional fabric that took place in 1947 is still far from mended.


While there are plenty of official accounts of Partition, there are few social histories and no feminist histories. Borders and Boundaries changes that, providing first-hand accounts and memoirs, juxtaposed alongside official government accounts. The authors make women not only visible but central. They explore what country, nation, and religious identity meant for women, and they address the question of the nation-state and the gendering of citizenship.


In the largest ever peace-time mass migration of people, violence against women became the norm. Thousands of women committed suicide or were done to death by their own kinsmen. Nearly 100,000 women were "abducted" during the migration. A young woman might have been separated from her family when a convoy was ambushed, abducted by people of another religion, forced to convert, and forced into marriage or cohabitation. After bearing a child, she would be offered the opportunity to return only if she left her child behind and if she could face shame in her natal community. These stories do not paint their subjects as victims. Theirs are the stories of battles over gender, the body, sexuality, and nationalism-stories of women fighting for identity.
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Borrowed Time
Survivors of Nazi Terezín Remember
Dennis Carlyle Darling
University of Texas Press, 2024

Documentation, through photographs and interviews, of those who survived the unique Nazi ghetto/camp located at Terezín, Czech Republic.

Dennis Carlyle Darling has photographed and interviewed hundreds of Holocaust survivors who spent time at the German transit camp and ghetto at Terezín, a former eighteenth-century military garrison located north of Prague. Many of the prisoners were kept there until they could be transported to Auschwitz or other camps, but unlike German captives elsewhere, they were allowed to participate in creative activities that the Nazis used for propaganda purposes to show the world how well they were treating Jews. Although it was not classified as a “death camp,” more than 33,000 prisoners died at Terezín from hunger, disease, and mistreatment.

In Borrowed Time, Darling reveals Terezín as a place of painful contradictions, through striking and intimate portraits that retrace time and place with his subjects, the last remnants of those who survived the experience. Returning to sites of painful memories with his interview subjects to photograph them, Darling respectfully depicts these survivors and tells their stories.

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front cover of A Boy in Terezín
A Boy in Terezín
The Private Diary of Pavel Weiner, April 1944–April 1945
Pavel Weiner
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Written by a Czech Jewish boy, A Boy in Terezín covers a year of Pavel Weiner's life in the Theresienstadt transit camp in the Czech town of Terezín from April 1944 until liberation in April 1945. 

The Germans claimed that Theresienstadt was "the town the Führer gave the Jews," and they temporarily transformed it into a Potemkin village for an International Red Cross visit in June 1944, the only Nazi camp opened to outsiders. But the Germans lied. Theresienstadt was a holding pen for Jews to be shipped east to annihilation camps. 

While famous and infamous figures and historical events flit across the pages, they form the background for Pavel's life. Assigned to the now-famous Czech boys' home, L417, Pavel served as editor of the magazine Ne?ar. Relationships, sports, the quest for food, and a determination to continue their education dominate the boys' lives. Pavel's father and brother were deported in September 1944; he turned thirteen (the age for his bar mitzvah) in November of that year, and he grew in his ability to express his observations and reflect on them. A Boy in Terezín registers the young boy's insights, hopes, and fears and recounts a passage into maturity during the most horrifying of times.
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front cover of The Boy of Battle Ford and the Man
The Boy of Battle Ford and the Man
W. S. Blackman
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012

A classic story of a young man’s journey to adulthood, The Boy of Battle Ford covers Blackman’s years growing up in early post-settlement Illinois, where he gave in to temptations such as drinking, gambling, and the lure of prostitutes before joining the army, finding God and becoming a preacher. Blackman, who notes that he is determined to “write facts” in this book,   peppers his story with the sordid details of the sinful times of his life as well as with discussions of faith and of struggling to understand his God and his beliefs.

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front cover of Boy Soldier of the Confederacy
Boy Soldier of the Confederacy
The Memoir of Johnnie Wickersham
Edited by Kathleen Gorman
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

Johnnie Wickersham was fourteen when he ran away from his Missouri home to fight for the Confederacy. Fifty years after the war, he wrote his memoir at the request of family and friends and distributed it privately in 1915. Boy Soldier of the Confederacy: The Memoir of Johnnie Wickersham offers not only a rare look into the Civil War through the eyes of a child but also a coming-of-age story.

Edited by Kathleen Gorman, the volume presents a new introduction and annotations that explain how the war was glorified over time, the harsh realities suppressed in the nation’s collective memory. Gorman describes a man who nostalgically remembers the boy he once was. She maintains that the older Wickersham who put pen to paper decades later likely glorified and embellished the experience, accepting a polished interpretation of his own past.

Wickersham recounts that during his first skirmish he was "wild with the ecstasy of it all" and notes that he was "too young to appreciate the danger." The memoir traces his participation in an October 1861 Confederate charge against Springfield, Missouri; his fight at the battle of Pea Ridge in March 1862; his stay at a plantation he calls Fairyland; and the battle of Corinth.

The volume details Wickersham’s assignment as an orderly for General Sterling Price, his capture at Vicksburg in 1863, his parole, and later his service with General John Bell Hood for the 1864 fighting around Atlanta. Wickersham also describes the Confederate surrender in New Orleans, the reconciliation of the North and the South, and his own return and reunification with his family.

While Gorman’s incisive introduction and annotations allow readers to consider how memories can be affected by the passage of time, Wickersham’s boy-turned-soldier tale offers readers an engaging narrative, detailing the perceptions of a child on the cusp of adulthood during a turbulent period in our nation’s history.

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Budapest Blackout
A Holocaust Diary
by Máriá Mádi, edited by James W. Oberly
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
Mária Mádi (1898–1970) was a Roman Catholic Hungarian physician living in Budapest during World War II. Stuck in the city, she vowed to become a witness to events as they unfolded and began keeping a diary to chronicle her everyday life, as well as the lives of her Jewish neighbors, during what would be the darkest periods of the Holocaust. From the time Hungary declared war on the United States in December 1941 until she secured an immigrant’s visa to the US in late 1946, she wrote nearly daily in English, offering current-day readers one of the most complete pictures of ordinary life during the Holocaust in Hungary. In the form of letters to her American relatives, Mádi addressed a wide range of subjects, from the fate of small countries like Hungary caught between the major powers of Germany and the Soviet Union, to the Nazi pogrom against Budapest’s Jews, to family news and the price of food.

Mádi’s family donated the entire collection of her diaries to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. This edition transcribes a selection of Mádi’s writings focusing on the period of March 1944 to November 1945, from the Nazi invasion and occupation of Hungary, through the Battle of Budapest, to the ensuing Soviet occupation. While bearing witness to the catastrophe in Hungary, Mádi hid a Jewish family in her small flat from October 1944 to February 1945. She received a posthumous Righteous among Nations Medal from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.

Editorial commentary by James W. Oberly situates Mádi’s observations, and a critical introduction by the Holocaust scholar András Lénárt outlines the wider sociopolitical context in which her diaries gain meaning.
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