HISTORY.. · PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS
Michael C. C. Adams
Most acclaimed
Echoes of war
"What makes people remember a particular battle? Why do we commemorate and mythologize some events while leaving other significant encounters in the dustbin of history?". "Reminders and depictions of our military past are everywhere: Civil War reenactments draw thousands of spectators; popular histories fill the bestseller lists; cable channels air a dizzying array of documentaries and historical dramas; and Hollywood war movies become blockbusters. Historians worry, though, that these popular representations sometimes sacrifice authenticity for broad popular appeal.". "In Echoes of War: A Thousand Years of Military History in Popular Culture, Michael C.C. Adams shows that living history - even if it is an incomplete depiction of the past - plays a vital role in stimulating the historical imagination. Adams argues that symbols of war are intrinsically significant and help people articulate ideas and values. We still return to the knight as a symbol of noble striving; the bowman appeals as a rebel against unjust privilege."--BOOK JACKET.
The great adventure
In 1873, an almost impossible mission was accomplished by an improbable posse of recruits. With little training and less experience, 150 men embarked upon a nine-hundred-mile march from civilized Toronto to a trading post at the heart of the wild frontier. Their goal: to penetrate Indian territory, stamp out nefarious whiskey trafficking, and bring order to a lawless land. What they encountered was horrifying and glorious in ways they could never have imagined. Official histories of the march have been largely based on the writings of the first commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and are colored accordingly. David Cruise and Alison Griffiths present an entirely different perspective of this extraordinary event, using such primary sources as diaries and memoirs by the "Mounties" themselves, contemporary newspaper accounts, and other recently discovered materials.
Living hell
Many Americans, argues Michael C. C. Adams, think of the Civil War as more glorious, less awful, than the reality. Tourists flock to battlefields, their perceptions of the war often shaped by reenactors who work hard for verisimilitude but who cannot ultimately simulate the horrors of war. In Living Hell, Adams uses the voices of actual participants on the firing line or in the hospital ward to create a virtual historical reenactment. Perhaps because the United States has not seen conventional war on its own soil since 1865, the collective memory has faded, so that we have sanitized and romanticized the experience of the Civil War. Living Hell presents a stark portrait of the human costs of the Civil War and gives readers a more accurate appreciation of its profound and lasting consequences. Adams examines the sharp contrast between the expectations of recruits versus the realities of dirt and exposure, poor diet, malnutrition, and disease. He describes the slaughter produced by close-order combat, the difficulties of cleaning up the battlefields-- often tens of thousands of dead and wounded--and the resulting psychological damage to survivors. Drawing extensively on letters and memoirs of individual soldiers, Adams assembles vivid accounts of the distress they faced daily. Providing a powerful counterpoint to Civil War glorification, Living Hell echoes William Tecumseh Sherman's comment that war is cruelty and cannot be refined.--From publisher description.