Claiming more than 600,000 lives, the American Civil War had a devastating impact on countless numbers of common soldiers and civilians, even as it brought freedom to millions. This book shows how average Americans coped with despair as well as hope during this vast upheaval. A People at War brings to life the full humanity of the war's participants, from women behind their plows to their husbands in army camps; from refugees from slavery to their former masters; from Mayflower descendants to freshly recruited Irish sailors. We discover how people confronted their own feelings about the war itself, and how they coped with emotional challenges (uncertainty, exhaustion, fear, guilt, betrayal, grief) as well as physical ones (displacement, poverty, illness, disfigurement). The book explores the violence beyond the battlefield, illuminating the sharp-edged conflicts of neighbor against neighbor, whether in guerilla warfare or urban riots. The authors travel as far west as China and as far east as Europe, taking us inside soldiers' tents, prisoner-of-war camps, plantations, tenements, churches, Indian reservations, and even the cargo holds of ships. They stress the war years, but also cast an eye at the tumultuous decades that preceded and followed the battlefield confrontations. An engrossing account of ordinary people caught up in life-shattering circumstances, A People at War captures how the Civil War rocked the lives of rich and poor, black and white, parents and children--and how all these Americans pushed generals and presidents to make the conflict a people's war.

In this highly acclaimed book, Charles Royster explores the mental processes and emotional crises that Americans faced in their first national war. He ranges imaginatively outside the traditional techniques of analytical historical exposition to build his portrait of how individuals and a populace at large faced the Revolution and its implications. The book was originally published by UNC Press in 1980.

War Against the People focuses on Israel's unique role in international affairs, highlighting how it promotes a global system of militarism and domestic control – a form of "global Palestine." Jeff Halper investigates how Israel exports the weaponry and techniques of occupation. He shows how it uses the West Bank and Gaza as a "laboratory" for the development of these weapons, instruments of population control and models of permanent pacification. These are used not only to armies but internal security agencies and police forces as well. Halper locates Israel's system of pacification within the broader project of global "transcapital pacification." War Against the People provides a valuable window into the workings of pacification on a global level and the latest in military and counter-insurgency doctrine, outlining critical aspects of global politics that activists often miss in their struggle for global justice.

If we see that our contemporary condition is one of war and widely diffused complexity, how do we understand our most basic ethical motivations? What might be the aims of our political activity? A War on People takes up these questions and offers a glimpse of a possible alternative future in this ethnographically and theoretically rich examination of the activity of some unlikely political actors: users of heroin and crack cocaine, both active and former. The result is a groundbreaking book on how anti–drug war political activity offers transformative processes that are termed worldbuilding and enacts nonnormative, open, and relationally inclusive alternatives to such key concepts as community, freedom, and care. Read the author's article about the opiod crisis on Open Democracy.

The Second World War was, for Britain, a 'total war'; no section of society remained untouched by military conscription, air raids, the shipping crisis and the war economy. In this comprehensive and engrossing narrative Angus Calder presents not only the great events and leading figures but also the oddities and banalities of daily life on the Home Front, and in particular the parts played by ordinary people: air raid wardens and Home Guards, factory workers and farmers, housewives and pacifists. Above all this revisionist and important work reveals how, in those six years, the British people came closer to discarding their social conventions than at any time since Cromwell's republic. Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys prize in 1970, The People’s War draws on oral testimony and a mass of neglected social documentation to question the popularised image of national unity in the fight for victory.

Includes portions of the diaries of: Pam Ashford, Christopher Tomlin, Tilly Rice, Eileen Potter, and Maggie Joy Blunt.