Mass shootings have been on the rise in the United States since the early 2000s, but until the heartbreak of the 1 October 2017 Route 91 Harvest Music Festival, the citizens of Las Vegas had never experienced the violence and tragedy of this now all-too-frequent occurrence. That day, fifty-eight people were shot to death on site, while another two victims later died of their injuries. The 1 October incident physically wounded nearly 900 concert-goers, but psychologically impacted countless untold victims.
As individual and institutional response to urgent requests for help came in both during and after the 1 October catastrophe, those who call Las Vegas home struggled to cope with pain and grief. Now, editor Roberta Sabbath draws together a collection of personal essays, oral histories, interviews, scholarly writings, and commentaries to remember those whose lives were lost, and to honor survivors and their loved ones. Written five years after the tragedy, each contribution offers a unique story of healing, demonstrating the wide-ranging experiences and repercussions of the event. The essays in this collection represent a broad diversity of voices from political leaders, health professionals, first responders, community members, and incident survivors. This work is dedicated to those who lost their lives on 1 October 2017, to survivors and their loved ones, and to the caregivers—both individual and institutional—all of whom continue to keep Vegas Strong.
In the decades since the Vietnam War, veteran memoirs have influenced Americans’ understanding of the conflict. Yet few historians or literary scholars have scrutinized how the genre has shaped the nation’s collective memory of the war and its aftermath. Instead, veterans’ accounts are mined for colorful quotes and then dropped from public discourse; are accepted as factual sources with little attention to how memory, no matter how authentic, can diverge from events; or are not contextualized in terms of the race, gender, or class of the narrators.
Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War is a landmark study of the cultural heritage of the war in Vietnam as presented through the experience of its American participants. Crossing disciplinary borders in ways rarely attempted by historians, John A. Wood unearths truths embedded in the memoirists’ treatments of combat, the Vietnamese people, race relations in the United States military, male-female relationships in the war zone, and veterans’ postwar troubles. He also examines the publishing industry’s influence on collective memory, discussing, for example, the tendency of publishers and reviewers to privilege memoirs critical of the war. Veteran Narratives is a significant and original addition to the literature on Vietnam veterans and the conflict as a whole.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Massachusetts native Gilbert Thompson joined the regular army, which assigned him to the engineer battalion, a unit that provided critical support for the Union military effort in building bridges and roads and surveying and producing maps. While serving, Thompson kept a journal that eventually filled three volumes. The author’s early education in a utopian community called Hopedale left him well read, affording a journal peppered with literary allusions. Once the war ended, Corporal Thompson added some postwar reflections to create a unified single volume, which editor Mark A. Smith has carefully arranged so that the reader can clearly distinguish between Thompson’s contemporary accounts and his postwar reminiscences. An accomplished artist and topographer, Thompson illustrated his journals, adding depth to his narrative with portraits of key figures, drawings of ordinary scenes such as soldiers playing chess, and sights of the war. Additionally, he collected photographs both during and after the war, many of which are included.
Thompson’s wartime musings and postwar recollections have much to offer. Few diaries contain glimpses into the workings of a highly specialized unit such as the engineer battalion, and Thompson’s skills in depicting daily camp life in both words and pictures provide a distinctive look at the Union Army during the Civil War as well as an insightful look into the human condition. In his 1879 introduction, Thompson writes, “I wonder how I wrote as much and as well, and am thankful I was so fortunate as to have the opportunity to do so.” Students of the Civil War will feel fortunate he did.
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