Upton's Regulars


Book Description

The harsh realities of Civil War life as seen through the eyes of the hard-fighting upstate New York regiment (the 121st New York State Volunteer Infantry Regiment). Combs letters, diaries, and memoirs to let the soldiers recount the war in their own words, following them from enlistment through combat, and back to civilian life.




From Antietam to Appomattox with Upton's Regulars


Book Description

Thirty years after the Civil War, the 121st New York Volunteers (Upton's Regulars) finally published a history of their regiment. Its stated author was a man who had not served directly with the 121st but had based the book on a memoir written by a survivor who had enlisted at age 15. That boy, Dewitt Clinton Beckwith, published his memoir thirty years after the war in an obscure upstate New York newspaper, The Hekrimer Democrat. For years, the "origin story" lay hidden in plain sight, until editor Salvatore Cilella discovered it while researching for a regimental history. The original 53 weekly installments, edited and annotated here, richly detail the horrors and folly of war. They reveal the slow maturation of a boy thrust into almost four years of war. Beckwith was present at nearly all the historic Eastern Theater engagements from Antietam to Appomattox, including an abortive stint with the 91st New York in Florida in 1861. He describes his various Tom Sawyer-like adventures with the VI Corps of the Army of the Potomac, dealing with death, disease, loss and ultimate elation at Lee's surrender, tempered only by Abraham Lincoln's death.













Delphi Collected Works of Upton Sinclair (Illustrated)


Book Description

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1943, Upton Sinclair was a prolific American novelist and polemicist for socialism, health, temperance, free speech and worker rights. His classic muckraking novel ‘The Jungle’ is regarded as a landmark naturalistic proletarian work, praised by Jack London as “the ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of wage slavery.” Sinclair also reached a wide audience with his Lanny Budd series of contemporary historical novels, concerning the adventures of an antifascist hero, who witnesses key events surrounding the two World Wars. This comprehensive eBook presents Sinclair’s collected works, with numerous illustrations, rare texts appearing in digital print for the first time, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1) * Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Sinclair’s life and works * Concise introductions to the major novels * 43 novels, with individual contents tables * The Complete Lanny Budd Series; all eleven novels * Features rare novels appearing for the first time in digital publishing * Images of how the books were first published, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts * Excellent formatting of the texts * Includes a selection of Sinclair’s plays and non-fiction * Features two autobiographies – discover Sinclair’s intriguing life * Ordering of texts into chronological order and genres CONTENTS: The Lanny Budd Series World’s End (1940) Between Two Worlds (1941) Dragon’s Teeth (1942) Wide Is the Gate (1943) Presidential Agent (1944) Dragon Harvest (1945) A World to Win (1946) A Presidential Mission (1947) One Clear Call (1948) O Shepherd, Speak! (1949) The Return of Lanny Budd (1953) Other Novels A Prisoner of Morro (1898) Springtime and Harvest (1901) The Journal of Arthur Stirling (1903) On Guard (1903) The West Point Rivals (1903) A West Point Treasure (1903) A Cadet’s Honor (1903) The Cruise of the Training Ship (1903) Manassas (1904) A Captain of Industry (1906) The Jungle (1906) The Overman (1907) The Metropolis (1908) The Moneychangers (1908) Samuel the Seeker (1910) Love’s Pilgrimage (1911) Damaged Goods (1913) Sylvia (1913) Sylvia’s Marriage (1914) King Coal (1917) Jimmie Higgins (1919) 100%: The Story of a Patriot (1920) They Call Me Carpenter (1922) The Millennium (1924) The Spokesman’s Secretary (1926) Oil! (1927) Boston (1928) The Gnomobile (1936) The Flivver King (1937) What Didymus Did (1954) Affectionately Eve (1961) The Plays Plays of Protest (1912) The Pot Boiler (1913) The Non-Fiction The Industrial Republic (1907) Good Health and How We Won It (1909) The Fasting Cure (1911) The Profits of Religion (1917) The Brass Check (1919) The Goose-Step (1923) The Goslings (1924) Mammonart (1925) Letters to Judd, an American Workingman (1925) Mental Radio (1930) The Book of Love (1934) The Autobiographies American Outpost (1932) The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (1962)




Zeppo


Book Description

“Marx Brothers authority Bader has done a remarkable job successfully uncovering the story of the unknown brother, revealing a genuinely complex character. This book is revelatory not just about Zeppo but also about the rest of the Marx Brothers.” - Library Journal Zeppo was the Marx Brother who didn’t want to go into the family business. A juvenile delinquent in his teen years, before joining his brothers on stage, Zeppo balanced two careers: auto mechanic and petty criminal. Even after getting dragged into the world of entertainment—for sixteen years, he did his familial duty as a vaudeville, Broadway, and movie star—he finally made his escape from the Four Marx Brothers. After failed attempts to find steady work in real estate, screenwriting, and the restaurant business, Zeppo finally hit it big as a Hollywood talent agent, representing stars like Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Lana Turner. From there, he bred racehorses, owned a manufacturing plant, tried out citrus ranching and commercial fishing, and patented several new inventions. He was, in short, a complex character, and his own family never quite figured him out. Zeppo: The Reluctant Marx Brother gives a lively account of this checkered life and career. As Robert Bader recounts, Zeppo’s lifelong addiction to gambling led him into relationships with several notorious organized crime figures, and he would ultimately appear before grand juries more frequently than movie cameras. (He was certainly the only Marx Brother who saw the corpse of a friend in a newspaper crime scene photo.) Socially, he mixed as easily with mobsters like Mickey Cohen as he did with movie stars like Clark Gable. Comprehensively researched with the full cooperation of Zeppo’s estate, including the first-ever interviews with his two sons, this is a remarkable look at the many lives of Zeppo Marx—even the ones he did his best to keep secret.




Regular Army O!


Book Description

“The drums they roll, upon my soul, for that’s the way we go,” runs the chorus in a Harrigan and Hart song from 1874. “Forty miles a day on beans and hay in the Regular Army O!” The last three words of that lyric aptly title Douglas C. McChristian’s remarkable work capturing the lot of soldiers posted to the West after the Civil War. At once panoramic and intimate, Regular Army O! uses the testimony of enlisted soldiers—drawn from more than 350 diaries, letters, and memoirs—to create a vivid picture of life in an evolving army on the western frontier. After the volunteer troops that had garrisoned western forts and camps during the Civil War were withdrawn in 1865, the regular army replaced them. In actions involving American Indians between 1866 and 1891, 875 of these soldiers were killed, mainly in minor skirmishes, while many more died of disease, accident, or effects of the natural environment. What induced these men to enlist for five years and to embrace the grim prospect of combat is one of the enduring questions this book explores. Going well beyond Don Rickey Jr.’s classic work Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay (1963), McChristian plumbs the regulars’ accounts for frank descriptions of their training to be soldiers; their daily routines, including what they ate, how they kept clean, and what they did for amusement; the reasons a disproportionate number occasionally deserted, while black soldiers did so only rarely; how the men prepared for field service; and how the majority who survived mustered out. In this richly drawn, uniquely authentic view, men black and white, veteran and tenderfoot, fill in the details of the frontier soldier’s experience, giving voice to history in the making.







Challenge


Book Description