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From Stephen E. Ambrose, bestselling author of Band of Brothers and D-Day, the inspiring story of the ordinary men of the U.S. army in northwest Europe from the day after D-Day until the end of the bitterest days of World War II. In this riveting account, historian Stephen E. Ambrose continues where he left off in his #1 bestseller D-Day. Citizen Soldiers opens at 0001 hours, June 7, 1944, on the Normandy beaches, and ends at 0245 hours, May 7, 1945, with the allied victory. It is biography of the US Army in the European Theater of Operations, and Ambrose again follows the individual characters of this noble, brutal, and tragic war. From the high command down to the ordinary soldier, Ambrose draws on hundreds of interviews to re-create the war experience with startling clarity and immediacy. From the hedgerows of Normandy to the overrunning of Germany, Ambrose tells the real story of World War II from the perspective of the men and women who fought it.
This sequel to D-DAY opens at 00:01 hours, June 7, 1944 on the Normandy Beaches and ends at 02:45 hours, May 7, 1945. In between comes the battles in the hedgerows of Normandy, the breakout of Saint-Lo, the Falaise gap, Patton tearing through France, the liberation of Paris, the attempt to leap the Rhine in operation Market-Garden, the near-miraculous German recovery, the battles around Metz and in the Huertgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge, the capture of the bridge at Remagen and, finally, the overunning of Germany. From the enlisted men and junior officers, Ambrose draws on hundreds of interviews and oral histories from those on both sides of the war. The experience of these citizen soldiers reveals the ordinary sufferings and hardships of war. They overcame their fear and inexperience, the mistakes of their high command and their enemy to win the war.
Why has the United States, unlike every other 20th-century world power, failed to settle on a durable system of military service? In this lucid book, Eliot Cohen studies the enduring problems of America's methods of raising an army.
"A hell of a gift, an opportunity." "Magnanimous." "One of the greatest advantages I ever experienced." These are the voices of World War II veterans, lavishing praise on their beloved G.I. Bill. Transcending boundaries of class and race, the Bill enabled a sizable portion of the hallowed "greatest generation" to gain vocational training or to attend college or graduate school at government expense. Its beneficiaries had grown up during the Depression, living in tenements and cold-water flats, on farms and in small towns across the nation, most of them expecting that they would one day work in the same kinds of jobs as their fathers. Then the G.I. Bill came along, and changed everything. They experienced its provisions as inclusive, fair, and tremendously effective in providing the deeply held American value of social opportunity, the chance to improve one's circumstances. They become chefs and custom builders, teachers and electricians, engineers and college professors. But the G.I. Bill fueled not only the development of the middle class: it also revitalized American democracy. Americans who came of age during World War II joined fraternal groups and neighborhood and community organizations and took part in politics at rates that made the postwar era the twentieth century's civic "golden age." Drawing on extensive interviews and surveys with hundreds of members of the "greatest generation," Suzanne Mettler finds that by treating veterans as first-class citizens and in granting advanced education, the Bill inspired them to become the active participants thanks to whom memberships in civic organizations soared and levels of political activity peaked. Mettler probes how this landmark law produced such a civic renaissance. Most fundamentally, she discovers, it communicated to veterans that government was for and about people like them, and they responded in turn. In our current age of rising inequality and declining civic engagement, Soldiers to Citizens offers critical lessons about how public programs can make a difference.
Although much has changed in the United States since the eighteenth century, our framework for gun laws still largely relies on the Second Amendment and the patterns that emerged in the colonial era. America has long been a heavily armed, and racially divided, society, yet few citizens understand either why militias appealed to the founding fathers or the role that militias played in North American rebellions, in which they often functioned as repressive—and racist—domestic forces. In Armed Citizens, Noah Shusterman explains for a general reader what eighteenth-century militias were and why the authors of the Constitution believed them to be necessary to the security of a free state. Suggesting that the question was never whether there was a right to bear arms, but rather, who had the right to bear arms, Shusterman begins with the lessons that the founding generation took from the history of Ancient Rome and Machiavelli’s reinterpretation of those myths during the Renaissance. He then turns to the rise of France’s professional army during seventeenth-century Europe and the fear that it inspired in England. Shusterman shows how this fear led British writers to begin praising citizens’ militias, at the same time that colonial America had come to rely on those militias as a means of defense and as a system to police enslaved peoples. Thus the start of the Revolution allowed Americans to portray their struggle as a war of citizens against professional soldiers, leading the authors of the Constitution to place their trust in citizen soldiers and a "well-regulated militia," an idea that persists to this day.
Winner of the Army Historical Foundation Book Award During the War of 1812, state militias were intended to be the primary fighting force. Unfortunately, while militiamen showed willingness to fight, they were untrained, undisciplined, and ill-equipped. These raw volunteers had no muskets, and many did not know how to use the weapons once they had been issued. Though established by the Constitution, state militias found themselves wholly unprepared for war. The federal government was empowered to use these militias to "execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions;" but in a system of divided responsibility, it was the states' job to appoint officers and to train the soldiers. Edward Skeen reveals states' responses to federal requests for troops and provides in-depth descriptions of the conditions, morale, and experiences of the militia in camp and in battle. Skeen documents the failures and successes of the militias, concluding that the key lay in strong leadership. He also explores public perception of the force, both before and after the war, and examines how the militias changed in response to their performance in the War of 1812. After that time, the federal government increasingly neglected the militias in favor of a regular professional army.
The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars affected millions of people's lives across Europe and beyond. Yet the extent to which the constant warfare of the period 1792-1815 shaped everyday experience has been little studied. This volume of essays discusses the formative experience of these wars for men and women, as soldiers, citizens and civilians.
How Rome's citizen-soldiers conquered the world—and why this militaristic ideal still has a place in America today. "For who is so worthless or indolent as not to wish to know by what means and under what system of polity the Romans . . . succeeded in subjecting nearly the whole inhabited world to their sole government—a thing unique in history?"—Polybius The year 146 BC marked the brutal end to the Roman Republic's 118-year struggle for the western Mediterranean. Breaching the walls of their great enemy, Carthage, Roman troops slaughtered countless citizens, enslaved those who survived, and leveled the 700-year-old city. That same year in the east, Rome destroyed Corinth and subdued Greece. Over little more than a century, Rome's triumphant armies of citizen-soldiers had shocked the world by conquering all of its neighbors. How did armies made up of citizen-soldiers manage to pull off such a major triumph? And what made the republic so powerful? In Killing for the Republic, Steele Brand explains how Rome transformed average farmers into ambitious killers capable of conquering the entire Mediterranean. Rome instilled something violent and vicious in its soldiers, making them more effective than other empire builders. Unlike the Assyrians, Persians, and Macedonians, it fought with part-timers. Examining the relationship between the republican spirit and the citizen-soldier, Brand argues that Roman republican values and institutions prepared common men for the rigors and horrors of war. Brand reconstructs five separate battles—representative moments in Rome's constitutional and cultural evolution that saw its citizen-soldiers encounter the best warriors of the day, from marauding Gauls and the Alps-crossing Hannibal to the heirs of Alexander the Great. A sweeping political and cultural history, Killing for the Republic closes with a compelling argument in favor of resurrecting the citizen-soldier ideal in modern America.
This book re-assesses the military, social and economic history of Roman Italy from the angle of population history.