San Antonio College Library

Ken Burns' Emmy Award-winning documentary brings to life America's most destructive and defining conflict. The Civil War is the saga of celebrated generals and ordinary soldiers, a heroic and transcendent president, and a country that had to divide itself in two in order to become one.

This collection is principally concerned with American and British conflicts with occasional forays into foreign armies - notably the Greeks, the Romans, and Napoleon's soldiers. Hastings has sought stories which illustrate the military condition through the ages, both on the battlefield and in the barracks: comic, eccentric, heroic, tragic.

""A dictionary of soldier talk" is an uncensored compendium of one of the more colorful American idioms -- that spoken by the men and women of the United States Armed Forces ... from the Revolution to the Vietnam War ... Acronyms, oaths, abbreviations, technical terms and slang expressions are all defined and an appendix of terms unique to the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps is included ..."--Inside front cover.

In Ride of the Second Horseman, Robert O'Connell probes the distant human past to show how and why war arose. He begins with a definition that distinguishes between war and mere feuding: war involves group rather than individual issues, political or economic goals, and direction by some governmental structure, carried out with the intention of lasting results. With this definition, he finds that ants are the only other creatures that conduct it -...

"For Frederick the Great, the prescription for warfare was simple: kurz und vives ("short and lively") - wars that relied upon swift, powerful, and decisive military operations. Robert Citino takes us on a dramatic march through Prussian and German military history to show how that primal theme played out time and time again."--Jacket.