LibGuides: History: Books

Featured EBooks in Ritter Library

War and Society in Afghanistan by Kaushik Roy This monograph analyses the rhythms of war and the geopolitical significance of Afghanistan with a focus on the interrelated concepts of weak/rentier state, great power rivalry and counter-insurgency. It analyses why the Mughal, the British, the Soviets, and the Americans won the conventional wars in Afghanistan but were defeated in the unconventional ones. It takes a comprehensive view of the history of the region and provides a political and military narrativeof conventional and unconventional war in Afghanistan during the last five centuries.
Publication Date: 2015
Your Country, My Country by Robert Bothwell Read The Wall Street Journal's review of Your Country, My Country a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/we-stand-on-guard-for-thee-1451429887"here/a. Canada: land of hockey, wintery weather, unfailing politeness - at least, as far as many Americans are aware. For Canadians, the United States is often seen as a land of extremes, both in terms of its policies and its values. Could two countries so seemingly different really have anything in common?Yes indeed, according to historian Robert Bothwell. In this witty and accessible book, Bothwell argues that the history of the United States and Canada reveals more about each country than most would suspect. Your Country, My Country takes readers back to the seventeenth century, when a sharedBritish colonial heritage set the two lands on paths that would remain intertwined to the present day. Tracing Canadian-American relations, common values, and differences through the centuries, Bothwell suggests that Canadians and Americans are not quite as different as we have been led to believe.He brings this contention down to the present day by examining Canadian and American differences over such questions as universal health care and the war in Iraq. Bothwell finds that what happens in one country is often reflected in the other. This innovative volume contends that Canada's storyilluminates America's - and vice-versa.
Publication Date: 2015

Books

Important links to find books for conducting research on History topics.

OPAL - Baldwin Wallace University Ritter Library Catalog

OhioLINK - Ohio College and University Libraries Catalog

WorldCat - Worldwide Libraries Catalog

Interlibrary Loan for books not available in Ritter Library or OhioLINK

Featured New Print Books in Ritter Library

Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire by Carla J. Mulford Drawing from Benjamin Franklin's published and unpublished papers, including letters, notes, and marginalia, Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire examines how the early modern liberalism of Franklin's youthful intellectual life helped foster his vision of independence from Britain thatbecame his hallmark achievement. In the early chapters, Carla Mulford explores the impact of Franklin's family history - especially their difficult times during the English Civil War - on Franklin's intellectual life and his personal and political goals.The book's middle chapters show how Franklin's fascination with British imperial strategy grew from his own analyses of the financial, environmental, and commercial potential of North America. Franklin's involvement in Pennsylvania's politics led him to devise strategies for monetary stability,intercolonial trade, Indian affairs, and imperial defense that would have assisted the British Empire in its effort to take over the world. When Franklin realized that the goals of British ministers were to subordinate colonists in a system that assisted the lives of Britons in England butundermined the wellbeing of North Americans, he began to criticize the goals of British imperialism. Mulford argues that Franklin's turn away from the British Empire began in the 1750s - not the 1770s, as most historians have suggested - and occurred as a result of Franklin's perceptive analyses ofwhat the British Empire was doing not just in the American colonies but in Ireland and India.In the last chapters, Mulford reveals how Franklin ultimately grew restive, formed alliances with French intellectuals and the court of France, and condemned the actions of the British Empire and imperial politicians. As a whole, Mulford's book provides a fresh reading of a much-admired foundingfather, suggesting how Franklin's conception of the freedoms espoused in England's ages old Magna Carta could be realized in the political life of the new American nation.
Call Number: E302.6.F8 M93 2015
Publication Date: 2015
Beyond Civil Rights by Daniel Geary Shortly after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Daniel Patrick Moynihan authored a government report titled The Negro Family: A Case for National Action that captured the attention of President Lyndon Johnson. Responding to the demands of African American activists that the United States go beyond civil rights to secure economic justice, Moynihan thought his analysis of black families highlighted socioeconomic inequality. However, the report's central argument that poor families headed by single mothers inhibited African American progress touched off a heated controversy. The long-running dispute over Moynihan's conclusions changed how Americans talk about race, the family, and poverty. Fifty years after its publication, the Moynihan Report remains a touchstone in contemporary racial politics, cited by President Barack Obama and Congressman Paul Ryan among others. Beyond Civil Rights offers the definitive history of the Moynihan Report controversy. Focusing on competing interpretations of the report from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, Geary demonstrates its significance for liberals, conservatives, neoconservatives, civil rights leaders, Black Power activists, and feminists. He also illustrates the pitfalls of discussing racial inequality primarily in terms of family structure. Beyond Civil Rights captures a watershed moment in American history that reveals the roots of current political divisions and the stakes of a public debate that has extended for decades.
Call Number: E185.86 .G425 2015
Publication Date: 2015
Doughboys on the Great War by Edward A. Gutièrrez "It is impossible to reproduce the state of mind of the men who waged war in 1917 and 1918," Edward Coffman wrote in The War to End All Wars. In Doughboys on the Great War the voices of thousands of servicemen say otherwise. The majority of soldiers from the American Expeditionary Forces returned from Europe in 1919. Where many were simply asked for basic data, veterans from four states—Utah, Minnesota, Connecticut, and Virginia—were given questionnaires soliciting additional information and "remarks." Drawing on these questionnaires, completed while memories were still fresh, this book presents a chorus of soldiers' voices speaking directly of the expectations, motivations, and experiences as infantrymen on the Western Front in World War I. What was it like to kill or maim German soldiers? To see friends killed or maimed by the enemy? To return home after experiencing such violence? Again and again, soldiers wrestle with questions like these, putting into words what only they can tell. They also reflect on why they volunteered, why they fought, what their training was, and how ill-prepared they were for what they found overseas. They describe how they interacted with the civilian populations in England and France, how they saw the rewards and frustrations of occupation duty when they desperately wanted to go home, and—perhaps most significantly—what it all added up to in the end. Together their responses create a vivid and nuanced group portrait of the soldiers who fought with the American Expeditionary Forces on the battlefields of Aisne-Marne, Argonne Forest, Belleau Wood, Chateau-Thierry, the Marne, Metz, Meuse-Argonne, St. Mihiel, Sedan, and Verdun during the First World War. The picture that emerges is often at odds with the popular notion of the disillusioned doughboy. Though hardened and harrowed by combat, the veteran heard here is for the most part proud of his service, service undertaken for duty, honor, and country. In short, a hundred years later, the doughboy once more speaks in his own true voice.
Call Number: D570.2 G88 2014
Publication Date: 2014
Field Marshal by Daniel Allen Butler Erwin Rommel was a complex man: a born leader, brilliant soldier, a devoted husband and proud father; intelligent, instinctive, brave, compassionate, vain, egotistical, and arrogant. In France in 1940, then for two years in North Africa, then finally back in France again, at Normandy in 1944, he proved himself a master of armored warfare, running rings around a succession of Allied generals who never got his measure and could only resort to overwhelming numbers to bring about his defeat. And yet for all his military genius, Rommel was also naive, a man who could admire Adolf Hitler at the same time that he despised the Nazis, dazzled by a Führer whose successes blinded him to the true nature of the Third Reich. Above all, he was the quintessential German patriot, who ultimately would refuse to abandon his moral compass, so that on one pivotal day in June 1944 he came to understand that he had mistakenly served an evil man and evil cause. He would still fight for Germany even as he abandoned his oath of allegiance to the Führer, when he came to realize that Hitler had morphed into nothing more than an agent of death and destruction. In the end Erwin Rommel was forced to die by his own hand, not because, as some would claim, he had dabbled in a tyrannicidal conspiracy, but because he had committed a far greater crime - he dared to tell Adolf Hitler the truth.In Field Marshal historian Daniel Allen Butler not only describes the swirling, innovative campaigns in which Rommel won his military reputation, but assesses the temper of the man who finally fought only for his country, and no dark depths beyond.REVIEWS An amazing biopic of Rommel. Only dedicated students of World War II history will have any idea about this charismatic leader - Butler sheds new light on the story of this fascinating man in an extremely readable book.BOOKS MONTHLY UK A complex man emerges from the pages of "Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel." Author Daniel Allen Butler assesses both the temperament and the battlefield brilliance of World War II Nazi Germany's "Desert Fox" in this 600-page, hardcover book with 16 pages of photographs. The writer describes Rommel as a born leader, superb soldier, devoted husband and proud father. The field marshal is also characterized as being intelligent, instinctive, courageous, compassionate, vain, egotistical and arrogant... In the end, Rommel was compelled to commit suicide at age 52 in 1944, not because he was involved in an assassination plot against Hitler as some would claim, but because he hadcommitted a far greater crime: he had the fortitude to face the Führer and tell the truth.Toy Soldier Model Figure Magazine
Call Number: DD247.R57 B88 2015
Publication Date: 2015
A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks by Stewart Gordon Stories of disasters at sea, whether about Roman triremes, the treasure fleet of the Spanish Main, or great transatlantic ocean liners, fire the imagination as little else can. From the historical sinkings of the Titanic and the Lusitania to the recent capsizing of a Mediterranean cruise ship, the study of shipwrecks also makes for a new and very different understanding of world history. A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks explores the age-old, immensely hazardous, persistently romantic, and ongoing process of moving people and goods across the seven seas. In recounting the stories of ships and the people who made and sailed them, from the earliest craft plying the ancient Nile to the Exxon Valdez, Stewart Gordon argues that the gradual integration of mainly local and separate maritime domains into fewer, larger, and more interdependent regions offers a unique perspective on world history. Gordon draws a number of provocative conclusions from his study, among them that the European “Age of Exploration” as a singular event is simply a myth: over the millennia, many cultures, east and west, have explored far-flung maritime worlds, and technologies of shipbuilding and navigation have been among the main drivers of science and exploration throughout history. In a series of compelling narratives, A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks shows that the development of institutions and technologies that made the terrifying oceans familiar and turned unknown seas into well-traveled sea-lanes matters profoundly in our modern world.
Call Number: G525 .G65 2015
Publication Date: 2015
Latvia by Mara Kalnins The history of the Latvian people begins some four and a half millennia ago with the arrival of the proto-Baltic Indo-Europeans to northern Europe. One branch of these migrants coalesced into a community which evolved a distinctive and remarkably robust culture and language, and which eventually developed into a loose federation of tribal kingdoms that stretched from the shores of the Baltic sea to the upper Dniepr river. But these small independent kingdoms were unable to resist the later invasion of the Teutonic Knights in 1201, an invasion that initiated nearly eight hundred years of helotry for the Latvians in their own domains. In the centuries of domination by successive European powers that followed, the inhabitants nonetheless preserved a powerful sense of identity, fostered by their ancient language, oral literature, songs and customs. These in turn informed and gave impetus to the rise of national consciousness in the nineteenth century and the political activities of the twentieth which brought the modern nation-state of Latvia into being. This book traces the genesis and growth of that nation, its endurance over centuries of conquest and oppression, the process by which it achieved its independence, and its status as a member of the European community in the twenty-first century.
Call Number: DK504.54 .K35 2015
Publication Date: 2015