Follow

• 

  Harriet Tubman: A Life in American History

  Kerry S. Walters

  Publication Date: 11-2019

  Harriet Tubman: A Life in American History is an indispensable resource for high school and college students about the life and times of anti-slavery activist Harriet Tubman, who exemplifies how slaves took the initiative to free themselves and others.

  Harriet Tubman served a pivotal role in leading slaves to freedom in the decade before the Civil War. This biography offers a demythologized chronicle of her life and work with information about her life as a slave, role as conductor on the Underground Railroad, work as a military scout during the Civil War, and postwar activism for blacks and women.

  The book provides valuable context that situates Harriet Tubman against the backdrop of the slavery debate in antebellum America, and the hardships endured by ex-slaves in postbellum America. As such, the timeframe covers nearly a full century, from the first quarter of the 19th to the first quarter of the 20th. In addition to ten biographical chapters and a short timeline, Harriet Tubman includes an interpretive essay reflecting on her importance in American history. The volume also includes an appendix of primary documents about Tubman's life and work, a bibliography, and a number of sidebars and short commentaries embedded in the text, inviting readers to explore connections between Tubman's life and political, intellectual, and social culture.

  Features:

  • Provides readers with a comprehensive but readable account of Tubman's life
  • Provides readers with an overview of American abolitionism and the Underground Railroad
  • Explores the pivotal role of religious faith in Tubman's activism
  • Suggests several comparisons between Tubman's activism and current struggles for social justice

• 

  The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies

  Peter S. Carmichael

  Publication Date: 12-2018

  How did Civil War soldiers endure the brutal and unpredictable existence of army life during the conflict? This question is at the heart of Peter S. Carmichael's sweeping new study of men at war. Based on close examination of the letters and records left behind by individual soldiers from both the North and the South, Carmichael explores the totality of the Civil War experience--the marching, the fighting, the boredom, the idealism, the exhaustion, the punishments, and the frustrations of being away from families who often faced their own dire circumstances. Carmichael focuses not on what soldiers thought but rather how they thought. In doing so, he reveals how, to the shock of most men, well-established notions of duty or disobedience, morality or immorality, loyalty or disloyalty, and bravery or cowardice were blurred by war.

  Digging deeply into his soldiers' writing, Carmichael resists the idea that there was "a common soldier" but looks into their own words to find common threads in soldiers' experiences and ways of understanding what was happening around them. In the end, he argues that a pragmatic philosophy of soldiering emerged, guiding members of the rank and file as they struggled to live with the contradictory elements of their violent and volatile world. Soldiering in the Civil War, as Carmichael argues, was never a state of being but a process of becoming.

• 

  Deleuze and Derrida: Difference and the Power of the Negative

  Vernon W. Cisney

  Publication Date: 10-1-2018

  The first scholarly comparative analysis of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze's philosophies of difference.
  
  Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze are best known for their respective attempts to theoretically formulate non-dialectical conceptions of difference. Now, for the first time, Vernon W. Cisney brings you a scholarly analysis of their contrasting concepts of difference.

  Cisney distinguishes their conceptions of difference by differentiating them on the basis of the criticisms they level against Hegel, as well as their valorisations of Nietzsche, and the ways in which they understand Nietzsche's thought to surpass that of Hegel. The contrast between the two, Cisney argues, is that while Deleuze formulates an affirmative conception of difference, Derrida's différance amounts to an irresolvable negativity.

• 

  Moral Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction

  Daniel R. DeNicola

  Publication Date: 12-18-2018

  Moral Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction is a compact yet comprehensive book offering an explication and critique of the major theories that have shaped philosophical ethics. Engaging with both historical and contemporary figures, this book explores the scope, limits, and requirements of morality. DeNicola traces our various attempts to ground morality: in nature, in religion, in culture, in social contracts, and in aspects of the human person such as reason, emotions, caring, and intuition.

• 

  The Politics of Water in the Art and Festivals of Medici Florence: From Neptune Fountain to Naumachia

  Felicia M. Else

  Publication Date: 8-2-2018

  This book tells the story of one dynasty's struggle with water, to control its flow and manage its representation. The role of water in the art and festivals of Cosimo I and his heirs, Francesco I and Ferdinando I de' Medici, informs this richly-illustrated interdisciplinary study. Else draws on a wealth of visual and documentary material to trace how the Medici sought to harness the power of Neptune, whether in the application of his imagery or in the control over waterways and maritime frontiers, as they negotiated a place in the unstable political arena of Europe, and competed with foreign powers more versed in maritime traditions and aquatic imagery.

• 

  Reconstruction: A Concise History

  Allen C. Guelzo

  Publication Date: 5-1-2018

  The era known as Reconstruction is one of the unhappiest times in American history. It succeeded in reuniting the nation politically after the Civil War but in little else. Conflict shifted from the battlefield to the Capitol as Congress warred with President Andrew Johnson over just what to do with the South. Johnson's plan of Presidential Reconstruction, which was sympathetic to the former Confederacy and allowed repressive measures such as the "black codes," would ultimately lead to his impeachment and the institution of Radical Reconstruction. While Reconstruction saw the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments, expanding the rights and suffrage of African Americans, it largely failed to chart a progressive course for race relations after the abolition of slavery and the rise of Jim Crow. It also struggled to manage the Southern resistance towards a Northern free-labor economy. However, these failures cannot obscure a number of accomplishments with long-term consequences for American life, among them the Civil Rights Act, the election of the first African American representatives to Congress, and the avoidance of renewed civil war. Reconstruction suffered from poor leadership and uncertainty of direction, but it also laid the groundwork for renewed struggles for racial equality during the civil rights movement.

  In this concise history, award-winning historian Allen C. Guelzo delves into the constitutional, political, and social issues behind Reconstruction to provide a lucid and original account of a historical moment that left an indelible mark on the American social fabric.

• 

  Relational Identities and Other-Than-Human Agency in Archaeology

  Eleanor Harrison-Buck and Julia A. Hendon

  Publication Date: 8-2018

  Relational Identities and Other-than-Human Agency in Archaeology explores the benefits and consequences of archaeological theorizing on and interpretation of the social agency of nonhumans as relational beings capable of producing change in the world. The volume cross-examines traditional understanding of agency and personhood, presenting a globally diverse set of case studies that cover a range of cultural, geographical, and historical contexts.

  Agency (the ability to act) and personhood (the reciprocal qualities of relational beings) have traditionally been strictly assigned to humans. In case studies from Ghana to Australia to the British Isles and Mesoamerica, contributors to this volume demonstrate that objects, animals, locations, and other nonhuman actors also potentially share this ontological status and are capable of instigating events and enacting change. This kind of other-than-human agency is not a one-way transaction of cause to effect but requires an appropriate form of reciprocal engagement indicative of relational personhood, which in these cases, left material traces detectable in the archaeological record.

  Modern dualist ontologies separating objects from subjects and the animate from the inanimate obscure our understanding of the roles that other-than-human agents played in past societies. Relational Identities and Other-than-Human Agency in Archaeology challenges this essentialist binary perspective. Contributors in this volume show that intersubjective (inherently social) ways of being are a fundamental and indispensable condition of all personhood and move the debate in posthumanist scholarship beyond the polarizing dichotomies of relational versus bounded types of persons. In this way, the book makes a significant contribution to theory and interpretation of personhood and other-than-human agency in archaeology.

• 

  So You Want to Sing Chamber Music: A Guide for Performers

  Susan Hochmiller

  Publication Date: 12-2018

  Vocal chamber music encompasses a wide range of music composed for anything from a solo to twelve voices and instruments. Performing chamber music offers the singer a unique opportunity to increase collaboration with instrumentalists and improve technique, musicianship, artistry, and communication.
  
  So You Want to Sing Chamber Music offers a comprehensive guide to learning, rehearsing, and performing in this genre. The book explores such critical skills as choosing repertoire that is appropriate for one’s voice type, communicating with wind players and string players, preparing for a successful rehearsal, performance style, staging considerations, and recital programming. Also included are suggestions on using vocal chamber music as a pedagogical tool in the voice studio, alongside recommendations for listening and further reading.

  Additional chapters by Scott McCoy and Wendy LeBorgne address universal questions of voice science, pedagogy, and vocal health. The So You Want to Sing series is produced in partnership with the National Association of Teachers of Singing. Like all books in the series, So You Want to Sing Chamber Music features online supplemental material on the NATS website. Please visit www.nats.org to access style-specific exercises, audio and video files, and additional resources.

• 

  Ancient China and its Eurasian Neighbors: Artifacts, Identity, and Death in the Frontier, 3000-700 BCE

  Katheryn M. Linduff, Yan Sun, Wei Cao, and Yuanqing Liu

  Publication Date: 2018

  This volume examines the role of objects in the region north of early dynastic state centers, at the intersection of Ancient China and Eurasia, a large area that stretches from Xinjiang to the China Sea, from c.3000 BCE to the mid-eighth century BCE. This area was a frontier, an ambiguous space that lay at the margins of direct political control by the metropolitan states, where local and colonial ideas and practices were reconstructed transculturally. These identities were often merged and displayed in material culture. Types of objects, styles, and iconography were often hybrids or new to the region, as were the tomb assemblages in which they were deposited and found. Patrons commissioned objects that marked a symbolic vision of place and person and that could mobilize support, legitimize rule, and bind people together. Through close examination of key artifacts, this book untangles the considerable changes in political structure and cultural makeup of ancient Chinese states and their northern neighbors.

• 

  Common Cause: An Oral History of the World War II Home Front

  Devin McKinney and Michael J. Birkner

  Publication Date: 2018

  In excerpts drawn from Musselman Library's Oral History Archive, the World War II years are recalled by dozens of the men and women—adults, teenagers, children—who endured them on the home front. The home front experience was by turns exhilarating, fearsome, depressing, and banal. Some civilians had it relatively easy, while others had it hard. Righteous confidence was offset by looming uncertainty, patriotism was often buttressed by bigotry, and the joys of victory and reunion were shadowed by irreplaceable losses. In this volume, the speech of ordinary citizens in extraordinary times is augmented by abundant illustration, much of it in color—photographs, posters, artifacts, and other evocations of a past that still fascinates us. Through word and image, in tones of humor, warmth, anger, and sadness, Common Cause brings back the unique features of American life at that time, and the daily reality of being a nation at war.

• 

  The Continuing Quest for Missile Defense: When Lofty Goals Confront Reality

  Peter J. Pella

  Publication Date: 6-2018

  For almost three quarters of a century, the United States has spent billions of dollars and countless person-hours in the pursuit of a national missile defense system that would protect the country from intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) carrying nuclear warheads. The system currently in place consists of 44 long-range antiballistic missiles stationed in Alaska and California to protect the United States from a possible nuclear weapon carrying ICBM attack from North Korea. After all this effort, this system is still imperfect, being successful only 10 out of 18 tests.
  
  This book will provide an historical description of past efforts in national missile defenses to understand the technical difficulties involved. It will also explain how national security concerns, the evolving international environment, and the complexities of US politics have all affected the story. The book will also describe the current systems in place to protect allies and troops in the field from the threat of shorter range missiles. Finally, the book will describe the current US vision for the future of missile defenses and provide some suggestions for alternative paths.

• 

  Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter Williamson in America and Britain

  Timothy J. Shannon

  Publication Date: 2018

  In 1758 Peter Williamson appeared on the streets of Aberdeen, Scotland, dressed as a Native American and telling a remarkable tale. He claimed that as a young boy he had been kidnapped from the city and sold into slavery in America. In performances and in a printed narrative he peddled to his audiences, Williamson described his tribulations as an indentured servant, Indian captive, soldier, and prisoner of war. Aberdeen’s magistrates called him a liar and banished him from the city, but Williamson defended his story.

  Separating fact from fiction, Timothy J. Shannon explains what Williamson’s tale says about how working people of eighteenth-century Britain, so often depicted as victims of empire, found ways to create lives and exploit opportunities within it. Exiled from Aberdeen, Williamson settled in Edinburgh, where he cultivated enduring celebrity as the self-proclaimed “king of the Indians.” His performances and publications capitalized on the curiosity the Seven Years’ War had ignited among the public for news and information about America and its native inhabitants. As a coffeehouse proprietor and printer, he gave audiences a plebeian perspective on Britain’s rise to imperial power in North America.

  Indian Captive, Indian King is a history of empire from the bottom up, showing how Williamson’s American odyssey illuminates the real-life experiences of everyday people on the margins of the British Empire and how those experiences, when repackaged in travel narratives and captivity tales, shaped popular perceptions about the empire’s racial and cultural geography.

• 

  On the Borders of the Academy: Challenges and Strategies for First-Generation Graduate Students and Faculty

  Alecea Ritter Standlee

  Publication Date: 2018

  One of the most significant achievements in US higher education during the latter half of the twentieth century was the increasing access enjoyed by historically marginalized populations, including women, people of color, and the poor and working class. With this achievement, however, has come a growing population of first generation students, including first-generation graduate students and faculty members, who struggle at times to navigate unfamiliar territory. This book offers insight into the challenges of first-generation status, as well as practical tools for navigating the halls of the academy for both academics and their institutional allies.

• 

  Saint Oscar Romero: Pastor, Prophet, Martyr

  Kerry S. Walters

  Publication Date: 10-2-2018

  “Carry on, always seeking truth, justice, peace, and freedom. Christ will give us strength so that we won’t lose heart along the way.” – Saint Oscar Romero
  
  This new biography by Kerry Walters offers an inspiring look at St. Óscar’s life, starting in childhood and then tracing his evolution from a conscientious but unremarkable (and at times curmudgeonly) priest to a heroic prophet and—finally—a martyr, gunned down in 1980 while celebrating mass.
  
  The “revolution of Christ’s love” that so moved St. Oscar is as relevant to our own lives as it was to an El Salvador torn by civil unrest: motivated by the power of love instead of arms; seeking not the overthrow but the conversion of society; and asserting that all people are equally beloved by God and equally deserving of the world’s resources.
  
  Only God could have foreseen that a timid, introverted, and very traditional Salvadoran priest—one with an unsavory reputation as the lackey of rightwing politicians and wealthy landowners—would go on to become the hero of liberation theology.
  
  And yet, largely thanks to the 1989 biopic starring Raul Julia, many people are familiar with the extraordinary journey of Oscar Romero. The priest, prophet, and martyr canonized by Pope Francis in October, 2018, has become a symbol for our time: a Christian hero who dared all, risked all, and sacrificed all for the sake of love.
  
  Liberation theology’s emergence in the late 1960s sparked a fresh way of reading the gospels and a new focus for evangelization—one that emphasized material as well as spiritual salvation and sought to empower victims of poverty and injustice. Initially, Romero worried that advocates of liberation theology, zealous as they were to redress injustice, fixated on political and economic activism at the expense of dedication to Christ.
  
  Then came 1977 and the tragedy that changed the trajectory of Romero’s life. With the government-sanctioned murder of his friend Rutilio Grande, a Jesuit who lived and worked with campesinos, something that had been stirring inside his heart finally clicked.

• 

  Banjo Roots and Branches

  Robert B. Winans

  Publication Date: 9-2018

  The story of the banjo's journey from Africa to the western hemisphere blends music, history, and a union of cultures. In Banjo Roots and Branches, Robert B. Winans presents cutting-edge scholarship that covers the instrument's West African origins and its adaptations and circulation in the Caribbean and United States. The contributors provide detailed ethnographic and technical research on gourd lutes and ekonting in Africa and the banza in Haiti while also investigating tuning practices and regional playing styles. Other essays place the instrument within the context of slavery, tell the stories of black banjoists, and shed light on the banjo's introduction into the African- and Anglo-American folk milieus.

  Wide-ranging and illustrated with twenty color images, Banjo Roots and Branchesoffers a wealth of new information to scholars of African American and folk musics as well as the worldwide community of banjo aficionados.

• 

  Managing Your Research Data and Documentation

  Kathy R. Berenson

  Publication Date: 11-2017

  In the behavioral sciences today, there is increasing emphasis on transparency, and the need for research studies to be made replicable.

  This book presents a straightforward approach to managing and documenting one's data so that other researchers can repeat the study.

  While data management may seem intimidating to new researchers, this book shows how easy it can (and should!) be. The first chapter presents a basic structure of folders and subfolders for organizing data files, and then each subsequent chapter delves into details for a specific folder.

  Step by step, readers learn to label and archive different kinds of project documents and data files, including original, processed, and working data. Readers also learn to write command codes showing exactly how the original data are analyzed.

  Examples illustrate how to document the most common types of research (an online survey, a paper questionnaire, and a multiple-trial experiment).

  Since major research funders now require recipients to meet strict standards for data handling, this book will foster a vital career skill for students and promote transparency and replicability of research.

• 

  La Iglesia Católica y la Política del Poder en América Latina

  Emelio R. Betances

  Publication Date: 2017

  El autor analiza las circunstancias particulares que le permitieron a la iglesia en la República Dominicana realizar su adaptación a los poderes establecidos en el campo político y social: la iglesia ofreció una mediación política imparcial, reconstruyó sus lazos con las clases más bajas de la sociedad y, así mismo, respondió a los desafíos del movimiento evangélico. La investigación histórica acerca de las relaciones Iglesia-Estado en el país amplía nuestro entendimiento de la iglesia católica en toda América latina. Este libro resultó ganador del Premio Nacional de Ensayo Pedro Henríquez Ureña 2009 en la modalidad de ensayo científico.

• 

  Eisenhower's Gettysburg Farm

  Michael J. Birkner, Carol A. Hegeman, and Kevin Lavery

  Publication Date: 3-6-2017

  The Eisenhower farm was the first and only home that Dwight Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, called their own. During Eisenhower’s military career, he and Mamie lived around the world, but he always hoped to own a piece of property and leave it better than he found it. That wish led to the purchase of the Allen Redding farm in 1950 and the Eisenhowers’ thorough renovation of its dwelling. During Eisenhower’s presidency, the farm served as a retreat from the Washington pressure cooker. When his presidential term ended, the Eisenhowers embraced a new chapter in their lives together. Eisenhower maintained an active schedule of writing, speechmaking, correspondence, and meetings with a wide range of national and world leaders, as well as supervision of an active farm operation. Mamie and Dwight shared a busy social life in retirement, taking special pleasure in spending time with their son John, daughter-in-law Barbara, and four grandchildren. This book tells the Eisenhowers’ Gettysburg story.

• 

  Researching Children and Youth: Methodological Issues, Strategies, and Innovations

  Ingrid E. Castro, Melissa Swauger, and Brent D. Harger

  Publication Date: 3-17-2017

  Researching Children and Youth: Methodological Issues, Strategies, and Innovations, part of the Sociological Studies of Children and Youth series, seeks to fill a void in current publications directly addressing the problems and pitfalls that often accompany researching children and youth in today s society. Sociologists face increasingly limited access to children and youth given their vulnerable status, growing requirements from Institutional Review Boards, and more restricted access from organizations and educational institutions. As a result, researchers must be creative in the pursuit of researching kids and teens. Chapters in this volume address such topics as participatory and feminist ethnographic approaches, digital mining, children s agency, and navigating IRBs. The importance of contextualizing sociological research with children with special consideration of space, location, and identity thematically runs throughout all of the contributions to this volume.

• 

  Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don’t Know

  Daniel R. DeNicola

  Publication Date: 8-2017

  Ignorance is trending. Politicians boast, “I’m not a scientist.” Angry citizens object to a proposed state motto because it is in Latin, and “This is America, not Mexico or Latin America.” Lack of experience, not expertise, becomes a credential. Fake news and repeated falsehoods are accepted and shape firm belief. Ignorance about American government and history is so alarming that the ideal of an informed citizenry now seems quaint. Conspiracy theories and false knowledge thrive. This may be the Information Age, but we do not seem to be well informed. In this book, philosopher Daniel DeNicola explores ignorance—its abundance, its endurance, and its consequences.

  DeNicola aims to understand ignorance, which seems at first paradoxical. How can the unknown become known—and still be unknown? But he argues that ignorance is more than a lack or a void, and that it has dynamic and complex interactions with knowledge. Taking a broadly philosophical approach, DeNicola examines many forms of ignorance, using the metaphors of ignorance as place, boundary, limit, and horizon. He treats willful ignorance and describes the culture in which ignorance becomes an ideological stance. He discusses the ethics of ignorance, including the right not to know, considers the supposed virtues of ignorance, and concludes that there are situations in which ignorance is morally good.

  Ignorance is neither pure nor simple. It is both an accusation and a defense (“You are ignorant!” “Yes, but I didn’t know!”). Its practical effects range from the inconsequential to the momentous. It is a scourge, but, DeNicola argues daringly, it may also be a refuge, a value, even an accompaniment to virtue.

• 

  Chinese Ghosts Revisited: A Study of Paranormal Beliefs and Experiences

  Charles F. Emmons

  Publication Date: 12-31-2017

  Do the Hong Kong Chinese experience ghosts, hauntings, spirit mediumship, ESP and other paranormal phenomena just like British and Americans? Or is their culture so different that the ghost accounts in this book will seem bizarre to anyone else? This classic presentation of cases is based on 3,600 interviews, questionnaires and observations in Hong Kong in 1980/81, updated by recent materials over 30 years later. Interestingly, in spite of clear influences from ancestor worship and Confucian/Taoist/Buddhist culture, parapsychological theories of apparitions from the West also apply to the Chinese cases. For this 2017 edition, Charles Emmons has revisited his earlier conclusions and added new material that has come to light in the intervening years. This book remains the only major cross-cultural study comparing Chinese with Western ghost experiences.

• 

  Whites Recall the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham: We Didn’t Know It Was History Until After It Happened

  Sandra K. Gill

  Publication Date: 2017

  This illuminating volume examines how the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama developed as a trauma of culture. Throughout the book, Gill asks why the “four little girls” killed in the bombing became part of the nation’s collective memory, while two black boys killed by whites on the same day were all but forgotten. Conducting interviews with classmates who attended a white school a few blocks from some of the most memorable events of the Civil Rights Movement, Gill discovers that the bombing of the church is central to interviewees’ memories. Even the boy killed by Gill’s own classmates often escapes recollection. She then considers these findings within the framework of the reception of memory and analyzes how white southerners reconstruct a difficult past.

• 

  Isn't That Clever: A Philosophical Account of Humor and Comedy

  Steven Gimbel

  Publication Date: 2017

  Isn’t That Clever provides a new account of the nature of humor – the cleverness account – according to which humor is intentional conspicuous acts of playful cleverness. By defining humor in this way, answers can be found to longstanding questions about humor ethics (Are there jokes that are wrong to tell? Are there jokes that can only be told by certain people?) and humor aesthetics (What makes for a good joke? Is humor subjective?). In addition to humor in general, Isn’t That Clever asks questions about comedy as an art form such as whether there are limits to what can be said in dealing with a heckler and how do we determine whether one comedian has stolen jokes from another.

• 

  Text in the Natural World: Topics of Evolutionary Theory of Literature

  Laurence A. Gregorio

  Publication Date: 8-23-2017

  The study of literature has expanded to include an evolutionary perspective. Its premise is that the literary text and literature as an overarching institution came into existence as a product of the same evolutionary process that gave rise to the human species. In this view, literature is an evolutionary adaptation that functions as any other adaptation does, as a means of enhancing survivability and also promoting benefits for the individual and society. Text in the Natural World is an introduction to the theory and a survey of topics pertinent to the evolutionary view of literature. After a polemical, prefatory chapter and an overview of the pertinent aspects of evolutionary theory itself, the book examines integral building blocks of literature and literary expression as effects of evolutionary development. This includes chapters on moral sense, symbolic thought, literary aesthetics in general, literary ontology, the broad topic of form, function and device in literature, a last theoretical chapter on narrative, and a chapter on literary themes. The concluding chapter builds on the preceding one as an illustration of evolutionary thematic study in practice, in a study of the fauna in the fiction of Maupassant. This text is designed to be of interest to those who read and think about things literary, as well as to those who have interest in the extension of Darwin’s great idea across the horizon of human culture. It tries to bridge the gulf that has separated the humanities from the sciences, and would be a helpful text for courses taught in both literary theory and interdisciplinary approaches to literature and philosophy.

• 

  An Artist as Soldier: Seeking Refuge in Love and Art

  Barbara S. Heisler

  Publication Date: 8-21-2017

  At the center of this book are the World War II letters (Feldpostbriefe) of a German artist and art teacher to his wife. While Bernhard Epple’s letters to his wife, Gudrun, address many of the topics usually found in war letters (food, lodging conditions, the weather, problems with the mail service, requests for favors from home), they are unusual in two respects. Each letter is lovingly decorated with a drawing and the letters make few references to the war itself. In addition to many personal communications and expressions of love for his wife and children, Epple writes about landscapes he saw as well as churches, museums and bookstores he visited. Epple’s letters give testimony to how a particular German soldier who was drafted and survived the war did his best to remain a civilian in uniform; distancing himself from a reality that was not of his choosing, seeking comfort and refuge in his love for art and his ability to share this love with his wife, herself an artist. While Epple’s letters are deeply personal, this book is about the human experience of war and the separation from civilian life and from family and friends.

  The introduction provides a short discussion of the importance and uses of war letters as historical documents, followed by a biography of the letter writer. The letters make up the two central chapters. The drawings form an integral part of the letters; each is reproduced and accompanied by an English translation of the letter. In addition to the drawings, the text includes several photographs of the letter writer and his family.