During World War II, the city of Evansville manufactured vast amounts of armaments that were vital to the Allied victory. The Evansville Ordnance Plant made 96 percent of all .45-caliber ammunition used in the war, while the Republic Aviation Plant produced more than 6,500 P-47 Thunderbolts--almost half of all P-47s built during the war. At its peak, the local shipyard employed upward of eighteen thousand men and women who forged 167 of the iconic Landing Ship Tank vessels. In this captivating and fast-paced account, University of Evansville historian James Lachlan MacLeod reveals the enormous influence these wartime industries had on the social, economic and cultural life of the city.

World War II changed the face of Evansville, Indiana. In December 1941, the city was still recovering from the Great Depression, yet within three months, a series of blockbuster announcements transformed the region. Several corporations received major defense contracts to manufacture parts and ammunitions, while two new installations were launched: a shipyard to construct Landing Ship Tanks and a factory to manufacture P-47 airplanes. Industrial employment rose dramatically, producing social, economic, and racial tensions as thousands of newcomers poured into a city that lacked adequate housing and public facilities. The citizens of Evansville persevered, and most workers stayed following the end of the war. One federal official commented that the city--not just its many defense plants--deserved the coveted Army-Navy "E" (for excellence) award.

An amateur HAM radio operator intercepts a garbled shortwave transmission that indicates the Gestapo's top henchman is coming to America to kill Erika Lehmann, the Nazis' top spy.

Details"Home Front Warriors" is the third book in a series of Evansville and Tri-state history books by Harold Morgan. Previous books in this series are "Home Front Heroes" and "Home Town History". Evansvilleʼs most renowned WWII products were the P-47 Thunderbolt fighter and the Landing Ship Tank; the LST. This book endeavors to illustrate how the devoted employees built the components and assembled the P-47 and the LST. The authorʼs goal is to provide as many war-time production employee photos as space allowed.Harold Morgan lived the war years and a total of 15 years of his young life immediately west of the airport and Republic Aviation. The many test flights and machine-gun test firing sounds became common enough to the author as a child as to be generally unnoticed.After collecting 40,000 historical photos and images of various subjects, the author wants to use as many of his photo collection as possible. The author selected 500 of these photos to illustrate how these war winning products were built and used.

This is a new release of the original 1946 edition.

In 1964, the Evansville College Purple Aces raced undefeated through the Indiana Collegiate Conference, posting a perfect 24–0 regular-season record and winning the College Division NCAA championship. The skeleton of this season exists in newspaper archives and in books that capture the on-court action, but the flesh and blood has never been written—until now. This is the story of Russell Grieger, a starting guard, and his observations, feelings, reactions, and struggles of that season. It provides a game-by-game look into the team, showcasing Grieger's teammates, Coach Arad McCutchan, and Evansville's love for the Aces. The Perfect Season is an insider's inspiring story of a team whose motto—"If you're going to go, go big time or don't go at all"—inspired them to achieve their dream.

A supplemental textbook for middle and high school students, Hoosiers and the American Story provides intimate views of individuals and places in Indiana set within themes from American history. During the frontier days when Americans battled with and exiled native peoples from the East, Indiana was on the leading edge of America’s westward expansion. As waves of immigrants swept across the Appalachians and eastern waterways, Indiana became established as both a crossroads and as a vital part of Middle America. Indiana’s stories illuminate the history of American agriculture, wars, industrialization, ethnic conflicts, technological improvements, political battles, transportation networks, economic shifts, social welfare initiatives, and more. In so doing, they elucidate large national issues so that students can relate personally to the ideas and events that comprise American history. At the same time, the stories shed light on what it means to be a Hoosier, today and in the past.

From our contemporary vantage point, we should take the time to look back to how people in American communities lived at the beginning of the 20th century. The focus of this work is Evansville - in the early 1900s, the only emerging metropolis between Louisville and St. Louis, and then the radial center of a hinterland stretching in all directions for at least 100 miles. Evansville illustrates how the city landscape changed because of the early industrial era, how people made a living and related to each other, and how they spent their leisure time. About one-fifth of the images in this collection focus on the residents of the Evansville region: the Tri-State of southwestern Indiana, western Kentucky, and southern Illinois, which has been Evansville's service area since the 1850s.

Taking as its focus memorials of the First World War in Britain, this book brings a fresh approach to the study of public symbols by exploring how different motives for commemorating the dead were reconciled through the processes of local politics to create a widely valued form of collective expression. It examines how the memorials were produced, what was said about them, how support for them was mobilized and behaviour around them regulated. These memorials were the sites of contested, multiple and ambiguous meanings, yet out of them a united public observance was created. The author argues that this was possible because the interpretation of them as symbols was part of a creative process in which new meanings for traditional forms of memorial were established and circulated. The memorials not only symbolized emotional responses to the war, but also ambitions for the post-war era. Contemporaries adopted new ways of thinking about largely traditional forms of memorial to fit the uncertain social and political climate of the inter-war years.This book represents a significant contribution to the study of material culture and memory, as well as to the social and cultural history of modern warfare.