San Antonio College Library

Recollections of the conquest of New Spain describes the various expeditions, marches, embassies, important leaders, sieges, and captures.

Historian Gerald Linderman has created a seamless and highly original social history, authoritatively recovering and capturing the full experience of combat in World War II. Based on a vast array of letters, diaries, books, and a survey of veterans by the Army War College, The World Within War cuts through the many layers of protective shielding in soldiers' memoirs to find the shards of direct experiences that lie beneath. The Allied-Axis conflict...

"Black soldiers first entered the regular army of the United States in the summer of 1866. While their segregated regiments served in the American West for the next three decades, the promise of the Reconstruction era gave way to the repressiveness of Jim Crow. But black men found a degree of equality in the service: the army treated them no worse than it did their white counterparts. Military imperatives, limited manpower, and tight budgets demanded...

From the Publisher: Even in the midst of World War II, Americans could not help thinking of the lands across the Pacific as a continuation of the American Western frontier. But this perception only heightened American soldiers' frustration as the hostile region ferociously resisted their attempts at control. The GI War Against Japan recounts the harrowing experiences of American soldiers in Asia and the Pacific. Based on countless diaries and letters,...

In the early hours of July 13, 1942, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of the German Order Police, entered the Polish Village of Jozefow. They had arrived in Poland less than three weeks before, most of them recently drafted family men too old for combat service--workers, artisans, salesmen, and clerks. By nightfall, they had rounded up Jozefow's 1,800 Jews, selected several hundred men as "work Jews," and shot the rest--that is, some...

"Drawing extensively upon the letters, diaries, and memoirs of Northern soldiers, Hess reveals their deepest fears and shocks, and also their sources of inner strength. By identifying recurrent themes found in these accounts, Hess constructs a multilayered view of the many ways in which these men coped with the challenges of battle."--Jacket.

Monash University (Australia) history professor Keith P. Wilson outlines three broad purposes in writing his new book on the camp life of the American Civil War's United States Colored Troops (USCT): "to describe the soldiers' lives ... to bring into focus the emotional texture of military life ... [and] to analyze the process of cultural change that occurred within the army camps" (xiii). Why camp life? As Wilson states, camp life helped the African-American,...

Why did the conventional wisdom -- that soldiers become increasingly cynical and disillusioned as war progresses -- not hold true in the Civil War? It is to this question that Civil War historian James M. McPherson now turns his attention. He shows that, contrary to what many scholars believe, the soldiers of the Civil War remained powerfully convinced of the ideals for which they fought throughout the conflict. McPherson draws on more than 25,000...