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World War II Aeronautical Research at Langley (Military)
By Mark A. Chambers. 2022
The effort to win the war began at home--and for the researchers at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, enhancing America's military…
aviation arsenal was the key to victory.Formed in 1915, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics established itself over the next 25 years as one of the world's finest research organizations. When World War II began in 1939, the NACA employed a mere 500 workers and maintained a budget slightly in excess of $4 million. To meet the demands of the war, a special partnership was quickly forged between NACA researchers, industry designers, and military planners. The Langley laboratory possessed world class aeronautical research facilities and flight research operations, making it ideally suited to help America win the war.Military historian Mark Chambers tells the story of the monumental task of developing the planes that spurred Allied victory in World War II.Virginia POW Camps in World War II (Military)
By Dr Kathryn Coker, Jason Wetzel. 2022
Tour the camps, learn stories of the daily lives of the POWs, and discover the impact they had on the…
Old Dominion.During World War II, Virginians watched as German and Italian prisoners invaded the Old Dominion. At least 17,000 Germans and countless Italians lived in over twenty camps across the state and worked on five military installations. Farmers hired POWs to pick apples. Fertilizer companies, lumber yards, and hospitals hired them. At first a phenomenon of war in Virginia's backyard, these former enemy combatants became familiar to many--often developing a rapport with their employers. Among them were die-hired Nazis and Fascists, but they benefited from double standards that placed them in better jobs and conditions than African Americans.Historians Kathryn Coker and Jason Wetzel tell a different story of the Old Dominion at War.We'll Soon Be Home Again
By Jessica Bab Bonde. 2020
The testimonies of six survivors of the Holocaust are presented in comics form, aimed at teenage readers.Some of them were…
children then, and are still alive to tell what happened to them and their families. How they survived. What they lost--and how you keep on living, despite it all.Jessica Bab Bonde has, based on survivor's stories, written an important book. Peter Bergting's art makes the book accessible, despite its difficult subject. Using first-person point of view allows the stories to get under your skin as survivors describe their persecutions in the Ghetto, the de-humanization and the starvation in the concentration camps, and the industrial-scale mass murder taking place in the extermination camps. When right-wing extremism and antisemitism are being evoked once again, it's the alarm-bell needed to remind us never to forget the horrors of the Holocaust.Grace Banker and Her Hello Girls Answer the Call: The Heroic Story of WWI Telephone Operators
By Claudia Friddell. 2021
NCSS/CBC Notable Social Studies Trade BookNCSS Septma Clark Award, Elementary Level HonoreeBank Street College of Education Best Book of the YearLed…
by twenty-five-year-old Grace Banker, thirty-two telephone operators — affectionately called "Hello Girls" back in the US — became the first female combatants in World War I.Follow Grace Banker's journey from her busy life as a telephone switchboard trainer in New York to her pioneering role as the Chief Operator of the 1st Unit of World War I telephone operators in the battlefields of France. With expert skill, steady nerves, and steadfast loyalty, the Signal Corps operators transferred orders from commanders to battlefields and communicated top-secret messages between American and French headquarters. After faithfully serving her country —undaunted by freezing weather and fires; long hours and little sleep, and nearby shellings and far off explosions — Grace was the first and only woman operator in the Signal Corps to be awarded the Army's Distinguished Service Medal.The Pig War: How a Porcine Tragedy Taught England and America to Share
By Emma Bland Smith. 2020
Here is a true story of how the great nations of America and England almost went to war in 1859…
over a pig--but learned to share instead.In 1859, the British and Americans coexist on the small island of San Juan, located off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. They are on fairly good terms--until one fateful morning when an innocent hog owned by a British man has the misfortune to eat some potatoes on an American farmer's land. In a moment of rash anger, Lyman Cutlar shoots Charles Griffin's pig, inadvertently almost bringing the two nations to war. Tensions flare, armies gather, cannons are rolled out . . . all because of a pig! Emma Bland Smith's humorous text and Alison Jay's folksy illustrations combine in this whimsical nonfiction picture book that models the principles of peaceful conflict resolution.Revolutionary Rogues: John André and Benedict Arnold
By Selene Castrovilla. 2017
NCSS/CBC Notable Trade Social Studies BookKansas Reading Circle ChoiceBank Street College Best BookTappantown Historical Society&’s Achievement Award Young fans of the Broadway…
smash "Hamilton" will enjoy this riveting nonfiction picture book that unfolds like a play, telling a story from American history. Gravely injured and with little chance for more military honors, Major General Benedict Arnold seeks reward and recognition another way. He contacts Major John André, the new head of British intelligence and another man determined to prove himself. Arnold and André strike a deal and use Arnold&’s intelligence to take over West Point, the strategic American fort. The plan ultimately fails, leading to André&’s capture and death and Arnold&’s loss of reward and glory. Author Selene Castrovilla and illustrator John O&’Brien brilliantly capture the tensions and high drama of these two revolutionary rogues by highlighting their similarities and differences and demonstrating how they brought about their own tragic ends. This title also includes an afterword, timelines of the lives of both men, an extensive bibliography, and a list of key places to visit.Atomic Bill: A Journalist's Dangerous Ambition in the Shadow of the Bomb
By Vincent Kiernan. 2022
In Atomic Bill, Vincent Kiernan examines the fraught career of New York Times science journalist, William L. Laurence and shows…
his professional and personal lives to be a cautionary tale of dangerous proximity to power. Laurence was fascinated with atomic science and its militarization. When the Manhattan Project drew near to perfecting the atomic bomb, he was recruited to write much of the government's press materials that were distributed on the day that Hiroshima was obliterated. That instantly crowned Laurence as one of the leading journalistic experts on the atomic bomb. As the Cold War dawned, some assessed Laurence as a propagandist defending the militarization of atomic energy. For others, he was a skilled science communicator who provided the public with a deep understanding of the atomic bomb. Laurence leveraged his perch at the Times to engage in paid speechmaking, book writing, filmmaking, and radio broadcasting. His work for the Times declined in quality even as his relationships with people in power grew closer and more lucrative. Atomic Bill reveals extraordinary ethical lapses by Laurence such as a cheating scandal at Harvard University and plagiarizing from press releases about atomic bomb tests in the Pacific. In 1963 a conflict of interest related to the 1964 World's Fair in New York City led to his forced retirement from the Times. Kiernan shows Laurence to have set the trend, common among today's journalists of science and technology, to prioritize gee-whiz coverage of discoveries. That approach, in which Laurence served the interests of governmental official and scientists, recommends a full revision of our understanding of the dawn of the atomic era.The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age
By Edward Kaplan. 2022
The End of Victory recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative…
body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC). From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war—how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy—a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States. Edward Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC's reports offered the best estimates of the butcher's bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives.Taken with the intelligence community's assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC's work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks—and ones involving military force run grave ones—though they can rarely be known with precision.Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO
By Susan Colbourn. 2022
In Euromissiles, Susan Colbourn tells the story of the height of nuclear crisis and the remarkable waning of the fear…
that gripped the globe. In the Cold War conflict that pitted nuclear superpowers against one another, Europe was the principal battleground. Washington and Moscow had troops on the ground and missiles in the fields of their respective allies, the NATO nations and the states of the Warsaw Pact. Euromissiles—intermediate-range nuclear weapons to be used exclusively in the regional theater of war—highlighted how the peoples of Europe were dangerously placed between hammer and anvil. That made European leaders uncomfortable and pushed fearful masses into the streets demanding peace in their time. At the center of the story is NATO. Colbourn highlights the weakness of the alliance seen by many as the most effective bulwark against Soviet aggression. Divided among themselves and uncertain about the depth of US support, the member states were riven by the missile issue. This strategic crisis was, as much as any summit meeting between US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the hinge on which the Cold War turned. Euromissiles is a history of diplomacy and alliances, social movements and strategy, nuclear weapons and nagging fears, and politics. To tell that history, Colbourn takes a long view of the strategic crisis—from the emerging dilemmas of allied defense in the early 1950s through the aftermath of the INF Treaty thirty-five years later. The result is a dramatic and sweeping tale that changes the way we think about the Cold War and its culmination.The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam
By Marc J. Selverstone. 2022
A major revision of our understanding of JFK’s commitment to Vietnam, revealing that his administration’s plan to withdraw was a…
political device, the effect of which was to manage public opinion while preserving US military assistance.In October 1963, the White House publicly proposed the removal of US troops from Vietnam, earning President Kennedy an enduring reputation as a skeptic on the war. In fact, Kennedy was ambivalent about withdrawal and was largely detached from its planning. Drawing on secret presidential tapes, Marc J. Selverstone reveals that the withdrawal statement gave Kennedy political cover, allowing him to sustain support for US military assistance. Its details were the handiwork of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, whose ownership of the plan distanced it from the president.Selverstone’s use of the presidential tapes, alongside declassified documents, memoirs, and oral histories, lifts the veil on this legend of Camelot. Withdrawal planning was never just about Vietnam as it evolved over the course of fifteen months. For McNamara, it injected greater discipline into the US assistance program. For others, it was a form of leverage over South Vietnam. For the military, it was largely an unwelcome exercise. And for JFK, it allowed him to preserve the US commitment while ostensibly limiting it.The Kennedy Withdrawal offers an inside look at presidential decisionmaking in this liminal period of the Vietnam War and makes clear that portrayals of Kennedy as a dove are overdrawn. His proposed withdrawal was in fact a cagey strategy for keeping the United States involved in the fight—a strategy the country adopted decades later in Afghanistan.Managing the Military: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and Civil-Military Relations
By Sharon K. Weiner. 2022
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS)—a senior group of officers who lead the Army, Navy, Air Force,…
and Marine Corps—is perhaps the most influential military figure in the United States. The chairman is the primary military advisor to the president and is often the public face of the armed forces. As advocates for the military’s priorities, some chairmen have used this role to help shape policy, but others have embraced the position as an opportunity to chart new policy directions or challenge presidential preferences.Managing the Military is a pioneering analysis of the power of the chairman of the JCS that sheds new light on civil-military relations in the United States. Using detailed case studies of debates over defense budgets since the end of the Cold War, Sharon K. Weiner examines when and how the JCS chairman opposes civilian defense policy preferences. She shows that, under the right conditions, the chairman can be a policy entrepreneur, challenging the goals of the White House and lobbying for the military’s interests. However, the extent of the chairman’s political clout is constrained by the preferences of the service chiefs who head the branches of the military. Weiner also explores the evolution of the institution of the JCS and illuminates the chairman’s interaction with the president and secretary of defense. Blending empirical detail and theoretical contributions, Managing the Military offers a compelling account of the circumstances under which the power of the JCS chairman is maximized.Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia
By Brian D. McKnight. 2006
During the four years of the Civil War, the border between eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia was highly contested territory,…
alternately occupied by both the Confederacy and the Union. Though this territory was sparsely populated, the geography oPassing the Test: April–June 1951 (Combat in Korea)
By William T. Bowers and John T. Greenwood. 2011
For U.S. and UN soldiers fighting the Korean War, the spring of 1951 was brutal. The troops faced a tough…
and determined foe under challenging conditions. The Chinese Spring Offensive of 1951 exemplified the hardships of the war, as the UN forces struggleJerusalem Falls: Seven Centuries of War and Peace
By John D. Hosler. 2022
The first full account of the medieval struggle for Jerusalem, from the seventh to the thirteenth century The history of…
Jerusalem is one of conflict, faith, and empire. Few cities have been attacked as often and as savagely. This was no less true in the Middle Ages. From the Persian sack in 614 through the bloody First Crusade and beyond, Jerusalem changed hands countless times. But despite these horrific acts of violence, its story during this period is also one of interfaith tolerance and accord. In this gripping history, John D. Hosler explores the great clashes and delicate settlements of medieval Jerusalem. He examines the city&’s many sieges and considers the experiences of its inhabitants of all faiths. The city&’s conquerors consistently acknowledged and reinforced the rights of those religious minorities over which they ruled. Deeply researched, this account reveals the way in which Jerusalem&’s past has been constructed on partial histories—and urges us to reckon with the city&’s broader historical contours.These proceedings present a selection of papers from the ICTTE 2021 conference. While face-to-face classroom instruction is brought back, there…
are a lot of lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic that schools, teacher training and education institutions, and government have to take into account. There is a need to reconsider what additional knowledge and skills pre-service teachers and in-service teachers need to be prepared for to anticipate such a similar unexpected situation in the future. Additionally, there is also a need to listen to in-service teacher experiences during the emergency remote teaching and integrate the positive lessons that they have gained, such as the use of technology, into the current post pandemic face-to-face classroom instruction. This proceeding is designed for teacher educators, researchers, in-service teachers, and pre-service teachers in the field of language education, math and science education and social science education, who are interested in these topics.Napoleon: A Life Told In Gardens And Shadows
By Ruth Scurr. 2021
Marking the 200th anniversary of his death, Napoleon is an unprecedented portrait of the emperor told through his engagement with…
the natural world. “How should one envisage this subject? With a great pomp of words, or with simplicity?” —Charlotte Brontë, “The Death of Napoleon” The most celebrated general in history, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) has for centuries attracted eminent male writers. Since Thomas Carlyle first christened him “our last Great Man,” regiments of biographers have marched across the same territory, weighing campaigns and conflicts, military tactics and power politics. Yet in all this time, no definitive portrait of Napoleon has endured, and a mere handful of women have written his biography—a fact that surely would have pleased him. With Napoleon, Ruth Scurr, one of our most eloquent and original historians, emphatically rejects the shibboleth of the “Great Man” theory of history, instead following the dramatic trajectory of Napoleon’s life through gardens, parks, and forests. As Scurr reveals, gardening was the first and last love of Napoleon, offering him a retreat from the manifold frustrations of war and politics. Gardens were, at the same time, a mirror image to the battlefields on which he fought, discrete settings in which terrain and weather were as important as they were in combat, but for creative rather than destructive purposes. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary and historical scholarship, and taking us from his early days at the military school in Brienne-le-Château through his canny seizure of power and eventual exile, Napoleon frames the general’s story through the green spaces he cultivated. Amid Corsican olive groves, ornate menageries in Paris, and lone garden plots on the island of Saint Helena, Scurr introduces a diverse cast of scientists, architects, family members, and gardeners, all of whom stood in the shadows of Napoleon’s meteoric rise and fall. Building a cumulative panorama, she offers indelible portraits of Augustin Bon Joseph de Robespierre, the younger brother of Maximilien Robespierre, who used his position to advance Napoleon’s career; Marianne Peusol, the fourteen-year-old girl manipulated into a Christmas-Eve assassination attempt on Napoleon that resulted in her death; and Emmanuel, comte de Las Cases, the atlas maker to whom Napoleon dictated his memoirs. As Scurr contends, Napoleon’s dealings with these people offer unusual and unguarded opportunities to see how he grafted a new empire onto the remnants of the ancien régime and the French Revolution. Epic in scale and novelistic in its detail, Napoleon, with stunning illustrations, is a work of revelatory range and depth, revealing the contours of the general’s personality and power as no conventional biography can.Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow
By Susan Campbell Bartoletti. 2005
In her first full-length nonfiction title since winning the Robert F. Sibert Award, Susan Campbell Bartoletti explores the riveting and…
often chilling story of Germany's powerful Hitler Youth groups. "I begin with the young. We older ones are used up... But my magnificent youngsters! Look at these men and boys! What material! With them, I can create a new world." --Adolf Hitler, Nuremberg 1933 By the time Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, 3.5 million children belonged to the Hitler Youth. It would become the largest youth group in history. Susan Campbell Bartoletti explores how Hitler gained the loyalty, trust, and passion of so many of Germany's young people. Her research includes telling interviews with surviving Hitler Youth members. Newbery Medal Honor book and Sibert Honor bookThe Great Escape from Stalag Luft III
By Tim Carroll. 2004
The true story of one of the most heroic feats of World War II...the daring prison camp breakout that inspired…
the classic film The Great Escape Stalag Luft III was one of the Germans' "escape-proof" prison camps, specially built by Hermann Göring to hold Allied troops. But on March 24, 1944, in a courageous attempt by two hundred prisoners to break out through a series of tunnels, seventy-six Allied officers managed to evade capture -- and create havoc behind enemy lines in the months before the Normandy Invasion. This is the incredible story of these brave men who broke free from the supposedly impenetrable barbed wire and watchtowers of Stalag Luft III -- and who played an important role in Allied intelligence operations within occupied Europe. The prisoners developed an intricate espionage network, relaying details of military deployment, bombings, and raids. Some of them were involved in other daring escape attempts, including the famous Wooden Horse episode, also turned into a classic film, and the little-known Sachsenhausen breakout, engineered by five Great Escapers sent to die in the notorious concentration camp on Hitler's personal orders. Tragically, fifty of those involved in the Great Escape were murdered by the Gestapo. Others were recaptured; only a few made it all the way to freedom. This dramatic account of personal heroism is a testament to their ingenuity and achievement -- a stirring tribute to the men who never gave up fighting. Includes eight pages of photographs and illustrations, excerpts from Göring's testimony during postwar investigations, and a list of the men who escaped.Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam
By Gordon M. Goldstein. 2008
X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II
By Leah Garrett. 2021
&“Brilliantly researched, utterly gripping history: the first full account of a remarkable group of Jewish refugees—a top-secret band of brothers—who…
waged war on Hitler.&”—Alex Kershaw, New York Times best-selling author of The Longest Winter and TheLiberatorThe incredible World War II saga of the German-Jewish commandos who fought in Britain&’s most secretive special-forces unit—but whose story has gone untold until now June 1942. The shadow of the Third Reich has fallen across the European continent. In desperation, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff form an unusual plan: a new commando unit made up of Jewish refugees who have escaped to Britain. The resulting volunteers are a motley group of intellectuals, artists, and athletes, most from Germany and Austria. Many have been interned as enemy aliens, and have lost their families, their homes—their whole worlds. They will stop at nothing to defeat the Nazis. Trained in counterintelligence and advanced combat, this top secret unit becomes known as X Troop. Some simply call them a suicide squad. Drawing on extensive original research, including interviews with the last surviving members, Leah Garrett follows this unique band of brothers from Germany to England and back again, with stops at British internment camps, the beaches of Normandy, the battlefields of Italy and Holland, and the hellscape of Terezin concentration camp—the scene of one of the most dramatic, untold rescues of the war. For the first time, X Troop tells the astonishing story of these secret shock troops and their devastating blows against the Nazis.&“Garrett&’s detective work is stunning, and her storytelling is masterful. This is an original account of Jewish rescue, resistance, and revenge.&”—Wendy Lower, author of The Ravine and National Book Award finalist Hitler&’s Furies