Examining the First World War through the lens of the American SouthHow did World War I affect the American South? Did southerners experience the war in a particular way? How did regional considerations and, more generally, southern values and culture impact the wider war effort? Was there a distinctive southern experience of WWI?Scholars considered these questions during “Dixie’s Great War,” a symposium held at the University of Alabama in October...

Violence has been a central feature of America’s history, culture, and place in the world. It has taken many forms: from state-sponsored uses of force such as war or law enforcement, to revolution, secession, terrorism and other actions with important political and cultural implications. Religion also holds a crucial place in the American experience of violence, particularly for those who have found order and meaning in their worlds through religious texts, symbols, rituals, and ideas. Yet...

The untold story of the federal government’s Depression-era effort to redeem Dust Bowl refugees in rural California through religionIn the midst of the Great Depression, punished by crippling drought and deepening poverty, hundreds of thousands of families left the Great Plains and the Southwest to look for work in California’s rich agricultural valleys. In response to the scene of destitute white families living in filthy shelters built of cardboard, twigs, and re...

Jonathan Ebel has long been interested in how religion helps individuals and communities render meaningful the traumatic experiences of violence and war. In this new work, he examines cases from the Great War to the present day and argues that our notions of what it means to be an American soldier are not just strongly religious, but strongly Christian.     Drawing on a vast array of sources, he further reveals the effects of soldier veneration on the men and women so often cast ...

Faith in the Fight tells a story of religion, soldiering, suffering, and death in the Great War. Recovering the thoughts and experiences of American troops, nurses, and aid workers through their letters, diaries, and memoirs, Jonathan Ebel describes how religion--primarily Christianity--encouraged these young men and women to fight and die, sustained them through war's chaos, and shaped their responses to the war's aftermath. The book reveals the surprising frequency with which Am...

Selected as a Financial Times Best Book of 2013 In Strategy: A History, Sir Lawrence Freedman, one of the world's leading authorities on war and international politics, captures the vast history of strategic thinking, in a consistently engaging and insightful account of how strategy came to pervade every aspect of our lives. The range of Freedman's narrative is extraordinary, moving from the surprisingly advanced strategy practiced in primate groups, to the opposing strat...

National Book Award winner: This story of a family torn apart by the Vietnam era is "a magnificent portrayal of two noble men who broke each other's hearts" ( Booklist).James Carroll grew up in a Catholic family that seemed blessed. His father, who had once dreamed of becoming a priest, instead began a career in J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, rising through the ranks and eventually becoming one of the most powerful men in the Pentagon, the founder of the Defense I...

" Everyone's favorite conservative argues that the decline in the West's birthrate will lead to a fatal decline in its power." — Library JournalThe West is dying. Collapsing birth rates in Europe and the US, coupled with population explosions in Africa, Asia and Latin America are set to cause cataclysmic shifts in world power, as unchecked immigration swamps and polarizes every Western society and nation.The Death of the West details how a c...

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN AMERICAN BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A monumental history that has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States.”In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War—race—while writing what John Toland has called “a landmark book ... a powerful, moving, and...

From a premier political philosopher, a penetrating investigation into the moral and ethical questions raised by war.**“A magnificent book, an honor to its writer...a book that makes for a return of civilized discussion of the question of the morality of war.”―**New York Review of BooksJust and Unjust Wars has forever changed how we think about the ethics of conflict. In this modern classic, political philosopher Michael W...

For those contemplating religious choices, Unitarian Universalism offers an appealing alternative to religious denominations that stress theological creeds over individual conviction and belief. In this new edition of the classic introductory text on Unitarian Universalism, which includes a revealing, entertaining foreword by best-selling author Robert Fulghum (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It), a new preface by UU moderator...

The importance of honor is present in the earliest records of civilization. Today, while it may still be an essential concept in Islamic cultures, in the West, honor has been disparaged and dismissed as obsolete. In this lively and authoritative book, James Bowman traces the curious and fascinating history of this ideal, from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment and to the killing fields of World War I and the despair of Vietnam. Bowman reminds us that the fate of honor and the fate o...