Books in America at War series

As many as 20,000 women worked in Union and Confederate hospitals during America's bloodiest war. Black and white, and from various social classes, these women served as nurses, administrators, matrons, seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, and custodial workers. Jane E. Schultz provides the first full history of these female relief workers, showing how the domestic and military arenas merged in Civil War America, blurring the line between homefront and battlefront.Schultz uses government records, private manuscripts, and published sources by and about women hospital workers, some of whom are familiar--such as Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, Louisa May Alcott, and Sojourner Truth--but most of whom are not well-known. Examining the lives and legacies of these women, Schultz considers who they were, how they became involved in wartime hospital work, how they adjusted to it, and how they challenged it. She demonstrates that class, race, and gender roles linked female workers with soldiers, both black and white, but became sites of conflict between the women and doctors and even among themselves.Schultz also explores the women's postwar lives--their professional and domestic choices, their pursuit of pensions, and their memorials to the war in published narratives. Surprisingly few parlayed their war experience into postwar medical work, and their extremely varied postwar experiences, Schultz argues, defy any simple narrative of pre-professionalism, triumphalism, or conciliation.

Spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s, the United States was involved in two wars that were fought far from homeone in aid of South Korea against the neighboring Communist North Korea, and a second waged through the jungles of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Both of these engagements were a reaction to what American leaders feared as being Communist takeovers, and both created storms of political controversy and upheaval that still echo today. This book explores both wars in detail to help readers understand why the conflicts occurred and what their lasting effects have been.

Beginning with the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, World War I spiraled into a struggle lasting four years, leaving ten million dead, and affecting the lives of millions more. This investigation begins in the shaky political climate that helped foment a massive conflict that swept up the world. Students will learn about important battles and their outcomes, and be intrigued by sidebars that introduce concepts such as trench warfare and the Schlieffen Plan. Incredible, eye-catching images support this unforgettable survey.