On the Shelf at CCBC Libraries
Why We Serve, Deluxe Edition by
Rare stories from more than 250 years of Native Americans' service in the military Why We Serve, Deluxe Edition, limited to 500 copies, is a stunning keepsake or gift. The lavish cloth cover with a beautiful 4-color image tipped on is encased in a translucent jacket. Illustrations celebrating Native American service in the armed forces pop on 100# matte art stock.Why We Serve commemorates the 2020 opening of the National Native American Veterans Memorial at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, the first landmark in Washington, DC, to recognize the bravery and sacrifice of Native veterans. American Indians' history of military service dates to colonial times, and today, they serve at one of the highest rates of any ethnic group. Why We Serve explores the range of reasons why, from love of their home to an expression of their warrior traditions. The book brings fascinating history to life with historical photographs, sketches, paintings, and maps. Incredible contributions from important voices in the field offer a complex examination of the history of Native American service. Why We Serve celebrates the unsung legacy of Native military service and what it means to their community and country.
Call Number: E98.M5 H37 2020
The Women with Silver Wings by Call Number: D790.5 .L36 2020
Marching Home by
For well over a century, traditional Civil War histories have concluded in 1865, with a bitterly won peace and Union soldiers returning triumphantly home. In a landmark work that challenges sterilized portraits accepted for generations, Civil War historian Brian Matthew Jordan creates an entirely new narrative. These veterans-- tending rotting wounds, battling alcoholism, campaigning for paltry pensions-- tragically realized that they stood as unwelcome reminders to a new America eager to heal, forget, and embrace the freewheeling bounty of the Gilded Age. Mining previously untapped archives, Jordan uncovers anguished letters and diaries, essays by amputees, and gruesome medical reports, all deeply revealing of the American psyche. In the model of twenty-first-century histories like Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering or Maya Jasanoff 's Liberty's Exiles that illuminate the plight of the common man, Marching Home makes almost unbearably personal the rage and regret of Union veterans. Their untold stories are critically relevant today.
Call Number: E462 .J67 2016
Retire the Colors by
Behind-the-scenes stories from veterans and civilians offer a more nuanced understanding of the aftereffects of war, specifically Iraq and Afghanistan.
Call Number: DS79.766.D53 A3 2016
Failing Our Veterans by
Returning Vietnam veterans had every reason to expect that the government would take care of their readjustment needs in the same way it had done for veterans of both World War II and Korea. But the Vietnam generation soon discovered that their G.I. Bills fell well short of what many of them believed they had earned. Mark Boulton's groundbreaking study provides the first analysis of the legislative debates surrounding the education benefits offered under the Vietnam-era G.I. Bills. Specifically, the book explores why legislators from both ends of the political spectrum failed to provide Vietnam veterans the same generous compensation offered to veterans of previous wars. Failing Our Veterans should be essential reading to scholars of the Vietnam War, political history, or of social policy. Contemporary lawmakers should heed its historical lessons on how we ought to treat our returning veterans. Indeed, veterans wishing to fully understand their own homecoming experience will find great interest in the book's conclusions.
Call Number: UB357 .B67 2014
Streaming Videos
- The American WarUsing rarely seen archival footage, animated illustrations and interviews, this film tells the story of the Vietnam War from the perspective of five Vietcong veterans: a soldier, an officer, an informant, a guerilla, a My Lai survivor and the leader of the Long Hair army.
- Debt of HonorA moving tribute to the history of disabled veterans, Debt of Honor takes an unflinching look at the reality of warfare and disability, featuring interviews with some of the country's most prominent disabled veterans.
Websites About Veterans in History
Online from CCBC Libraries
After Combat by
Approximately 2.5 million men and women have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in the service of the U.S. War on Terror. Marian Eide and Michael Gibler have collected and compiled personal combat accounts from some of these war veterans. In modern warfare no deployment meets the expectations laid down by stories of Appomattox, Ypres, Iwo Jima, or Tet. Stuck behind a desk or the wheel of a truck, many of today's veterans feel they haven't even been to war though they may have listened to mortars in the night or dodged improvised explosive devices during the day. When a drone is needed to verify a target's death or bullets are sprayed like grass seed, military offensives can lack the immediacy that comes with direct contact. After Combat bridges the gap between sensationalized media and reality by telling war's unvarnished stories. Participating soldiers, sailors, marines, and air force personnel (retired, on leave, or at the beginning of military careers) describe combat in the ways they believe it should be understood. In this collection of interviews, veterans speak anonymously with pride about their own strengths and accomplishments, with gratitude for friendships and adventures, and also with shame, regret, and grief, while braving controversy, misunderstanding, and sanction. In the accounts of these veterans, Eide and Gibler seek to present what Vietnam veteran and writer Tim O'Brien calls a "true war story"--one without obvious purpose or moral imputation and independent of civilian logic, propaganda goals, and even peacetime convention.
Publication Date: 2018-09-01
Toxic Exposures by
Mustard gas is typically associated with the horrors of World War I battlefields and trenches, where chemical weapons were responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. Few realize, however, that mustard gas had a resurgence during the Second World War, when its uses and effects were widespread and insidious. Toxic Exposures tells the shocking story of how the United States and its allies intentionally subjected thousands of their own servicemen to poison gas as part of their preparation for chemical warfare. In addition, it reveals the racialized dimension of these mustard gas experiments, as scientists tested whether the effects of toxic exposure might vary between Asian, Hispanic, black, and white Americans. Drawing from once-classified American and Canadian government records, military reports, scientists' papers, and veterans' testimony, historian Susan L. Smith explores not only the human cost of this research, but also the environmental degradation caused by ocean dumping of unwanted mustard gas. As she assesses the poisonous legacy of these chemical warfare experiments, Smith also considers their surprising impact on the origins of chemotherapy as cancer treatment and the development of veterans' rights movements. Toxic Exposures thus traces the scars left when the interests of national security and scientific curiosity battled with medical ethics and human rights.
Publication Date: 2017-01-17
Long Journeys Home by
In the modern history of American veterans, it is sometimes difficult to separate myth from fact. The men and women who served in World War II are routinely praised as heroes; the "Greatest Generation," after all, triumphed over fascism and successfully reentered postwar society. Veterans of the Vietnam War, on the other hand, occupy a different thread in the postwar narrative, sometimes as a threat to society but usually as victims of it; these vets returned home to a combination of disdain, fear, and prolonged suffering. And until very recently, both the public and historians have largely overlooked veterans of the Korean War altogether; the hit television show M*A*S*H was set in Korea but was more about Vietnam. Long Journeys Home explores the veteran experience of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. It examines and dissects the various myths that have grown up around each of these wars. Author Michael D. Gambone compares and contrasts the basic elements of each narrative, including the factors that influenced the decision to enlist, the impact of combat on life after the war, the struggles of postwar economic adjustment, and participation in (or withdrawal from) social and political activism. Gambone does not treat these veterans monolithically but instead puts each era's veterans in historical context. He also explores the nuances of race, gender, and class. Despite many differences, some obvious and some not, Gambone nonetheless finds a great deal of continuity, and ultimately concludes that Korean and Vietnam veterans have much more in common with the Greatest Generation than was previously understood.
Publication Date: 2017-10-16
Tattooed on My Soul by
For more than forty years the Institute for Oral History at Baylor University has dutifully gathered the flesh-and-blood memories of the World War II generation in the state of Texas. Tattooed on My Soul brings together seventeen of the most compelling narratives from Baylor's extensive collection of more than five thousand interviews. Taken together, these selections provide an authentic and powerful mosaic of those critical years and offer intimate glimpses into the reality and meaning of the war for those who fought it. For them, World War II is more than history. And when they tell their stories, it becomes more than facts and dates, victories and defeats for those who listen. Representing a cross-section of Texas' population and a wide range of wartime assignments, these recollections reveal the personal perspectives on many events and figures of World War II. On land, in air, and by sea, in the Pacific and in Europe, they fought for America's future. With the clear ring of authenticity and a surprising immediacy, even after all these years, their stories make a global war personal.
Publication Date: 2015-09-07
