Thunder on the River

Thunder on the River

Author: Daniel L Schafer

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2010-01-03

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0813047021

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

When the Civil War finally came to North Florida, it did so with an intermittent fury that destroyed much of Jacksonville and scattered its residents. The city was taken four separate times by Federal forces but abandoned after each of the first three occupations. During the fourth occupation, it was used as a staging ground for the ill-fated Union invasion of the Florida interior, which ended in the bloody Battle of Olustee in February 1864. This late Confederate victory, along with the deadly use of underwater mines against the U.S. Navy along the St. Johns, nearly succeeded in ending the fourth Union occupation of Jacksonville. Writing in clear, engaging prose, Daniel Schafer sheds light on this oft-forgotten theatre of war and details the dynamic racial and cultural factors that led to Florida’s engagement on behalf of the South. He investigates how fears about the black population increased and held sway over whites, seeking out the true motives behind both the state and federal initiatives that drove freed blacks from the cities back to the plantations even before the war's end. From the Missouri Compromise to Reconstruction, Thunder on the River offers the history of a city and a region precariously situated as a major center of commerce on the brink of frontier Florida. Historians and Civil War aficionados alike will not want to miss this important addition to the literature.


Battles of the Red River War

Battles of the Red River War

Author: J. Brett Cruse

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2017-08-03

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1623491525

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Battles of the Red River War unearths a long-buried record of the collision of two cultures. In 1874, U.S. forces led by Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie carried out a surprise attack on several Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa bands that had taken refuge in the Palo Duro Canyon of the Texas panhandle and destroyed their winter stores and horses. After this devastating loss, many of these Indians returned to their reservations and effectively brought to a close what has come to be known as the Red River War, a campaign carried out by the U.S. Army during 1874 as a result of Indian attacks on white settlers in the region. After this operation, the Southern Plains Indians would never again pose a coherent threat to whites’ expansion and settlement across their ancestral homelands. Until now, the few historians who have undertaken to tell the story of the Red River War have had to rely on the official records of the battles and a handful of extant accounts, letters, and journals of the U.S. Army participants. Starting in 1998, J. Brett Cruse, under the auspices of the Texas Historical Commission, conducted archeological investigations at six battle sites. In the artifacts they unearthed, Cruse and his teams found clues that would both correct and complete the written records and aid understanding of the Indian perspectives on this clash of cultures. Including a chapter on historiography and archival research by Martha Doty Freeman and an analysis of cartridges and bullets by Douglas D. Scott, this rigorously researched and lavishly illustrated work will commend itself to archeologists, military historians and scientists, and students and scholars of the Westward Expansion.


Slaves of Fortune

Slaves of Fortune

Author: Ronald M. Lamothe

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1847010423

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Anglo-Egyptian re-conquest of Sudan - Churchill's 'River War' - has been well chronicled from the British point of view, but we still know little about its front line troops, the Sudanese soldiers of the Egyptian Army. Making use of unpublished primary sources and published material located in the United Kingdom and Sudan, Slaves of Fortune provides an historiographic correction. It argues that nineteenth-century Sudanese slave soldiers were social beings and historical actors, shaping both European and African destinies, just as their own lives were being transformed by imperial forces. -- Jacket.


Death on the River

Death on the River

Author: John Wilson

Publisher: Orca Book Publishers

Published: 2009-10

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1554691117

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A young soldier survives a Confederate prison camp during the Civil War.


1000 Days on the River Kwai

1000 Days on the River Kwai

Author: Cary Owtram

Publisher: Casemate Publishers

Published: 2017-05-31

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1473897823

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A British officer recounts his harrowing years as a POW in Thailand, including his time as the camp commandant, in this WWII memoir. Colonel Cary Owtram served with the 137th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, and the 11th Indian Infantry Division in Malaysia. After being captured by the Japanese in Singapore, he was transported to the infamous Burma railway. He went on to spend the next three and a half years in grueling captivity in Thailand, first in Ban Pong Camp and then Chungkai Camp—one of the largest POW camps in the region. Owtram was appointed the British Camp Commandant at Chungkai, making him responsible for his fellow prisoners—a heavy responsibility added to the general deprivation and hardship suffered by all. During that time, Owtram kept a secret diary in which he recorded the brutal experience of surviving day to day and attempting to deal with their harsh and unpredictable Japanese captors. It is not only the prisoners who suffered, but also their families at home. The postscript by Owtram’s daughters vividly demonstrates the agonies of doubt and worry that loved ones went through and the effect of the experience on all.


Across the River and Into the Trees

Across the River and Into the Trees

Author: Ernest Hemingway

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2014-05-22

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1476770034

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the fall of 1948, Ernest Hemingway made his first extended visit to Italy in thirty years. His reacquaintance with Venice, a city he loved, provided the inspiration for Across the River and into the Trees, the story of Richard Cantwell, a war-ravaged American colonel stationed in Italy at the close of the Second World War, and his love for a young Italian countess. A poignant, bittersweet homage to love that overpowers reason, to the resilience of the human spirit, and to the worldweary beauty and majesty of Venice, Across the River and into the Trees stands as Hemingway's statement of defiance in response to the great dehumanizing atrocities of the Second World War. Hemingway's last full-length novel published in his lifetime, it moved John O'Hara in The New York Times Book Review to call him “the most important author since Shakespeare.”


From the River to the Sea

From the River to the Sea

Author: John Sedgwick

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-06-01

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1982104309

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“Riveting...A great read, full of colorful characters and outrageous confrontations back when the west was still wild.” —George R.R. Martin A propulsive and panoramic history of one of the most dramatic stories never told—the greatest railroad war of all time, fought by the daring leaders of the Santa Fe and the Rio Grande to seize, control, and create the American West. It is difficult to imagine now, but for all its gorgeous scenery, the American West might have been barren tundra as far as most Americans knew well into the 19th century. While the West was advertised as a paradise on earth to citizens in the East and Midwest, many believed the journey too hazardous to be worthwhile—until 1869, when the first transcontinental railroad changed the face of transportation. Railroad companies soon became the rulers of western expansion, choosing routes, creating brand-new railroad towns, and building up remote settlements like Santa Fe, Albuquerque, San Diego, and El Paso into proper cities. But thinning federal grants left the routes incomplete, an opportunity that two brash new railroad men, armed with private investments and determination to build an empire across the Southwest clear to the Pacific, soon seized, leading to the greatest railroad war in American history. In From the River to the Sea, bestselling author John Sedgwick recounts, in vivid and thrilling detail, the decade-long fight between General William J. Palmer, the Civil War hero leading the “little family” of his Rio Grande, and William Barstow Strong, the hard-nosed manager of the corporate-minded Santa Fe. What begins as an accidental rivalry when the two lines cross in Colorado soon evolves into an all-out battle as each man tries to outdo the other—claiming exclusive routes through mountains, narrow passes, and the richest silver mines in the world; enlisting private armies to protect their land and lawyers to find loopholes; dispatching spies to gain information; and even using the power of the press and incurring the wrath of the God-like Robber Baron Jay Gould—to emerge victorious. By the end of the century, one man will fade into anonymity and disgrace. The other will achieve unparalleled success—and in the process, transform a sleepy backwater of thirty thousand called “Los Angeles” into a booming metropolis that will forever change the United States. Filled with colorful characters and high drama, told at the speed of a locomotive, From the River to the Sea is an unforgettable piece of American history “that seems to demand a big-screen treatment” (The New Yorker).


Crossing the River

Crossing the River

Author: Victor Grossman

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Faced with an accusation from the US Army's highest legal authority in 1952, Grossman left his unit stationed in Bavaria and swam the Danube to East Germany. He traces his childhood and experiences as a student, worker, and soldier; then describes life in his new home among a surprisingly large community of defectors. There is no index. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).


When the Wind was a River

When the Wind was a River

Author: Dean Kohlhoff

Publisher:

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 9780295974033

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

World War II came to the North Pacific in June 1942. Alaska's Native people living on the Aleutian and Pribilof islands, the Aleuts, felt its impact as did no other American citizens in that region. Forty-two residents of Attu Island were captured and imprisoned in Japan and, in response to Japanese bombings of Dutch Harbor and invasions of Kiska Island, the American military evacuated the remaining 881 Aleuts from the islands to camps in southeastern Alaska. The story of the removal of the Aleuts is little known outside Alaska. Dean Kohlhoff delved extensively into civilian and government archives, as well as videotapes of Aleuts chronicling their wartime experiences, to compile this engrossing account of the evacuation. Personal accounts tell of life in the temporary camps, in which the makeshift accommodations arranged by the Department of the Interior failed to reflect the good intentions of some Interior officials. One visitor to the Funter Bay camp wrote, "I have no language at my command which can adequately describe what I saw....I have seen some tough places in my days in Alaska, but nothing to equal the situation in Funter". Upon their eventual return, the Aleuts found that their homes had been devastated by weather, fire, and both Japanese and American military operations, and they began the fight for reparation for loss of property and income that would affect them long after the war. Finally the Civil Rights Act of 1988, which awarded damage claims to Japanese Americans relocated during the war, led to restitution for the Aleuts, who Congress and the president agreed had been mistreated.