A public-private partnership between the United States Military Academy and Rowan Technology Solutions reshapes the six chapters of the academy's History of Warfare on the Civil War to bring its specialist curriculum before a general audience.
Edited by Rogers, Seidule and Watson, three current members of the academy's history department, the volume assembles contributions from five of the country's most distinguished historians of the Civil War: Mark E. Neely Jr., Joseph T. Glatthaar, Steven E. Woodworth, Earl J. Hess and James K. Hogue. “The Civil War was the most traumatic event in the United States Military Academy’s history,” writes Seidule in the introduction. “During the 1850s, the Academy changed from an institution that promoted nationalism to a bitterly divided school.” The book begins with Neely's contribution on the border states and origins of the war and concludes with Hogue’s writings on Reconstruction. Glatthaar and Woodworth divide the war in the East and West between them, and Hess takes on strategy coordination and the final phases of the war. Threaded throughout the text are campaign and battle maps and an extensive collection of contemporary illustrations, including portraits, cartoons, leaflets, newspaper reproductions and posters. The 50-plus maps in the collection provide campaign overviews as well as timelines and deployment details illustrating chains of command, numbers of troops by unit and special equipment. The series about Ulysses Grant's campaign in the West, with three maps on the Kentucky campaign, five on successive operations against Vicksburg, and two others including Chickamauga, are exemplary. Also included in the volume are full-page illustrations of significant leaders—including Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox and the only confirmed photograph of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg—and the uniforms of different branches of the service.
The volume provides a richness of political context as well as showing how the war was transformed from an initial defense of the Union to a war for emancipation.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476782621
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | UNITED STATES | MILITARY | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
