This book contains the unpublished diaries of two men writing under fire on the streets of Dublin in April 1916. In Jacob's factory, Volunteer Seosamh de Brún wrote in his tiny diary about guard duties and a bicycle sortie to help de Valera, during which a sniper killed one of the cyclists. Meanwhile, across the Liffey, British soldier Samuel Lomas wrote in his own diary of building barricades across Moore Street and participating in the executions of Pearse, Clarke and MacDonagh, giving new insights into the rebellion's grim closing days. Mick O'Farrell brilliantly juxtaposes these two accounts, including fascimilies that show through deteriorating handwriting the increasing pressure the diarists were under, to give a dramatic account of how ordinary participants experienced the events of Easter week.
After Arabella's father is jailed for his part in the short-lived 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion in Toronto, her mother just cannot cope. The family is ostracized, they lose their home and they have no income -- yet Arabella's mother still doesn't take action. So it is up to twelve-year-old Arabella to find new lodgings and to get employment so they have money to live on. And as if that weren't enough to worry about, her older brother Charlie has vanished. Readers will cheer for the heroine in this "riches to rags" story as Arabella struggles to keep her family afloat while awaiting her father's release from prison. A Rebel's Daughter includes an Historical Note giving readers the cultural context of the Upper Canada Rebellion, a map showing 1837 Toronto, as well as fascinating documents and photographs from this pivotal time period.
With exclusive access to previously hidden diaries, family and camp survivor accounts, and recently declassified files, critically acclaimed and award-winning journalist Jack Fairweather brilliantly portrays the remarkable man who volunteered to face the unknown in the name of truth and country. This extraordinary and eye-opening account of the Holocaust invites us all to bear witness. Occupied Warsaw, Summer 1940: Witold Pilecki, a Polish underground operative, accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands interned at a new concentration camp, report on Nazi crimes, raise a secret army, and stage an uprising. The name of the camp -- Auschwitz. Over the next two and half years, and under the cruelest of conditions, Pilecki's underground sabotaged facilities, assassinated Nazi officers, and gathered evidence of terrifying abuse and mass murder. But as he pieced together the horrifying 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 -- but first he would have to escape from Auschwitz itself...
Now after 141 years, these diaries originally compiled in two manuscripts, are being published for the first time unedited and in thier entirety. Rarely are any new discoveries made of the written material on the American Civil War and this may be the last major find of Civil War period literature.
Winner of the Mbokodo Award for Women in the Arts for Literature, the ATKV (Afrikaans Language and Culture Association) Award for non-fiction and the kykNet/Rapport Award for non-fiction. 'Here was Emily . . . in these diaries and scrapbooks. An unprecedented, intimate angle on the real Emily' Elsabé Brits has drawn on a treasure trove of previously private sources, including Emily Hobhouse's diaries, scrap-books and numerous letters that she discovered in Canada, to write a revealing new biography of this remarkable Englishwoman. Hobhouse has been little celebrated in her own country, but she is still revered in South Africa, where she worked so courageously, selflessly and tirelessly to save lives and ameliorate the suffering of thousands of women and children interned in camps set up by British forces during the Anglo-Boer War, in which it is estimated that over 27,000 Boer women and children died; and where her ashes are enshrined in the National Women's Monument in Bloemfontein. During the First World War, Hobhouse was an ardent pacifist. She organised the writing, signing and publishing in January 1915 of the 'Open Christmas Letter' addressed 'To the Women of Germany and Austria'. In an attempt to initiate a peace process, she also secretly metwith the German foreign minister Gottlieb von Jagow in Berlin, for which some branded her a traitor. In the war's immediate aftermath she worked for the Save the Children Fund in Leipzig and Vienna, feeding daily for over a year thousands of children, who would otherwise have starved. She later started her own feeding scheme to alleviate ongoing famine. Despite having been instrumental in saving thousands of lives during two wars, Hobhouse died alone - spurned by her country, her friends and even some of her relatives. Brits brings Emily's inspirational and often astonishing story, spanning three continents, back into the light.
During the American Civil War, southern white women found themselves speaking and acting in unfamiliar and tumultuous circumstances. With the war at their doorstep, women who supported the war effort took part in defining what it meant to be, and to behave as, a Confederate through their verbal and nonverbal rhetorics. Though most did not speak from the podium, they viewed themselves as participants in the war effort, indicating that what they did or did not say could matter. Drawing on the rich evidence in women’s Civil War diaries, The Rhetoric of Rebel Women recognizes women’s persuasive activities as contributions to the creation and maintenance of Confederate identity and culture. Informed by more than one hundred diaries, this study provides insight into how women cultivated rhetorical agency, challenging traditional gender expectations while also upholding a cultural status quo. Author Kimberly Harrison analyzes the rhetorical choices these women made and valued in wartime and postwar interactions with Union officers and soldiers, slaves and former slaves, local community members, and even their God. In their intimate accounts of everyday war, these diarists discussed rhetorical strategies that could impact their safety, their livelihoods, and those of their families. As they faced Union soldiers in attempts to protect their homes and property, diarists saw their actions as not only having local, immediate impact on their well-being but also as reflecting upon their cause and the character of the southern people as a whole. They instructed themselves through their personal writing, allowing insight into how southern women prepared themselves to speak and act in new and contested contexts. The Rhetoric of Rebel Women highlights the contributions of privileged white southern women in the development of the Confederate national identity, presenting them not as passive observers but as active participants in the war effort.
Excerpts from General Babcock's diaries and letters which illustrate camp life for Union soldiers during the Civil War, based in part on experiences in Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Virginia, and New York, covering a period in his life from Jan. 1860-Sept. 1864. The General (then Colonel Babcock) died on Oct. 6, 1864 from wounds suffered at the Battle of Winchester, Va. on Sept. 19, 1864.
