A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY5 start with B start with B
Dorothy Canfield Fisher, the prolific author of more than forty books, including translations, juveniles, and nonfiction, as well as novels and short-story collections, was one of the most popular and engaging American writers of the first half of the twentieth century. Although her work has been unduly neglected for several decades, it is currently enjoying a revival of critical attention. This colorful collection ranges in subject from New Englanders to the Basques of France to the struggles of African Americans to gain equal rights. Through her stories, many of which received literary awards, Fisher examined the complexities of modern life in the United States and abroad.
In addition to her writing, Fisher had a lifelong involvement in charitable work and social causes--so much so that Eleanor Roosevelt called her one of the most influential women of her time. As one of the earliest and most assertive members of the Book-of-the-Month Club selection committee, Fisher helped define literary taste in America for more than two decades. Mark J. Madigan discusses Fisher's extraordinary life and work in an Introduction and Afterword.
Because of Fisher's rare ability to distinguish enduring concerns from merely topical issues, her work will provide lasting pleasure for generations of readers to come.
As Faith shows, the believers in chemical weapons staffing the CWS allied with supporters in the military, government, and private industry to lobby to add chemical warfare to the country's permanent arsenal. Their argument: poison gas represented an advanced and even humane tool in modern war, while its applications for pest control and crowd control made a chemical capacity relevant in peacetime. But conflict with those aligned against chemical warfare forced the CWS to fight for its institutional life--and ultimately led to the U.S. military's rejection of battlefield chemical weapons.
The modern Middle East was forged in the crucible of the First World War, but few know the full story of how war actually came to the region. As Sean McMeekin reveals in this startling reinterpretation of the war, it was neither the British nor the French but rather a small clique of Germans and Turks who thrust the Islamic world into the conflict for their own political, economic, and military ends.
The Berlin-Baghdad Express tells the fascinating story of how Germany exploited Ottoman pan-Islamism in order to destroy the British Empire, then the largest Islamic power in the world. Meanwhile the Young Turks harnessed themselves to German military might to avenge Turkey’s hereditary enemy, Russia. Told from the perspective of the key decision-makers on the Turco-German side, many of the most consequential events of World War I—Turkey’s entry into the war, Gallipoli, the Armenian massacres, the Arab revolt, and the Russian Revolution—are illuminated as never before.
Drawing on a wealth of new sources, McMeekin forces us to re-examine Western interference in the Middle East and its lamentable results. It is an epic tragicomedy of unintended consequences, as Turkish nationalists give Russia the war it desperately wants, jihad begets an Islamic insurrection in Mecca, German sabotage plots upend the Tsar delivering Turkey from Russia’s yoke, and German Zionism midwifes the Balfour Declaration. All along, the story is interwoven with the drama surrounding German efforts to complete the Berlin to Baghdad railway, the weapon designed to win the war and assure German hegemony over the Middle East.
Roger Cunningham examines a lost history to show that, in addition to black regulars, hundreds of other black militiamen and volunteers from the Sunflower State provided military service from the Civil War until the dawn of the twentieth century. He tells how African Americans initially filled segregated companies hurriedly organized to defend the state from the threat of Confederate invasion, with some units ordered into battle around Kansas City. Then after the state constitution was amended to admit blacks into the Kansas National Guard, but its generals still refused to integrate, blacks served in reserve militia and independent companies and in all-black regiments that were raised for the Spanish-American and Philippine wars.
Cunningham has researched service records, African American newspapers, and official correspondence to give voice to these citizen-soldiers. He shares stories of real people like William D. Matthews, a captain in the First Kansas Colored Infantry who was refused a commission when his regiment was mustered into the Union army; Charles Grinsted, who commanded the first black militia company after the Civil War; and other unsung heroes.
More than a military history, Cunningham’s account records the quest of black men, many of them former slaves, for inclusion in American society. Many came from the bottom of the socioeconomic order and found that as militiamen they could gain respect within their communities. And by marching in public ceremonies and organizing fund-raising activities to compensate for lack of financial support from the state, they also strengthened the ties that bound African American communities together.
Here for the first time, Allen J. Frantzen traces these chivalric ideals from the Great War back to their origins in the Middle Ages and shows how they resulted in highly influential models of behavior for men in combat. Drawing on a wide selection of literature and images from the medieval period, along with photographs, memorials, postcards, war posters, and film from both sides of the front, Frantzen shows how such media shaped a chivalric ideal of male sacrifice based on the Passion of Jesus Christ. He demonstrates, for instance, how the wounded body of Christ became the inspiration for heroic male suffering in battle. For some men, the Crucifixion inspired a culture of revenge, one in which Christ's bleeding wounds were venerated as badges of valor and honor. For others, Christ's sacrifice inspired action more in line with his teachings—a daring stay of hands or reason not to visit death upon one's enemies.
Lavishly illustrated and eloquently written, Bloody Good will be must reading for anyone interested in World War I and the influence of Christian ideas on modern life.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press