Only seven U.S. submariners earned the Medal of Honor in World War II. Sam Dealey, the USS Harder's commander, was one of them. His honor was awarded posthumously after the entire crew was lost off Bataan during a depth-charge attack in August 1944 by a Japanese convoy. The Harder's fighting spirit is legendary, and its record of sinking a total of eighteen enemy ships (with a tonnage in excess of 55,000) made Dealey one of the top five submarine skippers in the war. During a single patrol his crew sank five enemy destroyers in five short-range torpedo attacks —an unprecedented feat. In addition, the Harder played important roles in rescue missions, extracting secret operatives deep in enemy territory and saving downed pilots. Drawing on previously untapped sources, Michael Sturma, an Australian teaching at Murdoch University, details several daring missions, one that involved the heroic Australian commando Bill Jinkins, and puts the Harder's action in the context of the overall Pacific campaign. In do so, the author adds not only significant information to the Harder's story but also provides a fresh perspective on the submarine war.

A comprehensive often spellbinding exploration of humans: How we came to be unique among all the Earth's animal species and how this uniqueness has shaped our history, behavior, and contemporary lives

Never before in human history has technology advanced as quickly as today. The biggest changes are taking place in communications and computers, which are being combined in new and astonishing ways. In this updated and revised addition, Frances Cairncross analyzes the impact of this revolution on business, government and society.

Running a marathon is tough enough. It’s even harder to outrun death. Erick Anderssen is the best-selling author of a series of how-to books for baby boomers seeking inner knowledge and strong thighs. Now Erick’s next book is due, and his agent, for mysterious reasons, is pushing hard for him to write about the experience of training to run the GrandHotel Chicago Marathon—where his egotistical ex-wife is the race director. But before he can even begin work on the book, a shocking and violent death derails his research. Before he knows it, Erick is racing to uncover the secrets of the marathon—all while fending off assaults, bomb threats, international fraud, and strange disappearances. Along the way, Erick encounters a wide and fascinating cast of characters—fading Olympians, international singing sensations, aggressive Chicago cops, and a photographer who he believes is hiding a terrible secret—running steadily toward what may be a tragic outcome at the finish line. In his debut novel, Death at a Distance, long-time Chicagoan Mark A. Nystuen, whose twelve-year leadership helped the LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon become one of the largest participatory sporting events in the world, gives readers a vivid, local’s-eye view of contemporary Chicago—its politics, its world-class food scene, and its history—as well as a behind-the-scenes look at the personality clashes, compromises, and conflicts involved in running—or running in—one of the largest marathons in the world.

"This volume unifies the concerns of Civil War and western history, revealing how Confederate secession created new and shifting borderlands. In the West, both Civil War battlefields and Civil War politics engaged a wider range of ethnic and racial distinctions, raising questions that would arise only later in places farther east. Likewise, the histories of occupation, reincorporation, and expanded citizenship during Reconstruction in the South have ignored the connections to previous as well as subsequent efforts in the West. The stories contained in this volume complicate our understanding of the paths from slavery to freedom for white as well as non-white Americans. By placing the histories of the American West and the Civil War and Reconstruction into one sustained conversation, this volume expands the limits of both by emphasizing how struggles over land, labor, sovereignty, and citizenship shaped the U.S. nation-state in this tumultuous era. This volume highlights significant moments and common concerns of this continuous conflict, as it stretched across the continent and throughout the nineteenth century"--Provided by publisher.

Predictions that globalization would undermine territorial attachments and weaken the sources of territorial conflict have not been realized in recent decades. Globalization may have produced changes in territoriality and the functions of borders, but it has not eliminated them. The contributors to this volume examine this relationship, arguing that much of the change can be attributed to sources other than economic globalization. Bringing the perspectives of law, political science, anthropology, and geography to bear on the complex causal relations among territoriality, conflict, and globalization, leading contributors examine how territorial attachments are constructed, why they have remained so powerful in the face of an increasingly globalized world, and what effect continuing strong attachments may have on conflict. They argue that territorial attachments and people's willingness to fight for territory depends upon the symbolic role it plays in constituting people's identities, and producing a sense of belonging in an increasingly globalized world.

Conventional wisdom tells us that marriage was illegal for African Americans during the antebellum era, and that if people married at all, their vows were tenuous ones: "until death or distance do us part." It is an impression that imbues beliefs about black families to this day. But it's a perception primarily based on documents produced by abolitionists, the state, or other partisans. It doesn't tell the whole story. Drawing on a trove of less well-known sources including family histories, folk stories, memoirs, sermons, and especially the fascinating writings from the Afro-Protestant Press,'Til Death or Distance Do Us Part offers a radically different perspective on antebellum love and family life. Frances Smith Foster applies the knowledge she's developed over a lifetime of reading and thinking. Advocating both the potency of skepticism and the importance of story-telling, her book shows the way toward a more genuine, more affirmative understanding of African American romance, both then and now.