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Featured in the NY Emmy-nominated documentary New York City's Vietnam Veterans (CUNY-TV) A collection of heartrending oral histories that topples assumptions about the people who served in Vietnam The Vietnam War was a defining event for a generation of Americans. But for years, misguided and sometimes demeaning clichés about its veterans have proliferated widely. Philip F. Napoli's Bringing It All Back Home strips away the myths and reveals the complex individuals who served in Southeast Asia. Napoli was one of the chief researchers for Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, and in the spirit of that enterprise, his oral histories recast our understanding of a war and its legacy. Napoli introduces a remarkable group of young New Yorkers who went abroad with high hopes only to find a bewildering conflict. We meet a nurse who staged a hunger strike to promote peace while working at a field hospital; a paratrooper whose experiences on the battlefield left him with emotional scars that led to violence and homelessness; a black soldier who achieved an unexpected camaraderie with his fellow servicemen in racially tense times; and a university administrator who helped to create New York City's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Some of Napoli's soldiers became active opponents of the war; others did not. But all returned with a powerful urge to understand the death and destruction they had seen. Overcoming adversity, a great many would go on to lead ambitious lives of public service. Tracing their journeys from the streets of Brooklyn and Queens to the banks of the Mekong, and back to the most glamorous corporations and meanest homeless shelters of New York City, Napoli reveals the variety and surprising vibrancy of the ex-soldiers' experiences. "For almost everyone the time in Vietnam was the most exciting and the most alive time of your life," one veteran recalls. He adds: "I still have this little trick . . . When I lie down and go to sleep, if there's something bothering me, I say, 'You're warm, you're dry, and there is no one shooting at you.'"
An oral history of the themes of war provides letters, photographs, and sketches from from U.S. veterans' who fought in World War I and II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf.
Shades of L.A., a collection of more than one hundred photographs selected from the family albums of eight different communities, makes available, for the first time, rare images of family life in Southern California. Taken not by outsiders reporting to the world, but by families recording their own history, these photographs are important cultural documents of the twentieth century. Together with a timeline of L.A.'s ethnic history, they give a compelling portrait of life in one of America's most diverse cities from the 1880s to the 1960s.
Contains thirty-seven narratives, drawn from letters, diaries, private memoirs, and oral histories in which American veterans describe their experiences serving in conflicts from the First World War to the twenty-first-century war in Iraq.
A sweeping history of emotional life that explores how 'Dear John' letters became a rite of passage for American servicemen.
"I would have followed him through Hell," said one of the men who was serving with George Pearkes at Passchendaele where he won the Victoria Cross. If his men were devoted to him, he was equally so to them. In the character of this distinguished Canadian soldier and statesman "most conspicuous bravery," "utmost gallantry," and "supreme contempt of danger" were combined with a deep sense of duty and a zeal for service. Set against the background of Canada's twentieth century transformation from a rural and agricultural society into an urban technological nation, General Pearkes's career makes a compelling biographical study. After proving up his homestead in Alberta, Pearkes joined the Royal North West Mounted Police and served in the Yukon until he was able to purchase his discharge and enlist in 1915. In Europe he was soon in the trenches, where, wounded five times, he saw the Canadian Army engage in battle after battle on the Western Front and win a reputation as an elite corps. In the two decades between the World Wars Pearkes served in the small permanent force as district commander, deputy commandant at the Royal Military College, Kingston, and as Director of Military Training in Ottawa. Neglect and apathy in the 1920's and financial stringencies and isolationism in the 1930's made the task of maintaining the militia in a state of preparedness increasingly difficult. When the inevitable war broke out in September 1939, Pearkes was among those who had to forge the weapon. Until late in 1942, when he was recalled to Canada to take charge of the Pacific Command, Pearkes served overseas training the 2nd Brigade and later the 1st Division as the Battle of Britain was waged overhead and plans and techniques for the eventual invasion of Europe were perfected. Back in Canada he became involved in the major political furore caused by the continuing need for reinforcements. Pearkes's role in the conscription crisis and the "Generals' Revolt" sheds new light on these important issues. Shortly before the war ended, Pearkes retired, but he soon accepted the call to stand as a member of Parliament. From 1945 to 1960, when he was appointed lieutenant-governor of British Columbia, he served as a Conservative defence critic and as Minister of Defence in the Diefenbaker cabinet. He was deeply involved in the highly charged and hotly debated decisions of the cold war era, including Bomarc, the Arrow, NATO, NORAD, and provisions for civil defence, and his views on them will be significant to those interested in Canadian political and military history.
During the Asia-Pacific War, the Japanese military forced hundreds of thousands of women across Asia into "comfort stations" where they were repeatedly raped and tortured. Japanese imperial forces claimed they recruited women to join these stations in order to prevent the mass rape of local women and the spread of venereal disease among soldiers. In reality, these women were kidnapped and coerced into sexual slavery. Comfort stations institutionalized rape, and these "comfort women" were subjected to atrocities that have only recently become the subject of international debate. Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves features the personal narratives of twelve women forced into sexual slavery when the Japanese military occupied their hometowns. Beginning with their prewar lives and continuing through their enslavement to their postwar struggles for justice, these interviews reveal that the prolonged suffering of the comfort station survivors was not contained to wartime atrocities but was rather a lifelong condition resulting from various social, political, and cultural factors. In addition, their stories bring to light several previously hidden aspects of the comfort women system: the ransoms the occupation army forced the victims' families to pay, the various types of improvised comfort stations set up by small military units throughout the battle zones and occupied regions, and the sheer scope of the military sexual slavery-much larger than previously assumed. The personal narratives of these survivors combined with the testimonies of witnesses, investigative reports, and local histories also reveal a correlation between the proliferation of the comfort stations and the progression of Japan's military offensive. The first English-language account of its kind, Chinese Comfort Women exposes the full extent of the injustices suffered by these women and the conditions that caused them.
The groundbreaking, bestselling history of slavery, with a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed With the publication of the 1619 Project and the national reckoning over racial inequality, the story of slavery has gripped America’s imagination—and conscience—once again. No group of people better understood the power of slavery’s legacies than the last generation of American people who had lived as slaves. Little-known before the first publication of Remembering Slavery over two decades ago, their memories were recorded on paper, and in some cases on primitive recording devices, by WPA workers in the 1930s. A major publishing event, Remembering Slavery captured these extraordinary voices in a single volume for the first time, presenting them as an unprecedented, first-person history of slavery in America. Remembering Slavery received the kind of commercial attention seldom accorded projects of this nature—nationwide reviews as well as extensive coverage on prime-time television, including Good Morning America, Nightline, CBS Sunday Morning, and CNN. Reviewers called the book “chilling . . . [and] riveting” (Publishers Weekly) and “something, truly, truly new” (The Village Voice). With a new foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar Annette Gordon-Reed, this new edition of Remembering Slavery is an essential text for anyone seeking to understand one of the most basic and essential chapters in our collective history.
The first and only memoir by one of the original Navajo code talkers of WWII. His name wasn’t Chester Nez. That was the English name he was assigned in kindergarten. And in boarding school at Fort Defiance, he was punished for speaking his native language, as the teachers sought to rid him of his culture and traditions. But discrimination didn’t stop Chester from answering the call to defend his country after Pearl Harbor, for the Navajo have always been warriors, and his upbringing on a New Mexico reservation gave him the strength—both physical and mental—to excel as a marine. During World War II, the Japanese had managed to crack every code the United States used. But when the Marines turned to its Navajo recruits to develop and implement a secret military language, they created the only unbroken code in modern warfare—and helped assure victory for the United States over Japan in the South Pacific. INCLUDES THE ACTUAL NAVAJO CODE AND RARE PICTURES