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“War means fighting, and fighting means killing,” Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest famously declared. The Civil War was fundamentally a matter of Americans killing Americans. This undeniable reality is what Jonathan Steplyk explores in Fighting Means Killing, the first book-length study of Union and Confederate soldiers’ attitudes toward, and experiences of, killing in the Civil War. Drawing upon letters, diaries, and postwar reminiscences, Steplyk examines what soldiers and veterans thought about killing before, during, and after the war. How did these soldiers view sharpshooters? How about hand-to-hand combat? What language did they use to describe killing in combat? What cultural and societal factors influenced their attitudes? And what was the impact of race in battlefield atrocities and bitter clashes between white Confederates and black Federals? These are the questions that Steplyk seeks to answer in Fighting Means Killing, a work that bridges the gap between military and social history—and that shifts the focus on the tragedy of the Civil War from fighting and dying for cause and country to fighting and killing.
Originally published by UNC Press in 1989, Fighting for the Confederacy is one of the richest personal accounts in all of the vast literature on the Civil War. Alexander was involved in nearly all of the great battles of the East, from First Manassas through Appomattox, and his duties brought him into frequent contact with most of the high command of the Army of Northern Virginia, including Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and James Longstreet. No other Civil War veteran of his stature matched Alexander's ability to discuss operations in penetrating detail-- this is especially true of his description of Gettysburg. His narrative is also remarkable for its utterly candid appraisals of leaders on both sides.
A controversial psychological examination of how soldiers’ willingness to kill has been encouraged and exploited to the detriment of contemporary civilian society. Psychologist and US Army Ranger Dave Grossman writes that the vast majority of soldiers are loath to pull the trigger in battle. Unfortunately, modern armies, using Pavlovian and operant conditioning, have developed sophisticated ways of overcoming this instinctive aversion. The mental cost for members of the military, as witnessed by the increase in post-traumatic stress, is devastating. The sociological cost for the rest of us is even worse: Contemporary civilian society, particularly the media, replicates the army’s conditioning techniques and, Grossman argues, is responsible for the rising rate of murder and violence, especially among the young. Drawing from interviews, personal accounts, and academic studies, On Killing is an important look at the techniques the military uses to overcome the powerful reluctance to kill, of how killing affects the soldier, and of the societal implications of escalating violence.
Killing a person is in general among the most seriously wrongful forms of action, yet most of us accept that it can be permissible to kill people on a large scale in war. Does morality become more permissive in a state of war? Jeff McMahan argues that conditions in war make no difference to what morality permits and the justifications for killing people are the same in war as they are in other contexts, such as individual self-defence. This view is radically at odds with the traditional theory of the just war and has implications that challenge common sense views. McMahan argues, for example, that it is wrong to fight in a war that is unjust because it lacks a just cause.
Looks at the effect of deadly battle on the body and mind and offers new research findings to help prevent lasting adverse effects.
In 1984, John Thompson was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a prominent white man in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was sent to Angola Prison and confined to his cell for twenty-three hours a day. However, Thompson adamantly proclaimed his innocence and just needed lawyers who believed that his trial had been mishandled and would step up to the plate against the powerful DA’s office. But who would fight for Thompson’s innocence when he didn’t have an alibi for the night of the murder and there were two key witnesses to confirm his guilt? Killing Time is about the eighteen-year quest for Thompson’s freedom from a wrongful murder conviction. After Philadelphia lawyers Michael Banks and Gordon Cooney take on his case, they struggle to find areas of misconduct in his previous trials while grappling with their questions about Thompson’s innocence. John Hollway and Ronald M. Gauthier have interviewed Thompson and the lawyers, and paint a realistic and compelling portrait of life on death row and the corruption in the Louisiana police and DA’s office. When it is found that evidence was mishandled in a previous trial that led to his death sentence in the murder case, Thompson is finally on his road to freedom—a journey that continues with his suit against Harry Connick, Sr. and the New Orleans DA’s office to this day.
Based on classified documents and interviews, argues that American acts of violence against millions of Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War were a pervasive and systematic part of the war.
Fighting The Enemy, first published in 2000, is about men with the job of killing each other. Based on the wartime writings of hundreds of Australian front-line soldiers during World War II, this powerful and resonant book contains many moving descriptions of high emotion and drama. Soldiers' interactions with their enemies are central to war and their attitudes to their adversaries are crucial to the way wars are fought. Yet few books look in detail at how enemies interpret each other. This book is an unprecedented and thorough examination of the way Australian combat soldiers interacted with troops from the four powers engaged in World War II: Germany, Italy, Vichy France and Japan. Each opponent has themes peculiar to it: the Italians were much ridiculed; the Germans were the most respected of enemies; the Vichy French were regarded with ambivalence; while the Japanese were the subject of much hostility, intensified by the real threat of occupation.
All for the Union is the eloquent and moving diary of Elisha Hunt Rhodes, featured throughout Ken Burns' PBS documentary The Civil War. Rhodes enlisted into the Union Army as a private in 1861 and left it four years later as a twenty-three-year-old colonel after fighting hard and honorably in battles from Bull Run to Appomattox. Anyone who heard these diaries excerpted in The Civil War will recognize his accounts of those campaigns, which remain outstanding for their clarity and detail. Most of all, Rhodes's words reveal the motivation of a common Yankee foot soldier, an otherwise ordinary young man who endured the rigors of combat and exhausting marches, short rations, fear, and homesickness for a salary of $13 a month and the satisfaction of giving "all for the union."
How do you get away with the murder of 11 million people? The answer is simple—and disturbing. You lie to them. Learn how you can become an informed, passionate citizen who demands honesty and integrity from your leaders. In this nonpartisan New York Times bestselling book, Andy Andrews emphasizes that seeking and discerning the truth is of critical importance, and that believing lies is the most dangerous thing you can do. You’ll be challenged to become a more careful student of the past, seeking accurate, factual accounts of events that illuminate choices our world faces now. By considering how the Nazi German regime was able to carry out over eleven million institutional killings between 1933 and 1945, Andrews advocates for an informed population that demands honesty and integrity from its leaders and from each other. This short, thought-provoking book poses questions like: What happens to a society in which truth is absent? How are we supposed to tell the difference between the “good guys" and the “bad guys”? How does the answer to this question affect our country, families, faith, and values? Does it matter that millions of ordinary citizens aren't participating in the decisions that shape the future of our country? Which is more dangerous: politicians with ill intent, or the too-trusting population that allows such people to lead them? This is a wake-up call: we must become informed, passionate citizens or suffer the consequences of our own ignorance and apathy. We can no longer measure a leader’s worth by the yardsticks provided by the left or the right. Instead, we must use an unchanging standard: the pure, unvarnished truth.