How does the sudden onset of disability impact the sense of self in a person whose identity was, at least in part, predicated on the possession of what is culturally understood to be an "able" body? How does this experience make visible the structures enabling society's shared notions of heteronormative masculinity? In the United States, the Second World War functioned as a key moment in the emergence of modern understandings of disability, demonstrating that an increased concern with disability in the postwar period would ultimately lead to greater incoherence in the definitions and cultural meanings of disability in America. The Illegible Man examines depictions of disability in American film and literature in twentieth-century postwar contexts, beginning with the first World War and continuing through America's war in Vietnam. Will Kanyusik searches for the origin of discourse surrounding disability and masculinity after the Second World War, examining both literature and film—both fiction and documentary—their depictions of disability and masculinity, and how many of these texts were created by the relationship between the culture industry and the Office of War Information in the 1940s. Supported by original archival research, The Illegible Man presents a new understanding of disability, masculinity, and war in American culture.

American academic Trevor Stratton discovers a box full of artifacts from World War I as he settles into his new office in Paris. The pictures, letters, and objects in the box relate to the life of Louise Brunet, a feisty, charming Frenchwoman who lived through both World Wars. As Trevor examines and documents the relics the box offers up, he begins to imagine the story of Louise Brunet's life: her love for a cousin who died in the war, her marriage to a man who works for her father, and her attraction to a neighbor in her building at 13 rue Thérèse. The more time he spends with the objects though, the truer his imaginings of Louise's life become, and the more he notices another alluring Frenchwoman: Josianne, his clerk, who planted the box in his office in the first place, and with whom he finds he is falling in love.

The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, vol. 1 inaugurates a multivolume documentary edition that will, for the first time ever, provide the complete collection of everything Dickinson published on public affairs over the course of his life. The documents include essays, articles, broadsides, resolutions, petitions, declarations, constitutions, regulations, legislation, proclamations, songs and odes. Among them are many of the seminal state papers produced by the first national congresses and conventions. Also included are correspondences between Dickinson and some of the key figures of his era. This edition should raise Dickinson to his rightful place among America’s founding fathers, rivaled in reputation only by Benjamin Franklin before 1776. Dickinson was celebrated throughout the colonies, as well as in England and France, as the great American spokesman for liberty, and the documents in this edition evidence his tireless political work and unmatched corpus. Distributed for the University of Delaware Press

This remarkable biography and edited diary tell the story of William Ellis Jones (1838–1910), an artillerist in Crenshaw’s Battery, Pegram’s Battalion, the Army of Northern Virginia. One of the few extant diaries by a Confederate artillerist, Jones’s articulate writings cover camp life as well as many of the key military events of 1862, including the Peninsula Campaign, the Second Battle of Manassas, the Maryland Campaign, and the Battle of Fredericksburg. In 1865 Jones returned to his prewar printing trade in Richmond, and his lasting reputation stems from his namesake publishing company’s role in the creation and dissemination of much of the Lost Cause ideology. Unlike the pro-Confederate books and pamphlets Jones published—primary among them the Southern Historical Society Papers—his diary shows the mindset of an unenthusiastic soldier. In a model of contextualization, Constance Hall Jones shows how her ancestor came to embrace an uncritical veneration of the army’s leadership and to promulgate a mythology created by veterans and their descendants who refused to face the amorality of their cause. Jones brackets the soldier’s diary with rich, biographical detail, profiling his friends and relatives and providing insight into his childhood and post-war years. In doing so, she offers one of the first serious investigations into the experience of a Welsh immigrant family loyal to the Confederacy and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Civil War–era Richmond and the nineteenth-century publishing industry. Invitingly written, The Spirits of Bad Men Made Perfect is an engaging life-and-times story that will appeal to historians and general readers alike.

The works by the four protestant women authors collected in this volume participate in the ars moriandi (art of dying) tradition which became increasingly powerful over the 16th and 17th centuries. The moment of death was thought to reveal the ’true’ state of the individual’s soul. This volume provides four varying forms of heroic subjectivity offered by middle class and aristocratic women by the act of dying well. In all four cases their heroic deaths also proclaimed and thus helped to define specifically Protestant doctrines. When so few women’s words appeared in print, this ideological function probably represented a primary reason for the recording and publishing of these works.

I am told that the first two names I recognized as a child were President Eisenhower and Marilyn Monroe. Hopefully, for my parents' sake, this was after I understood who Mama and Daddy were. To be truthful, I'm not at all certain. By the time the newsman interrupted my cartoons on Sunday morning, August 5, 1962, to tell me that Marilyn Monroe had been found dead of an overdose at the age of 36, she had become such a natural part of my daily life that I could not quite grasp the concept of a world where she was not still out there going about her surely incredible life. To even begin to attempt to understand that someone as big as Marilyn Monroe could actually die threw my seven-year-old brain into serious philosophical doubt. I kept a close watch on my parents, my teachers, even my close friends. The way I saw it, if Marilyn Monroe could die, everyone was up for grabs. -author David Marshall, from the introduction to The DD Group: An Online Investigation Into the Death of Marilyn Monroe

This book is an enquiry into early European colonial expansion in Central Africa especially in upper Zaire (Congo) and Ubangi rivers. It explores the extent to which French and Belgian colonial enterprise were dependent on the African labor and their penetration into Zaire basin.

In Shadowtime Jim Reilly explores how the great Victorian and Edwardian works of literature can be read in the light of current radical historiography, which foresees the extinction not just of art but of history itself. This is an outstanding combination of original readings and critical survey. Shadowtime is ideal material for anyone studying nineteenth-century realism, modernism and the history of aesthetics.