"In The Long Shadow of War, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James M. McPherson considers why the Civil War retains such a hold on our national psyche and identity. Though the drama and tragedy of the subject, from the war's scope and size--an estimated death toll of 750,000, far more than all the rest of the country's wars combined--to the nearly mythical individuals involved--Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson--help explain why the...

In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans--all of which were suppressed...

"On February 21, 1943, Pan American Airways' celebrated seaplane, the Yankee Clipper, took off from New York's Marine Air Terminal and island-hopped its way across the Atlantic Ocean. Arriving at Lisbon the following evening, it crashed in the Tagus River, killing twenty-four of its thirty-nine passengers and crew. Americans in a World at War traces the backstories of seven worldly Americans aboard that plane, their personal histories, their politics,...

Many Americans, argues Michael C. C. Adams, think of the Civil War as more glorious, less awful, than the reality. Tourists flock to battlefields, their perceptions of the war often shaped by reenactors who work hard for verisimilitude but who cannot ultimately simulate the horrors of war. In Living Hell, Adams uses the voices of actual participants on the firing line or in the hospital ward to create a virtual historical reenactment. Perhaps because...

"Chasing Ghosts describes how, near the end of his life, the daughter of a veteran of World War II comes to terms with her father, emotionally wounded by his military service through the stories he tells her about his childhood, about his military service in the Navy in the late 1930s, and about his wartime experiences and through her research undertaken to understand her father's life in the context of history. Told through the voice of a daughter...