He fought for himself. He fought for his country. He fought for acceptance. As the son of an Italian count, Cavalry Colonel Louis Palma di Cesnola had more military experience than most of the leading officers in the Civil War. Objecting to his general’s orders, di Cesnola led his men into battle, earning himself a Medal of Honor. When di Cesnola was captured and thrown into the notorious Libby Prison, he was forced to examine his life decisions. Upon release, di Cesnola was torn between his desire to return to war or to his wife and daughter—a battle of his heart and his duty. Once the war ended, di Cesnola became America’s consul for archaeological excavators, and eventually became the first director of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. With every step of success, di Cesnola was forced to prove himself in a country that emphatically disapproved of immigrants. His plight forged a path of national acceptance of Italian-Americans throughout the entire country.
The third installment of Harvard’s five-volume edition of Robert Frost’s correspondence. The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929–1936 is the latest installment in Harvard’s five-volume edition of the poet’s correspondence. It presents 589 letters, of which 424 are previously uncollected. The critically acclaimed first volume, a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, included nearly 300 previously uncollected letters, and the second volume 350 more. During the period covered here, Robert Frost was close to the height of his powers. If Volume 2 covered the making of Frost as America’s poet, in Volume 3 he is definitively made. These were also, however, years of personal tribulation. The once-tight Frost family broke up as marriage, illness, and work scattered the children across the country. In the case of Frost’s son Carol, both distance and proximity put strains on an already fractious relationship. But the tragedy and emotional crux of this volume is the death, in Montana, of Frost’s youngest daughter, Marjorie. Frost’s correspondence from those dark days is a powerful testament to the difficulty of honoring the responsibilities of a poet’s eminence while coping with the intensity of a parent’s grief. Volume 3 also sees Frost responding to the crisis of the Great Depression, the onset of the New Deal, and the emergence of totalitarian regimes in Europe, with wit, canny political intelligence, and no little acerbity. All the while, his star continues to rise: he wins a Pulitzer for Collected Poems in 1931 and will win a second for A Further Range, published in 1936, and he is in constant demand as a public speaker at colleges, writers’ workshops, symposia, and dinners. Frost was not just a poet but a poet-teacher; as such, he was instrumental in defining the public functions of poetry in the twentieth century. In the 1930s, Frost lived a life of paradox, as personal tragedy and the tumults of politics interwove with his unprecedented achievements. Thoroughly annotated and accompanied by a biographical glossary and detailed chronology, these letters illuminate a triumphant and difficult period in the life of a towering literary figure.
The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 2: 1920–1928 is the second installment of Harvard’s five-volume edition of the poet’s correspondence. Nearly three hundred letters in the critically-acclaimed first volume had never before been collected; here, close to four hundred are gathered for the first time. Volume 2 includes letters to some 160 correspondents: family and friends; colleagues, fellow writers, visual artists, editors, and publishers; educators of all kinds; farmers, librarians, and admirers. In the years covered here, publication of Selected Poems, New Hampshire, and West-Running Brook enhanced Frost’s stature in America and abroad, and the demands of managing his career—as public speaker, poet, and teacher—intensified. A good portion of the correspondence is devoted to Frost’s appointments at the University of Michigan and Amherst College, through which he played a major part in staking out the positions poets would later hold in American universities. Other letters show Frost helping to shape the Bread Loaf School of English and its affiliated Writers’ Conference. We encounter him discussing his craft with students and fostering the careers of younger poets. His observations (and reservations) about educators are illuminating and remain pertinent. And family life—with all its joys and sorrows, hardships and satisfactions—is never less than central to Frost’s concerns. Robert Frost was a masterful prose stylist, often brilliant and always engaging. Thoroughly annotated and accompanied by a biographical glossary, chronology, and detailed index, these letters are both the record of a remarkable literary life and a unique contribution to American literature.
This fourth edition constitutes the most extensive reshaping of the text to date. In a lucid and accessible style Kevin Greene explains the discovery and excavation of sites, outlines major dating methods, gives clear explanations of scientific techniques, and examines current theories and controversies. New features include: a completely new user-friendly text design with initial chapter overviews and final conclusions, key references for each chapter section, an annotated guide to further reading, a glossary, refreshed illustrations, case studies and examples, bibliography and full index a new companion website built for this edition providing hyperlinks from contents list to individual chapter summaries which in turn link to key websites and other material an important new chapter on current theory emphasizing the richness of sources of analogy or interpretation available today. This new edition provides students with a sound introduction to the field of archaeology and guides them towards further study.
Henry Calvert's warmly funny and heartbreaking memoir of his time in the American Civil War is sometimes a typical soldier story but more often a highly-entertaining tale. He interwove his experiences in the army with his pursuit of the love of his life, who was already promised to another soldier. He and his best friend enlisted in Scott's 900 Regiment of Cavalry. For a time, they were bodyguards to Abraham Lincoln and Calvert's stories of that time is here as well. His heart broken, he nevertheless accepts his love's request to find her betrothed and present him with her locket. He finally found his rival after the war, explained his mission, and got an unexpected surprise. Along the way, he fought a war and commanded other soldiers. Every memoir of the American Civil War provides us with another view of the catastrophe that changed the country forever. For the first time, this long out-of-print volume is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers, tablets, and smartphones. Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above or download a sample.
Soldier Heroes explores the imagining of masculinities within adventure stories. Drawing on literary theory, cultural materialism and Kleinian psychoanalysis, it analyses modern British adventure heroes as historical forms of masculinity originating in the era of nineteenth-century popular imperialism, traces their subsequent transformations and examines the way these identities are internalized and lived by men and boys.
The writings presented in this volume shed tremendous light, both on the character of T. E. Lawrence and the current situation in the Middle East. Despite being written more than seventy years ago, the thoughts of Lawrence of Arabia remain remarkably pertinent. This collection includes Lawrences wartime reports from the desert, along with later writings in which Lawrence attempts to cope with the consequences of war in the circumstances of peace. Many of the pieces have previously only been issued in limited editions.
This book includes a variety of chapters that consider the role and importance of anthropology in small wars and insurgencies. Almost every war since the origins of the discipline at the beginning of the 19th century has involved anthropology and anthropologists. The chapters in this book fall into the following myriad categories of military anthropology. Anthropology for the military. In some cases, anthropologists participated directly as uniformed combatants, having the purpose of directly providing expert knowledge with the goal of improving operations and strategy. Anthropology of the military. Anthropologists have also been known to study State militaries. Sometimes this scholarship is undertaken with the objective of providing the military with information about its own internal systems and processes in order to improve its performance. At other times, the objective is to study the military as a human group to identify and describe its culture and social processes. Anthropology of war. As a discipline, anthropology has also had a long history of studying warfare itself. This book considers the anthropology of small wars and insurgencies through an analysis of the Islamic State’s military adaptation in Iraq, Al Shabaab recruiting in Somalia, religion in Israeli combat units, as well as many other topics. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Small Wars & Insurgencies.
Fearing the loss of Korea and Vietnam would touch off a chain reaction of other countries turning communist, the United States fought two major wars in the hinterlands of Asia. What accounts for such exaggerated alarm, and what were its consequences? Is a fear of the domino effect permanently rooted in the American strategic psyche, or has the United States now adopted a less alarmist approach? The essays in this book address these questions by examining domino thinking in United States and Soviet Cold War strategy, and in earlier historic settings. Combining theory and history in analyzing issues relevant to current public policy, Dominoes and Bandwagons examines the extent to which domino fears were a rational response, a psychological reaction, or a tactic in domestic politics.
