As companion to his PBS series airing in September 2007, "The War" focuses on the citizens of four towns--Luverne, Minnesota; Sacramento, California; Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama, following more than forty people from 1941 to 1945. Maps and hundreds of photographs enrich this compelling, unflinching narrative.

Acclaimed historian Nicholas Stargardt draws on an extraordinary range of primary source materials-personal diaries, court records, and military correspondence and offers an unprecedented portrait of wartime Germany, bringing the hopes and expectations of the German people-from infantrymen and tank commanders on the Eastern front to civilians on the home front-to vivid life. While most historians identify the German defeat at Stalingrad as the moment...

"From one of the finest journalists of our time comes a definitive, boots-on-the-ground dispatch from the front lines of the conflict in Ukraine. Ever since Ukraine's violent 2014 revolution, followed by Russia's annexation of Crimea, the country has been at war. Misinformation reigns, more than two million people have been displaced, and Ukrainians fight one another on a second front--the crucial war against corruption. With In Wartime, Tim Judah...

"War, the instinct to fight, is inherent in human nature; peace is the aberration in history. War has shaped humanity, its institutions, its states, its values and ideas. Our very language, our public spaces, our private memories, some of our greatest cultural treasures reflect the glory and the misery of war. War is an uncomfortable and challenging subject not least because it brings out the most vile and the noblest aspects of humanity. Margaret...

Danijel is a soldier fighting for the Serbs, and Ajla is a Bosnian held captive in the camp he oversees. They two knew each other before the war, and could have found love with each other. But as the armed conflict takes hold of their lives, their relationship grows darker, their motives and connection to each other ambiguous, and their allegiances uncertain. DVD format.

"From the acclaimed author of Corelli's Mandolin: a powerfully evocative and emotional novel, set in the years between the two World Wars, about a closely-knit group of British men and women struggling to cope with the world--and the selves--left to them in the wake of World War I. They were inseparable childhood friends. Some were lost to the war. The others' lives were unimaginably upended, and now, postwar, they've scattered: to Ceylon and India,...

"On August 27, 1943, news broke in the United States that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was on the other side of the world. A closely guarded secret, she had left San Francisco aboard a military transport plane headed for the South Pacific to support and report the troops on WW2's front lines. Meanwhile, for those ten days, Americans had believed she was secluded at home. As Allied forces battled the Japanese for control of the region, Eleanor was...

In Looking for the good war, Elizabeth D. Samet examines the literature, art and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life, She exposes contemporary confusion about American identity, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans -- a history that was suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously...

No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion. In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation....