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Gentlemen Volunteers

Author : Arlen J. Hansen

Publisher : Skyhorse

Page : 346 pages

File Size : 16,55 MB

Release : 2011-09-01

Category : History

ISBN : 1628721499

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Book Description

They left Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Michigan, and Stanford to drive ambulances on the French front, and on the killing fields of World War I they learned that war was no place for gentlemen. The tale of the American volunteer ambulance drivers of the First World War is one of gallantry amid gore; manners amid madness. Arlen J. Hansen’s Gentlemen Volunteers brings to life the entire story of the men—and women—who formed the first ambulance corps, and who went on to redefine American culture. Some were to become legends—Ernest Hemingway, e. e. cummings, Malcolm Cowley, and Walt Disney—but all were part of a generation seeking something greater and grander than what they could find at home. The war in France beckoned them, promising glory, romance, and escape. Between 1914 and 1917 (when the United States officially entered the war), they volunteered by the thousands, abandoning college campuses and prep schools across the nation and leaving behind an America determined not to be drawn into a “European war.” What the volunteers found in France was carnage on an unprecedented scale. Here is a spellbinding account of a remarkable time; the legacy of the ambulance drivers of WWI endures to this day.



By the People

Author : Susan J. Ellis

Publisher : Jossey-Bass

Page : 464 pages

File Size : 30,13 MB

Release : 1990

Category : Self-Help

ISBN :

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Book Description

Most history books paint our past with portraits of presidents, generals, and captains of industry. By the People introduces the multitude of citizens who stood on the front lines when history was being made--the volunteers and associates that shaped us as a people, from the Social Compact of 1620 to the Underground Railroad before the Civil War and the women's suffrage movement.



Heart of the Nation

Author : John M. Bridgeland

Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Page : 193 pages

File Size : 47,31 MB

Release : 2012-12-29

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1442220627

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Book Description

Heart of the Nation traces America’s volunteer tradition—the golden thread of American democracy—and how Presidents from Washington to Obama have called on citizens to serve neighbor and nation. From the bunker below the White House on 9/11 to villages in Africa, John Bridgeland shares his own experiences inside and outside of government to spark more Americans to volunteer to meet urgent needs. He compellingly argues that such service is fundamental to our own happiness and to what the Founding Fathers envisioned when they talked about the “pursuit of Happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. Bridgeland helps the reader discover their own volunteer service mission and issues a rallying cry to the nation to heal our partisan divisions by joining together across party lines to address our toughest challenges.



Flying Tigers

Author : Daniel Ford

Publisher : Warbird Books

Page : 422 pages

File Size : 48,96 MB

Release : 2023-05-01

Category : History

ISBN : 0692734732

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Book Description

During World War II, in the skies over Burma and China, a handful of American pilots met and bloodied the "Imperial Wild Eagles" of Japan and won immortality as the Flying Tigers. One of America's most famous combat forces, the Tigers were recruited to defend beleaguered China for $600 a month and a bounty of $500 for each Japanese plane they shot down--fantastic money in an era when a Manhattan hotel room cost three dollars a night.This May 2023 revision has never-before-published information about Chennault's early years. "Admirable," wrote Chennault biographer Martha Byrd of Ford's original text. "A readable book based on sound sources. Expect some surprises." Flying Tigers won the Aviation/Space Writers Association Award of Excellence in the year of its first publication.



Letters from Verdun

Author : William C. Harvey

Publisher : Casemate

Page : 241 pages

File Size : 22,26 MB

Release : 2009-12-05

Category : Biography & Autobiography

ISBN : 1612000282

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Book Description

The dramatic experiences of an ambulance driver in the Great War, told through personal correspondence and photographs. Though the United States was late to enter the Great War, a number of idealistic young Americans wished to take part from the beginning. One of these was Avery Royce Wolf, a highly educated scion of a family in America’s burgeoning industrial heartland. Volunteering as an ambulance driver with the French Army in the Verdun sector, Royce sent back a constant stream of highly detailed letters describing the experience of frontline combat, as well as comments on strategy, the country he encountered, and the Allies’ prospects for success. This treasure trove of brilliant letters, only recently discovered, is accompanied by several albums worth of rare, high-quality photos depicting aspects of the Great War in France never previously published. Full of action, including the suspense and terror of the Ludendorff Offensive, and interesting firsthand analyses, such as comparing French and German trench works, Letters from Verdun brings the reader amazingly close to the frontlines of the Great War.



America's Army

Author : Beth Bailey

Publisher : Harvard University Press

Page : 352 pages

File Size : 17,97 MB

Release : 2009-11-23

Category : History

ISBN : 0674035364

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Book Description

" ... the story of the all-volunteer force, from the draft protests and policy proposals of the 1960s through the Iraq War"--Jacket.



Volunteers

Author : Jerad W. Alexander

Publisher : Algonquin Books

Page : 334 pages

File Size : 44,4 MB

Release : 2021-11-09

Category : Biography & Autobiography

ISBN : 1643752189

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Book Description

“Riveting and morally complex, Volunteers is not only an insider’s account of war. It takes you inside the increasingly closed culture that creates our warriors.” —Elliot Ackerman, author of the National Book Award finalist Dark at the Crossing As a child, Jerad Alexander lay in bed listening to the fighter jets take off outside his window and was desperate to be airborne. As a teenager at an American base in Japan, he immersed himself in war games, war movies, and pulpy novels about Vietnam. Obsessed with all things military, he grew up playing with guns, joined the Civil Air Patrol for the uniform, and reveled in the closed and safe life “inside the castle,” within the embrace of the armed forces, the only world he knew or could imagine. Most of all, he dreamed of enlisting—like his mother, father, stepfather, and grandfather before him—and playing his part in the Great American War Story. He joined the US Marines straight out of high school, eager for action. Once in Iraq, however, he came to realize he was fighting a lost cause, enmeshed in the ongoing War on Terror that was really just a fruitless display of American might. The myths of war, the stories of violence and masculinity and heroism, the legacy of his family—everything Alexander had planned his life around—was a mirage. Alternating scenes from childhood with skirmishes in the Iraqi desert, this original, searing, and propulsive memoir introduces a powerful new voice in the literature of war. Jerad W. Alexander—not some elite warrior, but a simple volunteer—delivers a passionate and timely reckoning with the troubled and cyclical truths of the American war machine.



Groundbreakers

Author : Elizabeth McKenna

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 269 pages

File Size : 15,72 MB

Release : 2014

Category : Biography & Autobiography

ISBN : 0199394598

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Book Description

Much has been written about the historic nature of the Obama campaign. The multi-year, multi-billion dollar operation elected the nation's first black president, raised and spent more money than any other election effort in history, and built the most sophisticated voter targeting technology ever before used on a national campaign. What is missing from most accounts of the campaign is an understanding of how Obama for America recruited, motivated, developed, and managed its formidable army of 2.2 million volunteers. Unlike previous field campaigns that drew their power from staff, consultants, and paid canvassers, the Obama campaign's capacity came from unpaid local citizens who took responsibility for organizing their own neighborhoods months--and even years--in advance of election day. In so doing, Groundbreakers argues, the campaign engaged citizens in the work of practicing democracy. How did they organize so many volunteers to produce so much valuable work for the campaign? This book describes how. Elizabeth McKenna and Hahrie Han argue that the legacy of Obama for America extends beyond big data and micro-targeting; it also reinvigorated and expanded traditional models of field campaigning. Groundbreakers makes the case that the Obama campaign altered traditional ground games by adopting the principles and practices of community organizing. Drawing on in-depth interviews with OFA field staff and volunteers, this book also argues that a key achievement of the OFA's field organizing was its transformative effect on those who were a part of it. Obama the candidate might have inspired volunteers to join the campaign, but it was the fulfilling relationships that volunteers had with other people--and their deep belief that their work mattered for the work of democracy--that kept them active. Groundbreakers documents how the Obama campaign has inspired a new way of running field campaigns, with lessons for national and international political and civic movements.



The US Volunteers in the Southern Philippines

Author : John Scott Reed

Publisher : University Press of Kansas

Page : 318 pages

File Size : 24,87 MB

Release : 2020-07-23

Category : History

ISBN : 0700629726

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Book Description

In fighting the Philippine-American War, the United States counted heavily on twenty-five new regiments raised in the summer of 1899: the United States Volunteers (USVs). The USVs outnumbered regular regiments in eleven of eighteen military pacification districts, particularly through the southern archipelago, where they bore the brunt of field service, combat, and disease casualties until relieved in spring 1901 by a reconstituted Regular Army. The US Volunteers in the Southern Philippines offers the first full account of this historically unique 35,000-man force—and in the process describes how the USVs decisively contributed to the United States’ single most successful counterinsurgency campaign waged outside the Western Hemisphere. A close examination of the military achievements, garrison life, and institutional characteristics of the US Volunteers reveals how the force effectively combined the best elements of the American regular and militia traditions during its brief existence—abetted by an Army medical system vastly improved since debilitating losses in Cuba and the United States during 1898. Countering recent readings of the pacification of the Philippines as a near-genocidal event, John Scott Reed uses court-martial records to argue for a high disciplinary and behavioral standard among the USVs—in garrison, in the field, and, most critically, in their interactions with Filipino villagers. This standard, his evidence suggests, was supported by a late-Victorian, reflexively patriotic sense of masculinity that motivated the Volunteers, along with a profound belief in the self-evident superiority of American institutions. He also draws on recent Filipino scholarship to clarify the role of landed and commercial elites in initially supporting the Philippine Revolution and later collaborating with the US occupation. Bridging military history and post-colonial studies, Reed’s work provides a new and clearer understanding of the short-lived but highly effective US Volunteer force, and a new perspective on a critical moment in America’s military and colonial past.



The Volunteer

Author : Jack Fairweather

Publisher : HarperCollins

Page : 630 pages

File Size : 17,7 MB

Release : 2019-06-25

Category : History

ISBN : 0062561421

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Book Description

COSTA BOOK AWARD WINNER: BOOK OF THE YEAR • #1 SUNDAY TIMES (UK) BESTSELLER “Superbly written and breathtakingly researched, The Volunteer smuggles us into Auschwitz and shows us—as if watching a movie—the story of a Polish agent who infiltrated the infamous camp, organized a rebellion, and then snuck back out. ... Fairweather has dug up a story of incalculable value and delivered it to us in the most compelling prose I have read in a long time.” —Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm and Tribe The incredible true story of a Polish resistance fighter’s infiltration of Auschwitz to sabotage the camp from within, and his death-defying attempt to warn the Allies about the Nazis’ plans for a “Final Solution” before it was too late. To uncover the fate of the thousands being interred at a mysterious Nazi camp on the border of the Reich, a thirty-nine-year-old Polish resistance fighter named Witold Pilecki volunteered for an audacious mission: assume a fake identity, intentionally get captured and sent to the new camp, and then report back to the underground on what had happened to his compatriots there. But gathering information was not his only task: he was to execute an attack from inside—where the Germans would least expect it. The name of the camp was Auschwitz. Over the next two and half years, Pilecki forged an underground army within Auschwitz that sabotaged facilities, assassinated Nazi informants and officers, and gathered evidence of terrifying abuse and mass murder. But as he pieced together the horrifying truth that the camp was to become the epicenter of Nazi plans to exterminate Europe’s Jews, Pilecki realized he would have to risk his men, his life, and his family to warn the West before all was lost. To do so, meant attempting the impossible—an escape from Auschwitz itself. Completely erased from the historical record by Poland’s post-war Communist government, Pilecki remains almost unknown to the world. Now, with exclusive access to previously hidden diaries, family and camp survivor accounts, and recently declassified files, Jack Fairweather offers an unflinching portrayal of survival, revenge and betrayal in mankind’s darkest hour. And in uncovering the tragic outcome of Pilecki’s mission, he reveals that its ultimate defeat originated not in Auschwitz or Berlin, but in London and Washington.