"A soldier's mother in France" by Rheta Childe Dorr. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end tyranny and mass murder? Certainly—but if you’re the US Army in 1944, you also try another tack: you dangle the lure of beautiful French women, waiting just on the other side of the wire, ready to reward their liberators in oh so many ways. That’s not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we’ve been given, but it’s the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating effect in What Soldiers Do. Drawing on an incredible range of sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials, official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread—and then exploited—the myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting chaos—ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease—horrified the war-weary and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused serious friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty. While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, What Soldiers Do reminds us that history is always more useful—and more interesting—when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who lived it.

It is a commonplace that the United States lagged behind the countries of Western Europe in developing modern social policies. But, as Theda Skocpol shows in this startlingly new historical analysis, the United States actually pioneered generous social spending for many of its elderly, disabled, and dependent citizens. During the late nineteenth century, competitive party politics in American democracy led to the rapid expansion of benefits for Union Civil War veterans and their families. Some Americans hoped to expand veterans' benefits into pensions for all of the needy elderly and social insurance for workingmen and their families. But such hopes went against the logic of political reform in the Progressive Era. Generous social spending faded along with the Civil War generation. Instead, the nation nearly became a unique maternalist welfare state as the federal government and more than forty states enacted social spending, labor regulations, and health education programs to assist American mothers and children. Remarkably, as Skocpol shows, many of these policies were enacted even before American women were granted the right to vote. Banned from electoral politics, they turned their energies to creating huge, nation-spanning federations of local women's clubs, which collaborated with reform-minded professional women to spur legislative action across the country. Blending original historical research with political analysis, Skocpol shows how governmental institutions, electoral rules, political parties, and earlier public policies combined to determine both the opportunities and the limits within which social policies were devised and changed by reformers and politically active social groups over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By examining afresh the institutional, cultural, and organizational forces that have shaped U.S. social policies in the past, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers challenges us to think in new ways about what might be possible in the American future.

The story of a renowned French painter who volunteered for the Army during the First World War paints a vivid picture of the horror at the front in his letters home written before his death in 1915. “A Bestseller, remarkable for the horrors of the western front conveyed in a spirit of self-sacrifice and filial love.”- A Companion to World War One ed. John Horne, Blackwell Publishing, 2012 “THE following letters were written by a young French painter who was at the front until the beginning of April, 1915, when he “disappeared” in one of the combats in the Argonne region of France. “Should he be spoken of in the present or in the past?” asks M. André Chevrillon , a friend of the soldier’s family, in the preface to the French edition of this book. “Since the day when his mother and grandmother received from him his last communication, a post card bespattered with mud which announced the attack in which he fell, what a tragic silence for these two women who, during eight months, had lived only with these letters, which came almost daily. In his studio, among the pictures in which this young man had fixed his dreams and his visions of an artist, I have seen, piously arranged on a table, all the little square white sheets of this correspondence. What a speechless presence! I did not know then what a soul was there transcribed in these messages to the family hearth - a fully formed soul, which, if it had lived, I feel sure would have spread its fame and its influence far beyond this little home circle and radiated a-wide among the hearts of men.””

In 1799, however, Dumas left Egypt when Napoleon wanted him to remain with the army. This plunged Dumas deeply into the dungeon of Napoleon's disfavor. Later he was literally imprisoned in southern Italy until 1801. "Napoleon never forgave Dumas," Gallaher notes, "and even continued to punish his wife and children after his death.".

In March 1915, a young French artist-turned soldier went missing in action. He left behind a remarkable series of letters which, due to wartime security, had to be edited and published anonymously under the title Letters of a Soldier 1914-1915. This powerful volume was for many years out of print, but this new edition corrects that unhappy situation and provides an English speaking readership with a rare and much needed insight into what it meant to experience the Great War from the sharp end during the desperate struggles of the French Army fighting for its survival in 1914 and 1915.??Originally published by Constable & Co., London in 1917 with a preface by AndrŽ Chevrillon, this evocative and moving primary source volume is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the role of the French army in the opening battles of the Great War.

In March 1915, a young French artist-turned soldier went missing in action. He left behind a remarkable series of letters which, due to wartime security, had to be edited and published anonymously under the title Letters of a Soldier 1914-1915. This powerful volume was for many years out of print, but this new edition corrects that unhappy situation and provides an English speaking readership with a rare and much needed insight into what it meant to experience the Great War from the sharp end during the desperate struggles of the French Army fighting for its survival in 1914 and 1915.Originally published by Constable & Co., London in 1917 with a preface by Andr Chevrillon, this evocative and moving primary source volume is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the role of the French army in the opening battles of the Great War.

Nearly 1.7 million French soldiers died in the First World War fighting for their homeland against the invading German Armies; it is difficult to comprehend that hecatomb. It is indeed difficult to comprehend that many lost lives, perhaps the only way to do so is in representative figures such as the Unknown Soldier or by the many memoirs and diaries that have been left behind. One such diary is that of Captain André Cornet-Auquier, a passionate but moral man, well-known for his leadership skills in and bravery on the battlefield. The conditions in which he served on the Alsace front were always tough, being often within forty-five yards of the enemy’s front lines, his faith in his cause and God sustained him even in the most trying situations. Despite being in the front line fighting for so long his luck ran out in February 1916, mortally wounded by a shell splinter. A symbol of French stoicism and courage he died beloved by his men, one of his sergeants said “It is not a spectacle often witnessed, — that of soldiers, accustomed to face death, weeping like children as they stood round his bier.”

"Concentrating on the militarised borderlands of eastern France, this book examines the disjuncture between the patriotic expectations of elites and the sentiments expressed in folksongs, folktales and popular imagery, in which issues of sexuality, violence and separation took far greater prominence. Hopkin follows the soldier through his life-cycle, from greenhorn recruit to grizzled veteran, to show how the peasant conscript was separated from his previous life and re-educated in military mores (and the response that this transformation elicited from his family and community)."--BOOK JACKET.

In the opening decades of the 20th century, war reporting remained one of the most well-guarded, thoroughly male bastions of journalism. However, when war erupted in Europe in August 1914, a Boston woman, Mary Boyle O’Reilly, became one of the first journalists to bring the war to American newspapers. A Saturday Evening Post journalist, Mary Roberts Rinehart, became the first journalist, of any country, of any gender, to visit the trenches. These women were only the first wave of female journalists who covered the conflict. American Women Report World War I collects more than 35 of the best of their articles and those that highlight the richness of their contribution to the history of the Great War. Editor Chris Dubbs provides section introductions for background and context to stories such as “Woman Writer Sees Horrors of Battle,” “Star Woman Runs Blockade,” and “America Meets France.” The work of female journalists focuses more squarely on individuals caught in the conflict—including themselves. It offers a valuable counterpoint to the male, horror-of-the-trenches experience and demonstrates how World War I served as a catalyst that enabled women to expand the public forum for their opinions on social and moral issues.