Forgotten Battles and American Memory PDF Download

Author: Douglas Smock
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781662475238
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Forgotten Battles and American Memory is a military history book that brings to life long-ignored important conflicts through personal stories. Key figures include George Washington, Myles Standish, Daniel Morgan, Banastre Tarleton, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Hazard Perry, Nathan Bedford Forest, Joseph Stilwell, Chiang Kai-shek, and George Marshall. The battles covered are the Plymouth Plantation militia attack on the Massachusett Tribe, the defeat of General Edward Braddock in the French and Indian War, Cowpens in the Revolutionary War, the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812, the Fort Pillow Massacre in the Civil War, and the Battle for the Burma Road in World War II. The book also examines why the battles were lost to history and why they are still important today. In some cases, controversies remain, ranging from the depiction of Myles Standish on the Massachusetts flag to statues of Nathan Bedford Forrest. The book includes some never-reported information on the Battle for the Burma Road and the role of Pennsylvania militia in the War of 1812.

Author: Douglas Smock
Publisher: Page Publishing Inc
ISBN: 1662475241
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Forgotten Battles and American Memory is a military history book that brings to life long-ignored important conflicts through personal stories. Key figures include George Washington, Myles Standish, Daniel Morgan, Banastre Tarleton, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Hazard Perry, Nathan Bedford Forest, Joseph Stilwell, Chiang Kai-shek, and George Marshall. The battles covered are the Plymouth Plantation militia attack on the Massachusett Tribe, the defeat of General Edward Braddock in the French and Indian War, Cowpens in the Revolutionary War, the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812, the Fort Pillow Massacre in the Civil War, and the Battle for the Burma Road in World War II. The book also examines why the battles were lost to history and why they are still important today. In some cases, controversies remain, ranging from the depiction of Myles Standish on the Massachusetts flag to statues of Nathan Bedford Forrest. The book includes some never-reported information on the Battle for the Burma Road and the role of Pennsylvania militia in the War of 1812.

Author: Michael Van Wagenen
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
ISBN: 155849930X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This title addresses the deeper questions of how remembrance of the U.S.-Mexican War has influenced the complex relationship between these former enemies now turned friends.

Author: Douglas Smock
Publisher: Page Publishing Inc
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
History is constantly changing. What we know of past events is based on someone's interpretation. Even first-person accounts can vary widely and, in fact, did in the reports of Benedict Arnold's conduct at the second Battle of Saratoga in 1777. The conventional histories were based on a now-discredited account by one officer. A letter made public in 2016 painted a different version of events more favorable to Arnold. Hallowed Ground: How Forgotten Battles Changed America provides a fresh look at history through the lens of battles that deserve new attention, starting with the Saratoga Campaign. The little-taught Mexican War that preceded the Civil War is too easily recalled as an important training ground for the legendary military leaders of the Civil War. It was also a land grab condemned by Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Henry Clay, and many others. The issues of technology and preparedness are major themes of the chapters on Selma, Alabama, during the Civil War and the Saint-Mihiel offensive in World War I. Selma was a focal point of Confederate efforts to build munitions while the US Army played catchup on aircraft, tanks, and wireless communications at Saint-Mihiel. Future American military leaders such as George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, and William Mitchell quickly learned the new technologies. The fifth chapter tells the forgotten story of one of the most inspiring Americans of the twentieth century, Dr. Gordon Seagrave, a Baptist missionary on the northern frontier of Burma who became one of the military's greatest combat surgeons.

Author: John Bodnar
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421400022
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The “Good War” in American Memory dispels the long-held myth that Americans forged an agreement on why they had to fight in World War II. John Bodnar's sociocultural examination of the vast public debate that took place in the United States over the war's meaning reveals that the idea of the "good war" was highly contested. Bodnar's comprehensive study of the disagreements that marked the American remembrance of World War II in the six decades following its end draws on an array of sources: fiction and nonfiction, movies, theater, and public monuments. He identifies alternative strands of memory—tragic and brutal versus heroic and virtuous—and reconstructs controversies involving veterans, minorities, and memorials. In building this narrative, Bodnar shows how the idealism of President Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms was lost in the public commemoration of World War II, how the war's memory became intertwined in the larger discussion over American national identity, and how it only came to be known as the "good war" many years after its conclusion.

Author: Thomas A. Chambers
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801465672
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Even in the midst of the Civil War, its battlefields were being dedicated as hallowed ground. Today, those sites are among the most visited places in the United States. In contrast, the battlegrounds of the Revolutionary War had seemingly been forgotten in the aftermath of the conflict in which the nation forged its independence. Decades after the signing of the Constitution, the battlefields of Yorktown, Saratoga, Fort Moultrie, Ticonderoga, Guilford Courthouse, Kings Mountain, and Cowpens, among others, were unmarked except for crumbling forts and overgrown ramparts. Not until the late 1820s did Americans begin to recognize the importance of these places. In Memories of War, Thomas A. Chambers recounts America's rediscovery of its early national history through the rise of battlefield tourism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Travelers in this period, Chambers finds, wanted more than recitations of regimental movements when they visited battlefields; they desired experiences that evoked strong emotions and leant meaning to the bleached bones and decaying fortifications of a past age. Chambers traces this impulse through efforts to commemorate Braddock's Field and Ticonderoga, the cultivated landscapes masking the violent past of the Hudson River valley, the overgrown ramparts of Southern war sites, and the scenic vistas at War of 1812 battlefields along the Niagara River. Describing a progression from neglect to the Romantic embrace of the landscape and then to ritualized remembrance, Chambers brings his narrative up to the beginning of the Civil War, during and after which the memorialization of such sites became routine, assuming significant political and cultural power in the American imagination.

Author: Viet Thanh Nguyen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067466034X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, National Book Award in Nonfiction A New York Times Book Review “The Year in Reading” Selection All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War—a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both nations. “[A] gorgeous, multifaceted examination of the war Americans call the Vietnam War—and which Vietnamese call the American War...As a writer, [Nguyen] brings every conceivable gift—wisdom, wit, compassion, curiosity—to the impossible yet crucial work of arriving at what he calls ‘a just memory’ of this war.” —Kate Tuttle, Los Angeles Times “In Nothing Ever Dies, his unusually thoughtful consideration of war, self-deception and forgiveness, Viet Thanh Nguyen penetrates deeply into memories of the Vietnamese war...[An] important book, which hits hard at self-serving myths.” —Jonathan Mirsky, Literary Review “Ultimately, Nguyen’s lucid, arresting, and richly sourced inquiry, in the mode of Susan Sontag and W. G. Sebald, is a call for true and just stories of war and its perpetual legacy.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

Author: Chris Mackowski
Publisher: Grub Street Publishers
ISBN: 1611211379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
The first book-length study of two overlooked engagements that helped turned the tide of a pivotal Civil War battle. By May of 1863, the stone wall at the base of Marye’s Heights above Fredericksburg, Virginia, loomed large over the Army of the Potomac, haunting its men with memories of slaughter from their crushing defeat there the previous December. They would assault it again with a very different result the following spring. This time the Union troops wrested the wall and high ground from the Confederates and drove west into the enemy’s rear. The inland drive stalled in heavy fighting at Salem Church. Chancellorsville’s Forgotten Front is the first book to examine Second Fredericksburg and Salem Church and the central roles they played in the final Southern victory. Authors Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White have long appreciated the pivotal roles these engagements played in the Chancellorsville campaign, and just how close the Southern army came to grief—and the Union army to stunning success. Together they seamlessly weave their extensive newspaper, archival, and firsthand research into a compelling narrative to better understand these combats, which usually garner little more than a footnote to the larger story of Stonewall Jackson’s march and fatal wounding. Chancellorsville’s Forgotten Front offers a thorough examination of the decision-making, movements, and fighting that led to the bloody stalemate at Salem Church, as Union soldiers faced the horror of an indomitable wall of stone—and an undersized Confederate division stood up to a Union juggernaut.

Author: Wayne E. Lee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190920661
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Taking its title from The Face of Battle, John Keegan's canonical book on the nature of warfare, The Other Face of Battle illuminates the American experience of fighting in "irregular" and "intercultural" wars over the centuries. Sometimes known as "forgotten" wars, in part because they lacked triumphant clarity, they are the focus of the book. David Preston, David Silbey, and Anthony Carlson focus on, respectively, the Battle of Monongahela (1755), the Battle of Manila (1898), and the Battle of Makuan, Afghanistan (2020)--conflicts in which American soldiers were forced to engage in "irregular" warfare, confronting an enemy entirely alien to them. This enemy rejected the Western conventions of warfare and defined success and failure--victory and defeat--in entirely different ways. Symmetry of any kind is lost. Here was not ennobling engagement but atrocity, unanticipated insurgencies, and strategic stalemate. War is always hell. These wars, however, profoundly undermined any sense of purpose or proportion. Nightmarish and existentially bewildering, they nonetheless characterize how Americans have experienced combat and what its effects have been. They are therefore worth comparing for what they hold in common as well as what they reveal about our attitude toward war itself. The Other Face of Battle reminds us that "irregular" or "asymmetrical" warfare is now not the exception but the rule. Understanding its roots seems more crucial than ever.

Author: Frank P Varney
Publisher: Savas Beatie
ISBN: 1611215544
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
General Ulysses S. Grant is best remembered today as a war-winning general, and he certainly deserves credit for his efforts on behalf of the Union. But has he received too much credit at the expense of other men? Have others who fought the war with him suffered unfairly at his hands? General Grant and the Verdict of History: Memoir, Memory, and the Civil War explores these issues. Professor Frank P. Varney examines Grant’s relationship with three noted Civil War generals: the brash and uncompromising “Fighting Joe” Hooker; George H. Thomas, the stellar commander who earned the sobriquet “Rock of Chickamauga”; and Gouverneur Kemble Warren, who served honorably and well in every major action of the Army of the Potomac before being relieved less than two weeks before Appomattox, and only after he had played a prominent part in the major Union victory at Five Forks. In his earlier book General Grant and the Rewriting of History, Dr. Varney studied the tempestuous relationship between Grant and Union General William S. Rosecrans. During the war, Rosecrans was considered by many of his contemporaries to be on par with Grant himself; today, he is largely forgotten. Rosecrans’s star dimmed, argues Varney, because Grant orchestrated the effort. Unbeknownst to most students of the war, Grant used his official reports, interviews with the press, and his memoirs to influence how future generations would remember the war and his part in it. Aided greatly by his two terms as president, by the clarity and eloquence of his memoirs, and in particular by the dramatic backdrop against which those memoirs were written, our historical memory has been influenced to a degree greater than many realize. It is beyond time to return to the original sources—the letters, journals, reports, and memoirs of other witnesses and the transcripts of courts-martial— to examine Grant’s story from a fresh perspective. The results are enlightening and more than a little disturbing.