A personal account by a war historian and adoptee who discovers his biological father was a famous Marine combat photographer in Vietnam.
 
Robert K. Brigham has had a substantial career as a historian of the Vietnam War, with a hand in nine books, a documentary, public history projects, and more. While many a historian has felt compelled at some point to write about a subject close to them personally, Brigham did not think he was doing that. But, at age fifty-eight, Brigham, who had long known he was adopted, discovered that he’d improbably and unknowingly been studying and talking about his biological father for decades. That man, Bruce Atwell, was a Marine Corps photographer who took some of that war’s most indelible and widely reproduced pictures. Brigham had used those images over and over again in decades’ worth of classes and public lectures, never knowing the truth.
 
Both Brigham and Atwell were products of the American foster care and adoption system, and both were defined professionally by Vietnam. In a story shot through with echoes and shadows, Brigham not only reveals his own history as an adoptee but opens a startlingly fresh vantage on the fragility of American families; the power of social norms and taboos to shape lives; and the forces that inequitably disrupt families, not least of them war. The result is an accessible and moving book that is at once both a powerful personal story and an illuminating social critique.

 

This is an audiobook version of this book.

A personal account by a war historian and adoptee who discovers his biological father was a famous Marine combat photographer in Vietnam.
 
Robert K. Brigham has had a substantial career as a historian of the Vietnam War, with a hand in nine books, a documentary, public history projects, and more. While many a historian has felt compelled at some point to write about a subject close to them personally, Brigham did not think he was doing that. But, at age 58, Brigham, who had long known he was adopted, discovered that he’d improbably and unknowingly been studying and talking about his real father for decades. That man, Bruce Atwell, was a Marine Corps photographer who took some of that war’s most indelible and widely reproduced pictures. Brigham had used those images over and over again in decades’ worth of classes and public lectures, never knowing the truth.
 
Both Brigham and Atwell were products of the American foster care and adoption system, and both were defined professionally by Vietnam. In a story shot through with echoes and shadows, Brigham not only reveals his own history as an adoptee but opens a startlingly fresh vantage on the fragility of American families; the power of social norms and taboos to shape lives; and the forces that inequitably disrupt families, not least of them war. The result is an accessible and moving book that is at once both a powerful personal story and an illuminating social critique.

The state of Iowa is named for the Ioways, but most Iowans—and most Americans—know little about them. In This Is the Route of My Forefathers, William Green elevates an understudied history by synthesizing oral traditions, written records, and archaeological data to decode the 1837 map drafted by Ioway leaders. Spanning Indigenous settlements from Missouri to Wisconsin, this map was created to depict tribal history and defend tribal land claims at the height of the Indian removal era.

Illustrating nearly 200 years of Ioway history, the 1837 Ioway map provides insights into the tribe’s political and diplomatic strategies, their relationships with neighboring nations, and how they resisted and negotiated in the face of dispossession. This Is the Route of My Forefathers uses an interdisciplinary approach to reveal how group accounts may fade over time, while accounts of origin—legendary histories—remain rich and vibrant.