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Author: Michael C. C. Adams Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press ISBN: 1421421453 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
A senior military historian presents an unflinching account of the human costs of the Civil War. Many Americans, argues Michael C. C. Adams, tend to think of the Civil War as more glorious, less awful, than the reality. Millions of tourists flock to battlefields each year as vacation destinations, their perceptions of the war often shaped by reenactors who work hard for verisimilitude but who cannot ultimately simulate mutilation, madness, chronic disease, advanced physical decay. In Living Hell, Adams tries a different tack, clustering the voices of myriad actual participants on the firing line or in the hospital ward to create a virtual historical reenactment. Perhaps because the United States has not seen conventional war on its own soil since 1865, the collective memory of its horror has faded, so that we have sanitized and romanticized even the experience of the Civil War. Neither film nor reenactment can fully capture the hard truth of the four-year conflict. Living Hell presents a stark portrait of the human costs of the Civil War and gives readers a more accurate appreciation of its profound and lasting consequences. Adams examines the sharp contrast between the expectations of recruits versus the realities of communal living, the enormous problems of dirt and exposure, poor diet, malnutrition, and disease. He describes the slaughter produced by close-order combat, the difficulties of cleaning up the battlefields—where tens of thousands of dead and wounded often lay in an area of only a few square miles—and the resulting psychological damage survivors experienced. Drawing extensively on letters and memoirs of individual soldiers, Adams assembles vivid accounts of the distress Confederate and Union soldiers faced daily: sickness, exhaustion, hunger, devastating injuries, and makeshift hospitals where saws were often the medical instrument of choice. Inverting Robert E. Lee’s famous line about war, Adams suggests that too many Americans become fond of war out of ignorance of its terrors. Providing a powerful counterpoint to Civil War glorification, Living Hell echoes William Tecumseh Sherman’s comment that war is cruelty and cannot be refined. Praise for Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861–1865 "This excellent and provocative work concludes with a chapter suggesting how the image of Southern military superiority endured in spite of defeat."—Civil War History "Adams's imaginative connections between culture and combat provide a forceful reminder that Civil War military history belongs not in an encapsulated realm, with its own categories and arcane language, but at the center of the study of the intellectual, social, and psychological currents that prevailed in the mid-nineteenth century."—Journal of American History Praise for The Best War Ever: America and World War II "Adams has a real gift for efficiently explaining complex historical problems."—Reviews in American History "Not only is this mythologizing bad history, says Adams, it is dangerous as well. Surrounding the war with an aura of nostalgia both fosters the delusion that war can cure our social ills and makes us strong again, and weakens confidence in our ability to act effectively in our own time."—Journal of Military History
Author: Michael C. C. Adams Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press ISBN: 1421421453 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
A senior military historian presents an unflinching account of the human costs of the Civil War. Many Americans, argues Michael C. C. Adams, tend to think of the Civil War as more glorious, less awful, than the reality. Millions of tourists flock to battlefields each year as vacation destinations, their perceptions of the war often shaped by reenactors who work hard for verisimilitude but who cannot ultimately simulate mutilation, madness, chronic disease, advanced physical decay. In Living Hell, Adams tries a different tack, clustering the voices of myriad actual participants on the firing line or in the hospital ward to create a virtual historical reenactment. Perhaps because the United States has not seen conventional war on its own soil since 1865, the collective memory of its horror has faded, so that we have sanitized and romanticized even the experience of the Civil War. Neither film nor reenactment can fully capture the hard truth of the four-year conflict. Living Hell presents a stark portrait of the human costs of the Civil War and gives readers a more accurate appreciation of its profound and lasting consequences. Adams examines the sharp contrast between the expectations of recruits versus the realities of communal living, the enormous problems of dirt and exposure, poor diet, malnutrition, and disease. He describes the slaughter produced by close-order combat, the difficulties of cleaning up the battlefields—where tens of thousands of dead and wounded often lay in an area of only a few square miles—and the resulting psychological damage survivors experienced. Drawing extensively on letters and memoirs of individual soldiers, Adams assembles vivid accounts of the distress Confederate and Union soldiers faced daily: sickness, exhaustion, hunger, devastating injuries, and makeshift hospitals where saws were often the medical instrument of choice. Inverting Robert E. Lee’s famous line about war, Adams suggests that too many Americans become fond of war out of ignorance of its terrors. Providing a powerful counterpoint to Civil War glorification, Living Hell echoes William Tecumseh Sherman’s comment that war is cruelty and cannot be refined. Praise for Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861–1865 "This excellent and provocative work concludes with a chapter suggesting how the image of Southern military superiority endured in spite of defeat."—Civil War History "Adams's imaginative connections between culture and combat provide a forceful reminder that Civil War military history belongs not in an encapsulated realm, with its own categories and arcane language, but at the center of the study of the intellectual, social, and psychological currents that prevailed in the mid-nineteenth century."—Journal of American History Praise for The Best War Ever: America and World War II "Adams has a real gift for efficiently explaining complex historical problems."—Reviews in American History "Not only is this mythologizing bad history, says Adams, it is dangerous as well. Surrounding the war with an aura of nostalgia both fosters the delusion that war can cure our social ills and makes us strong again, and weakens confidence in our ability to act effectively in our own time."—Journal of Military History
Author: Daniel E. Sutherland Publisher: University of Arkansas Press ISBN: 9781610751452 Category : Buildings Languages : en Pages : 350
Book Description
6 portrays ordinary Americans swept up in an era of social and geographical expansion. During this period, five states joined the Union -- Kansas, West Virginia, Nevada, Nebraska, and Colorado -- and the population reached nearly forty million. The westward movement was given a boost by the completion of the first intercontinental railroad, and migration from farms and villages to towns and cities increased, accompanied by a shift from rural occupations and crafts to industrial tasks and trades. Overall, the pursuit of middle-class status became a driving force.
Author: Maureen Stanton Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101516054 Category : Antiques & Collectibles Languages : en Pages : 347
Book Description
One dealer's journey from the populist mayhem of flea markets to the rarefied realm of auctions reveals the rich, often outrageous subculture of antiques and collectibles. Millions of Americans are drawn to antiques and flea-market culture, whether as participants or as viewers of the perennially popular Antiques Roadshow or the recent hit American Pickers. This world has the air of a lottery: a $20 purchase might net you four, five, or six figures. Master dealer Curt Avery, the unlikely star of Killer Stuff and Tons of Money, plays that lottery every day, and he wins it more than most. Occasionally he gets lucky, but more often, he draws on a deep knowledge of America's past and the odd, fascinating, and beautiful objects that have survived it. Week in, week out, Avery trawls the flea and antiques circuit-buying, selling, and advising other dealers in his many areas of expertise, from furniture to glass to stoneware, and more. On the surface, he's an improbable candidate for an antiques dealer. He wrestled in high school and still retains the pugilistic build; he is gruff, funny, and profane; he favors shorts and sneakers, even in November; and he is remarkably generous toward both competitors and customers who want a break. But as he struggles for a spot in a high-end Boston show, he must step up his game and, perhaps more challenging, fit in with a white-shoe crowd. Through his ascent, we see the flea-osphere for what it truly is-less a lottery than a contact sport with few rules and many pitfalls. This rich and sometimes hilarious subculture rewards peculiar interests and outright obsessions-one dealer specializes in shrunken heads; another wants all the postal memorabilia he can get. So Avery must be a guerrilla historian and use his hard-earned knowledge of America's past to live by and off his wits. Only the smartest survive in one of America's most ruthless meritocracies. Killer Stuff and Tons of Money is many things: an insider's look at a subculture replete with arcane traditions and high drama, an inspiring account of a self-made man making his way in a cutthroat field, a treasure trove of tips for those who seek out old things themselves, and a thoroughly fresh, vibrant view of history as blood sport.
Author: Harvey Green Publisher: University of Arkansas Press ISBN: 9781557285980 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
The era between the world wars, from the "roaring 20s" to the grim days of the Great Depression, was a time of tremendous change. The United States became an increasingly urban culture as people left their farms to seek work in the cities. Many blacks moved North to escape the violence and racism of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan in the South. And, while life became more comfortable for many Americans during this period, by 1941 only half the population enjoyed the modern conveniences we now take for granted. With improvements in technology and the rise of consumerism (spurred by the new "science" of advertising) the country was expanding in every direction. However, for many Americans, daily life was fraught with uncertainty. Jobs and wages were unpredictable, labor unrest was constant, and savings vanished in the stock market. In this vividly detailed narrative, Harvey Green recounts an era of unprecedented change in American culture and examines the impact of these uncertain times on such aspects of daily life as employment, home life, gender roles, education, religion, and recreation.
Author: Michel de Certeau Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520271459 Category : Family & Relationships Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws on an immense theoretical literature in analytic philosophy, linguistics, sociology, semiology, and anthropology--to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.
Author: Judith Flanders Publisher: Atlantic Books ISBN: 1782393781 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 262
Book Description
The idea that "home" is a special place, a separate place, a place where we can be our true selves, is so obvious to us today that we barely pause to think about it. But, as Judith Flanders shows in this revealing book, "home" is a relatively new concept. When in 1900 Dorothy assured the citizens of Oz that "There is no place like home," she was expressing a view that was a culmination of 300 years of economic, physical, and emotional change. In The Making of Home, Flanders traces the evolution of the house across northern Europe and America from the 16th to the early 20th century, and paints a striking picture of how the homes we know today differ from homes through history. The transformation of houses into homes, she argues, was not a private matter, but an essential ingredient in the rise of capitalism and the birth of the Industrial Revolution. Without "home," the modern world as we know it would not exist, and as Flanders charts the development of ordinary household objects—from cutlery, chairs, and curtains, to fitted kitchens, plumbing, and windows—she also peels back the myths that surround some of our most basic assumptions, including our entire notion of what it is that makes a family. As full of fascinating detail as her previous bestsellers, The Making of Home is also a book teeming with original and provocative ideas.
Author: Majia Holmer Nadesan Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135903581 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 259
Book Description
Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life synthesizes and extends the disparate strands of scholarship on Foucault's notions of governmentality and biopower and grounds them in familiar social contexts including the private realm, the market, and the state/military. Topics include public health, genomics, behavioral genetics, neoliberal market logics and technologies, philanthropy, and the war on terror. This book is designed for readers interested in a rigorous, comprehensive introduction to the wide array of interdisciplinary work focusing on Foucault, biopower and governmentality. However, Nadesan does not merely reproduce existing literatures but also responds to implicit critiques made by Cultural Studies and Marxist scholarship concerning identity politics, political economy, and sovereign force and disciplinary control. Using concrete examples and detailed illustrations throughout, this book extends the extant literature on governmentality and biopower and helps shape our understanding of everyday life under neoliberalism.
Author: Laura Carter Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192638793 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 224
Book Description
Histories of Everyday Life is a study of the production and consumption of popular social history in mid-twentieth century Britain. It explores how non-academic historians, many of them women, developed a new breed of social history after the First World War, identified as the 'history of everyday life'. The 'history of everyday life' was a pedagogical construct based on the perceived educational needs of the new, mass democracy that emerged after 1918. It was popularized to ordinary people in educational settings, through books, in classrooms and museums, and on BBC radio. After tracing its development and dissemination between the 1920s and the 1960s, this book argues that 'history of everyday life' declined in the 1970s not because academics invented an alternative 'new' social history, but because bottom-up social change rendered this form of popular social history untenable in the changing context of mass education. Histories of Everyday Life ultimately uses the subject of history to demonstrate how profoundly the advent of mass education shaped popular culture in Britain after 1918, arguing that we should see the twentieth century as Britain's educational century.
Author: Michael C. C. Adams
Author: Michael C. C. Adams
Author: Daniel E. Sutherland
Author: Maureen Stanton
Author: Harvey Green
Author: Michel de Certeau
Author: Judith Flanders
Author: Fiona Mackie
Author: Majia Holmer Nadesan
Author: Anders Hektor
Author: Laura Carter