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Saber’s Edge
A Combat Medic in Ramadi, Iraq
Thomas A. Middleton
University Press of New England, 2010
The National Guardsman, the citizen soldier called upon to fight for this nation in a time of war, is one of the least understood — and perhaps one of the most compelling — figures of the Iraq War. Saber’s Edge is the story of a middle-aged Vermont firefighter called upon to be a soldier in the worst place on earth — Ramadi, Iraq. In a few short weeks Thomas A. Middleton went from being a suburban dad to a combat medic traveling between platoons, filling in for other medics and engaging in some of the fiercest and most crucial fighting of the war. This is the war as experienced from the ground level: days of tedium interspersed with the adrenalin of combat; moments of lighthearted laughter broken by the sorrow of loss. This is also the story of the unique wartime perspective of our guardsmen. Unlike the raw, unformed young recruit, the mature guardsman often comes with the burdens of family, experience, and a developed sense of self. Accordingly, Sgt. Middleton’s story chronicles the inner conflict created by his long-time professional role as a healer and his newfound life as a warrior in the urban battlefields of Iraq. Thrust into a culture and theater of war that he is little equipped or trained for, the author tries to make sense of his actions. Coarsened by combat and increasingly disdainful of the local population, he receives solace and insight from his life-long faith and ultimately emerges as a man who understands his role in the world. Saber’s Edge is also the story of the Green Mountain Boys of Task Force Saber: a story of comradeship and communion amid fierce street fighting in a crucial theater of the Iraq War (the eventual site of the “Al Anbar Awakening”). Based on the author’s first-hand experiences and interviews with other soldiers, Saber’s Edge presents a riveting account of modern urban warfare and the inspiring story of one man reconciling his actions in warfare.
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Scouting with the Buffalo Soldiers
John P. Langellier
University of North Texas Press, 2020

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Seeing the Elephant
RAW RECRUITS AT THE BATTLE OF SHILOH
Joseph Allan Frank and George A. Reaves
University of Illinois Press, 1989
One of the bloodiest battles in the Civil War, the two-day engagement near Shiloh, Tennessee, in April 1862 left more than 23,000 casualties. Fighting alongside seasoned veterans were more than 160 newly recruited regiments and other soldiers who had yet to encounter serious action. In the phrase of the time, these men came to Shiloh to “see the elephant.”
Drawing on the letters, diaries, and other reminiscences of these raw recruits on both sides of the conflict, “Seeing the Elephant” gives a vivid and valuable primary account of the terrible struggle.
From the wide range of voices included in this volume emerges a nuanced picture of the psychology and motivations of the novice soldiers and the ways in which their attitudes toward the war were affected by their experiences at Shiloh.
 
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Shadow of Shiloh
Major General Lew Wallace in the Civil War
Gail Stephens
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2010
Thirty-two years after the battle of Shiloh, Lew Wallace returned to the battlefield, mapping the route of his April 1862 march. Ulysses S. Grant, Wallace's commander at Shiloh, expected Wallace and his Third Division to arrive early in the afternoon of April 6. Wallace and his men, however, did not arrive until nightfall, and in the aftermath of the bloodbath of Shiloh Grant attributed Wallace's late arrival to a failure to obey orders. By mapping the route of his march and proving how and where he had actually been that day, the sixty-seven-year-old Wallace hoped to remove the stigma of "Shiloh and its slanders." That did not happen. Shiloh still defines Wallace's military reputation, overshadowing the rest of his stellar military career and making it easy to forget that in April 1862 he was a rising military star, the youngest major general in the Union army. Wallace was devoted to the Union, but he was also pursuing glory, fame, and honor when he volunteered to serve in April 1861. In Shadow of Shiloh: Major General Lew Wallace in the Civil War, author Gail Stephens specifically addresses Wallace's military career and its place in the larger context of Civil War military history.
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Sherman
A Soldier's Passion for Order
John F. Marszalek
Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order is the premier biography of William Tecumseh Sherman, the Civil War commander known for his “destructive war” policy against Confederates and as a consummate soldier. This updated edition of John F. Marszalek’s award-winning book presents the general as a complicated man who, fearing anarchy, searched for the order that he hoped would make his life a success.

Sherman was profoundly influenced by the death of his father and his subsequent relationship with the powerful Whig politician Thomas Ewing and his family. Although the Ewings treated Sherman as one of their own, the young Sherman was determined to make it on his own. He graduated from West Point and moved on to service at military posts throughout the South. This volume traces Sherman’s involvement in the Mexican War in the late 1840s, his years battling prospectors and deserting soldiers in gold-rush California, and his 1850 marriage to his foster sister, Ellen. Later he moved to Louisiana, and, after the state seceded, Sherman returned to the North to fight for the Union.

Sherman covers the general’s early Civil War assignments in Kentucky and Missouri and his battles against former Southern friends there, the battle at Shiloh, and his rise to become second only to Grant among the Union leadership. Sherman’s famed use of destructive war, controversial then and now, is examined in detail. The destruction of property, he believed, would convince the Confederates that surrender was their best option, and Sherman’s successful strategy became the stuff of legend.

This definitive biography, which includes forty-six illustrations, effectively refutes misconceptions surrounding the controversial Union general and presents Sherman the man, not the myth.

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Sherman's Forgotten General
Henry W. Slocum
Brian C. Melton
University of Missouri Press, 2007

Henry Warner Slocum, a Union major general who was a corps and army commander in the Civil War, served from the first call for troops until he stood with William Tecumseh Sherman to receive Joseph E. Johnston’s surrender after Appomattox. He saw action at Bull Run, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, and by the end of the war he had taken command of the Army of Georgia, yet historians have largely overlooked this key commander.

            Brian Melton has written the first scholarly account of this important general—the first full-length biography in nearly a century—who as one of Sherman’s most trusted commanders exercised significant influence during the Civil War. Although Slocum is remembered primarily for his lackluster performance at Gettysburg, Melton discloses that there is more to him than current history credits, offering a holistic account of his life to show that his career was much more significant than has been supposed.

            Slocum took on the characteristics of the leaders he served, and Melton reveals how Slocum’s attitudes and tactics changed dramatically between commanders to explain why he proved to be of little help to George McClellan and almost a liability while serving under “Fighting Joe” Hooker and yet was an effective commander under Sherman. Slocum became Sherman’s “left arm” and adapted so thoroughly to his style of generalship that he anticipated the general’s intentions on two important occasions, and Melton contends that Slocum was a much more important contributor to the success of Sherman’s later campaigns than has been acknowledged, becoming at times more aggressive and driving than Sherman himself.

            Melton ultimately considers Slocum’s fate as one of the forgotten generals of the Civil War—brought on largely by his joining the Democratic Party in 1865—and demonstrates why previous simplistic depictions of Slocum miss the mark. By providing the first detailed look at this important second-tier commander, Sherman’s Forgotten General illuminates the influences, events, and individuals of Slocum’s career to show that, while he may not have changed the course of the war, he played a conspicuous and important role in its successful execution that has long deserved to be recognized.

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Sioux War Dispatches
Reports from the Field, 1876-1877
Marc H. Abrams
Westholme Publishing, 2012

Rare, First-Hand Accounts from Newspaper Correspondents Describing the Course of America’s Largest Indian War, Compiled and Edited for the First Time in One Volume

“No one commands better the story of the Great Sioux War of 1876–1877 as presented in the nation’s newspapers than does Marc Abrams. Here is Abrams’s story of America’s greatest Indian war woven from those timely reports, augmented with insightful introductions and annotations. Abrams has produced a significant addition to the historiography of this endlessly fascinating struggle and its colorful personalities.” —Paul L. Hedren, author of After Custer: Loss and Transformation in Sioux Country

“Marc Abrams has provided an invaluable service to both scholars and lay readers in compiling this treasure trove of primary information. Like the correspondents he has come to know through his research, Marc has done the hard work; we need only read in comfort and benefit from his efforts.” —Douglas W. Ellison, author of Sole Survivor: An Examination of the Frank Finkel Narrative

“Marc Abrams’s book is an exciting and innovative approach that brings immediacy to the campaigns of Custer, Crook, and Miles, and teems with fascinating new detail. Sioux War Dispatches not only offers a gripping contemporary window into those times, it fills an important reference need as well.” —Jerome A. Greene, author of Stricken Field: The Little Bighorn Since 1876

Sioux War Dispatches: Reports from the Field, 1876-1877, tells the story of the Great Sioux War, including the battle of the Little Big Horn, primarily through the eyes of contemporary newspaper correspondents, both civilian and military. The volume begins with the Black Hills dilemma and the issue of the unceded territory (the disputed lands that were adjacent to the Great Sioux Reservation) and continues through to the spring of 1877 with the surrender of the legendary Sioux leader Crazy Horse. Along the way readers will learn about the Reynolds battle, the skirmish at Tongue River Heights, the battle of the Rosebud, the battle of the Little Big Horn, the skirmish at Warbonnet Creek, the fight at Slim Buttes, and more. In addition to numerous annotated excerpts from those who were there, are rare original dispatches, reprinted in full, that will take readers on a wild ride through several battles.
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Small Arms at Gettysburg
Infantry and Cavalry Weapons in America's Greatest Battle
Joseph G. Bilby
Westholme Publishing, 2023

The Effect of Soldiers’ Weapons on the Turning Point of the Civil War
The three-day battle of Gettysburg has probably been the subject of more books and articles than any other comparable event. Surprisingly, until this work, no one has analyzed the firearms and other individual soldier’s weapons used at Gettysburg in any great detail. The battle was a watershed, with military weapons technologies representing the past, present, and future—sabers, smoothbores, rifles, and breechloaders—in action alongside each other, providing a unique opportunity to compare performance and use, as well as determining how particular weapons and their deployment affected the outcome and course of the battle.
Small Arms at Gettysburg: Infantry and Cavalry Weapons in America’s Greatest Battle covers all of the individual soldier’s weapons—muskets, rifle-muskets, carbines, repeaters, sharpshooter arms, revolvers, and swords—providing a detailed examination of their history and development, technology, capabilities, and use on the field at Gettysburg. Here we learn that the smoothbore musket, although beloved by some who carried it, sang its swan song, the rifle-musket began to come into its own, and the repeating rifle, although tactically mishandled, gave a glimpse of future promise. This is the story of the weapons and men who carried them into battle during three days in July 1863.

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Snake's Daughter
The Roads in and out of War
Gail Hosking Gilberg
University of Iowa Press, 1997

Gail Hosking Gilberg's father was a hero, a valiant soldier decorated posthumously with the Medal of Honor, a man who served his country throughout his entire adult life. But Charles Hosking was a mystery to his daughter. He was killed in Vietnam a week after her seventeenth birthday. She buried the war, the protests, the medal, and her military upbringing along with her father, so much so that she felt cut off from herself. It took more than twenty years for her to recognize the stirrings of a father and a daughter not yet at peace.

Gilberg began a journey—two journeys really—to find out who her father was and in the process to find herself. She explored her buried rage, shame, and silence, and examined how war had shaped her life. In studying the photo albums that her father had left behind, Gilberg found that the photographs demanded that she give voice to her feelings, then release her silent words, words that had no meaning in war for her father yet had all the meaning in the world for her. The result was an epiphany. The photographs became the roads she took in and out of war, and her words brought her father home. Snake's Daughter reveals the crossroads where a soldier father's life and a daughter's life connect.

Snake's Daughter is an arresting and anguished narrative that gives voice to an experience Gail Hosking Gilberg shares with thousands of Americans, including military “brats” whose parents served their country and often gave their lives in the process.

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A Soldier in World War I
The Diary of Elmer W. Sherwood
Robert H. Ferrell
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2004
In April 1917 a sophomore at Indiana University, inspired by his grandfather's service in the Union army during the Civil War, left school and enlisted with a National Guard unit in Indianapolis that became the 150th Field Artillery Regiment. Before long the young man, Elmer W. Sherwood, found himself fighting in France. Sherwood kept a diary of his time overseas, including his experiences in the army of occupation following the war's end. A Soldier in World War I: The Diary of Elmer W. Sherwood captures the words of the Hoosier as he wrote them on the front lines. The book also includes a shipboard diary Sherwood sent home from France shortly after his arrival, which appeared in his hometown newspaper.
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Soldiers on the Home Front
The Domestic Role of the American Military
William C. Banks and Stephen Dycus
Harvard University Press, 2016

When crisis requires American troops to deploy on American soil, the country depends on a rich and evolving body of law to establish clear lines of authority, safeguard civil liberties, and protect its democratic institutions and traditions. Since the attacks of 9/11, the governing law has changed rapidly even as domestic threats—from terror attacks, extreme weather, and pandemics—mount. Soldiers on the Home Front is the first book to systematically analyze the domestic role of the military as it is shaped by law, surveying America’s history of judicial decisions, constitutional provisions, statutes, regulations, military orders, and martial law to ask what we must learn and do before the next crisis.

America’s military is uniquely able to save lives and restore order in situations that overwhelm civilian institutions. Yet the U.S. military has also been called in for more coercive duties at home: breaking strikes, quelling riots, and enforcing federal laws in the face of state resistance. It has spied on and overseen the imprisonment of American citizens during wars, Red scares, and other emergencies. And while the fears of the Republic’s founders that a strong army could undermine democracy have not been realized, history is replete with reasons for concern.

At a time when the military’s domestic footprint is expanding, Banks and Dycus offer a thorough analysis of the relevant law and history to challenge all the stakeholders—within and outside the military—to critically assess the past in order to establish best practices for the crises to come.

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Southern Unionist Pamphlets and the Civil War
Edited by Jon L. Wakelyn
University of Missouri Press, 1999

During the Civil War, many southerners expressed serious opposition to secession and openly entreated their fellow southerners to maintain support for the Union. A number of these unionists actively opposed the Confederacy while remaining within its borders; others fled their homes and the South, becoming exiles in northern cities and the border slave states. The southern unionist leaders used their oral and written communication skills to proclaim their opposition to the Confederacy, often producing pamphlets that circulated in the North, in the border states, and in the heart of the Confederacy itself. Jon L. Wakelyn unites the voices of these southern unionists in the first comprehensive collection of their written arguments—Southern Unionist Pamphlets and the Civil War.

Including eighteen pamphlets and a discussion of twenty-two others, this book provides a magnificent representation of the southern unionists and their concerns. Written between 1861 and 1865, the pamphlets were compiled by local and national political leaders, including three federal congressmen and future vice president and president Andrew Johnson, as well as concerned private citizens and members of the military and clergy. Except for Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia, all Confederate and border slave states are represented in this collection.

The topics discussed and the events described in the pamphlets cover a wide range of subjects. The authors discuss their motivation to remain loyal to the union, the actions of their friends and enemies, the perilous life of unionists behind military lines, their continued support for the federal government, and their hopes for a restored Union. Aware that their northern allies would read these pamphlets, the unionists also wrote to solicit northern aid, to renew efforts to defeat the Confederacy, and to gain sympathy for the plight of their people behind enemy lines.

A remarkable collection of primary source material, Southern Unionist Pamphlets and the Civil War provides the most detailed study of the internal resistance to the Confederacy available to date. Students, scholars, and general readers alike will find this volume an invaluable resource for Civil War studies.

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Steel Helmet and Mortarboard
An Academic in Uncle Sam's Army
Francis H. Heller
University of Missouri Press, 2009
As a young officer candidate in the Austrian army in 1938, Francis Heller put himself at risk by refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. Had he stayed in Vienna, he would have been arrested by the Gestapo as a supporter of Austrian independence and an enemy of the Nazis. But he managed to escape into Czechoslovakia under cover of darkness. He subsequently made his way to America, where he finally pursued the academic career that military service had interrupted.
            Steel Helmet and Mortarboard is the story of this Austrian refugee who earned an American law degree in 1941 and set his sights on studying political science but a year later was drafted into the U.S. Army. In his second military career, Heller opted for service as an enlisted man in a combat unit. After basic training, he was assigned as a private in a regular army division. Then in a field artillery unit, he so distinguished himself in combat in the Pacific theater that he received a battlefield commission and went on to serve in the early months of the occupation of Japan—and on one assignment, escorting German nationals home from the Far East, found himself back in Europe and witnessing evidence of the horrors at Dachau that he himself had barely managed to escape.
Heller’s account of those years recalls how an upper-middle-class émigré adjusted to military life while serving in such combat zones as New Guinea and the Philippines, then how he later resumed his academic career, earned his Ph.D., and went on to teach at the University of Kansas. But Heller’s return to academic life was anything but final: recalled to active duty for the Korean War, he also served in later years with the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.
After a lifetime of changing hats—mortarboard for helmet and back again—Heller, now in his nineties, has recorded his unique perceptions as an educated observer of the world. Steel Helmet and Mortarboard is an absorbing narrative of one individual’s experiences across a spectrum of personal and professional challenges, written with wry humor and insight that reflect a keen ability to master whatever circumstances life brings.
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Supplying Custer
The Powder River Supply Depot, 1876
Gerald R. Clark
University of Utah Press, 2014
The Battle of the Little Bighorn is one of the best-known events in the history of the American West. Questions surrounding Custer’s fate have been discussed and researched at length, but details about the transportation and logistics of military supplies have not been thoroughly investigated. Archaeologist Gerald Clark stumbled upon the remnants of a supply depot while surveying the area near the confluence of the Yellowstone and Powder Rivers. It turned out to have been established by General Terry during the Sioux War and utilized by Custer and part of the 7th Calvary.
     The book details the items recovered archaeologically, including ale and soda bottles, cartridges, packing crates, and a horseshoe and ceramic doll. It also addresses the army’s knowledge of this area and how the supply depot fit into the broader military campaign. This book connects archaeology and history to explore how the American military planned, maneuvered, and operated on the northern plains from the end of the Civil War through 1876.
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The Sword & the Pen
A Life of Lew Wallace
Ray E. Boomhower
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2005


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